27 Ethics Bowl Case: Do Grades Capture Learning?
Table of Contents
Do Grades Capture Learning?
Starting in the fall of 2023, all K–9 students in British Columbia public schools were assessed with the Education Ministry’s new four-point proficiency scale, which replaced the long-standing letter grade system. Instead of traditional As, Bs, and Cs, the new report cards read either Emerging, Developing, Proficient, or Extending. This paradigm shift from the Ministry of Education reflects the latest attempt in correcting the deficiencies of the previous system — with letter grades indicating no further level of achievement for high-performing students and demotivating low-performing students away from the learning process altogether. Letting go of the previous model, however, proved difficult for teachers, students, and parents to whom letter-grades or otherwise quantified scales of assessment all seem embedded into the very notion of standardized education.
Of course, learning on its own does not require evaluation of any kind. If you successfully teach yourself to strum out complex chords on the guitar, mix rich hues in watercolour, or edit a YouTube video with cool transitions, nobody will grade you on your accomplishment. You will not even think of your skills along a GPA scale — despite having learned something impressive and valuable. Yet the grading system as an artificial institutional tool is regarded as necessary because it renders massive quantities of data legible to a large-scale education system. Answering questions such as which schools should receive funding, which students should be accepted into which universities, and so forth all require an external evaluative standard.
Grading scales are not the only means by which institutional methods of evaluation creep into our personal values. Some philosophers are now talking about the concept of value capture, which is what happens when a simplified, easily-trackable measure of our values replaces the real, nuanced, and complicated values, and we start pursuing the simplified version, sometimes to the detriment of the actual goal. For example, someone might become obsessed with Fitbit metrics (instead of overall health), Duolingo streaks (instead of language acquisition), and followers on social media (instead of social well-being).
While these measurements offer easily digestible — perhaps even seductive — proof of our successes, internalizing this kind of institutional metric can be damaging to our autonomy and values. When we become obsessed with external assessment, we forgo experiences that elude straightforward quantification (such as enjoying a good book or visiting a friend) and deprioritize the actual value of our goals (learning) over its measured counterpart (grades).
Where it concerns grading in public high schools, there are even further questions concerning the ultimate and instrumental ends of education and the kind of influence a government ought to have over these goals. Knowledge, of course, is good in itself and good for other purposes: learning to read enables a human being both to appreciate literature and to find a job. What role an external system of evaluation might play in achieving these goals and how that system ought to be designed, however, is a matter of ongoing disagreement.
Discussion Questions
- Imagine that throughout your life you had never been graded, in school or anywhere else. How might your learning experiences have been different? In which ways better, and in which ways worse?
- Is the new evaluative system in British Columbia an effective way of circumventing the problems of grading?
- Do grading and other forms of external evaluation always distort the things that they measure? Or, is the issue more about the way we interpret and internalize the grades?
- Do the arguments against grading also count against testing in general?
- Are all human values equally suited for external evaluation? Take, for example, the difference between the hard sciences and the humanities — is performance in one area more appropriate for measurement than the other? If so, why?
Further Reading
- “BC Has Ended Letter Grades. Here’s the Argument for Doing So” by Victor Brar (2023)
- “Teacher, Bureaucrat, Cop (Guest Post)” by C. Thi Nguyen (2022)
- “What I’ve Learned from Ungrading” by Robert Talbert (2022)
Bibliography
Brar, Victor. 2023. “BC Has Ended Letter Grades. Here’s the Argument for Doing So.” The Tyee, August 7, 2023. https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2023/08/07/BC-Ends-Letter-Grades/.
Luo, Helen Han Wei. 2023. “Case 10: Do Grades Capture Learning?.” In Ethics Bowl Canada 2023-2024 National Case Set, edited by Ethics Bowl Canada Case Development Committee. n.p.: Ethics Bowl Canada. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IYW9BoZuJckjpj74ku24pLJgmTCj9h10/view.
Nguyen, C. Thi. 2022. “Teacher, Bureaucrat, Cop (Guest Post).” Daily Nous, August 9, 2022. https://dailynous.com/2022/08/09/teacher-bureaucrat-cop-guest-post/.
Talbert, Robert. 2022. “What I’ve Learned from Ungrading.” Inside Higher Ed, April 26, 2022. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2022/04/27/professor-shares-benefits-and-drawbacks-ungrading-opinion.
Attribution
Unless otherwise noted, “Do Grades Capture Learning?” by Helen Han Wei Luo (2023) [and the Ethics Bowl Canada Case Development Committee], via Ethics Bowl Canada, is used and adapted under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
The Ethics Bowl Canada Case Development committee gives permission to third parties to use the Case Sets it has developed between September 2021 and March 2024 under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. The Committee also asks that users notify Ethics Bowl Canada of their use of the case sets, especially if they are adapting or remixing it. This can be done by sending an email to contact@ethicsbowl.ca.
