By Deanna Bauerlein, PGY-1 Pharmacy Practice Resident, VA Maryland Health Care System
In traditional education, students are
evaluated using number or letter grading systems. Grading in various forms have
been used since the 1600s1. The first letter grading system used was
in 1984 by Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts1. Their grading
system originally used letters A through E, but in 1898 they switched E to F to
signify failure1. As the number of schools grew there became a need
to have uniform grading across universities2, creating the grading
culture we know today. However, there is much debate on whether this system is
beneficial to the learner. There are numerous thoughts that make one question
the use of grading systems. First, do grades motivate or punish students?
Second, how well do grades translate to a level of understanding of the
material? Such questions allow one to explore that pros and cons of grading
systems.
The first question is whether grading helps
or harms the learner. Grades can motivate the learner to do well in hopes of
getting a good grade. This positive reinforcement however, may encourage the
student to only study for a test to get a good grade, rather than to understand
the material. Students may become competitive against one another to get the
best grades. This can be good as it pushes and challenges students, however
some personality types can take this to an extreme and obsess unhealthily over
grades. For students who obsess and/or have a family culture that highly values
grades, grades may act as negative reinforcement if students fear bad grades
which can cause stress, anxiety, and shame1. This can lead to a
negative feedback loop, that for some students, can be hard to break. Additionally,
do low grades motivate students who are doing poorly to work harder - or to
give up2? This likely differs from person to person as everyone has
varying levels of resilience. All things considered, grades may do more harm
than good for students where psychological benefits are concerned.
The next thing to consider about grading
systems is the actual value grades have. Tests can either be free-response or
multiple choice. Free response questions are great because the teacher can
really get a sense of the understanding of the student. However, grading of these
types of questions is very subjective; different teachers may grade the same answer
differently, and one teacher might grade the same answer differently from one
day to the next. Multiple-choice questions are more objective however, they
limit the student’s ability to think critically and can underestimate how much
a student truly understands if they just happened to guess correctly.
Furthermore,
the use of curves when a class does poorly should be considered. It is assumed
that a class is a sample of the population, and thus grades should be normally
distributed1. When the grades do not come out as such, teachers can
adjust the grades to represent a bell-shaped curve. This causes two problems.
First, grades become based on the test taking abilities of each specific class.
If the class average is below what the population average should be, those
students are rewarded with an improved grade because the class was not a true
sample of the population. In addition, if a class as a whole does poorly, it
may not be entirely the fault of the students. Perhaps the test was too
challenging or poorly written, or the teacher did not prepare the class well - or
a combination of such factors. The second problem curving creates is that classes
from one year to the next cannot be compared to each other, as some grades may
have been inflated with curving. Therefore, it goes back to the issue of
whether grades can be translatable to different students and classes. This was
shown in a study done by Rojstaczer, et al. (2012) that showed grading standards
have lowered and that A was the most common grade given in 135 colleges across
America3.
The bottom line is there is no perfect way to grade, and
with that grades need to be taken with a grain of salt. Even if one can get
past how we grade, the specific student needs to be accounted for. There are
many bright people who are poor test takers and there are many people who test
well, but may not be able to retain or apply the knowledge. Therefore, grades
do no correlate to future success. Yet grades are so highly valued, and
sometimes students are not even considered for a job or residency because their
GPA is too low. Meanwhile, maybe a student’s GPA is low because they were very
active in extra-curriculars or had a full-time job. Thus, it is not fair to
define the value of an employee based on one number. However, I do not see this
changing because it is easy to use this objective information to compare
students and to weed out job applicants. If I am ever in the position to hire
employees I will not be using GPA as my sole criteria on evaluating candidates.
If I did, I would be doing my institution a disservice by potentially missing
out on excellent candidates. Especially in health care, subjective information
is more important because to me it does not matter if you can take care of a
paper patient on a test. I want to know how you take care of real patients in
real life settings that are not as black as white as tests. Meeting candidates
and asking them about certain situations and how they handled them, in addition
to references from previous preceptors and supervisors would be more useful
information. Although this may be true in some cases, I do not think a
pharmacist who did poorly in school would make a bad pharmacist. I personally
feel I have learned and retained more on APPE rotations and residency than I
learned in school. So even if a student genuinely did not understand certain
topics in school does not mean they will never understand. Maybe they just
needed to be exposed to the topic a few more times or have it explained in a
different way. Although it is great when someone has a high GPA, it should not
be the only thing that matters as this number tells so little about the
specific student.
As one can see, there are many flaws with
grading systems. However, they are used by most schools since there is no
better method for tracking a student’s progress and making a determination if
the student understands the material enough to progress. This does not mean
that modifications are not needed. One way to take the pressure off both
students and teachers would be to have some assignments assessed just for
effort and participation alone1. This can encourage students to try
their best for the sake of learning rather than just to achieve a good grade.
Another method would be to have students correct their own assignment or have
peer reviews. These grades do not have to be recorded, but giving the student a
chance to recognize his/her own mistakes has additional learning benefits. Peer
reviews allow for students to learn from each other and not from the teacher
alone. Two other strategies for grading
is to use rubrics to limit subjectivity of grading and to avoid curving test
grades. If a class does poorly on a test, extra credit can be assigned such as
students correcting their tests. This allows students to earn an improved grade
and encourages the student to rectify what they misunderstood before1.
In conclusion, grading systems will always be used as a way to evaluate
students, but it is up to the teacher to use a grading system that motivates
students and measures understanding as accurately as possible.
References
1.
Schinske J, Tanner K. Teaching more by
grading less (or differently). Life Sciences Education [Internet]. 2014 [cited
2017 May 7];13(2):159-66. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274836095_Teaching_More_by_Grading_Less_or_Differently
2.
Grant D, Green WB. Grades as incentives.
Emprical Econom [Internet]. 2013 [cited 2017 May 7];44(21):1563-92. Available
from: http://www.shsu.edu/dpg006/gincentives2.pdf
3.
Rojstaczer S, Healy C. Where A is ordinary:
The evolution of American college and university grading. Teachers College Rec
[Internet]. 2012 [cited 2017 May 7];114(7);1-23. Available from: http://www.gradeinflation.com/tcr2012grading.pdf
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