A teacher named Dorothy de Zouche, in the winter of 1944-5, wrote an article urging the obsolescence and harm of grading that, to my mind, grows ever more unanswerable as AI puts grading into doubt: "The Wound Is Mortal": Marks, Honors, Unsound Activities
De Zouche urges the end of grading for a number of reasons: its irrationality, the wound it inflicts on “inferior” students (those who get inferior grades), the wiliness and disconnect with quality it encourages in “bright” students, etc.
But de Zouche is after the whole competitive rationale that underlines grading as well.
“If we should spend even one tenth of the time teaching people to cooperate that we spend teaching them to compete, we should have a happier and more decent world. From the time a child enters first grade until the time he finishes college we pit him against his fellow classmen. For grades may not be meant to be comparative, but they are comparative. Some of us may not give them upon a comparative basis, but children accept them that way. Alice who made an M in algebra is hardly ever dissatisfied until the moment she discovers that Marguerite-across-the-aisle, who is no smarter than she, made an S. If as adults we could come to realize that the real and permanent satisfactions in life are the satisfactions that come from doing things for the sake of the things themselves, and not for the reward tacked on, we might be able to sell our young people on the same idea, and we should have a less ugly, jealous, vicious world.”
De Zouche, I hear you! What the now famous New York article about AI so clearly and painfully shows is that the grading system, which has long been an archaic and misleading method of teaching children, adolescents and young adults things, has finally been superceded by an instrument that binds together the substance and the mark without any mediation.
In 2016, Counterpoints published an issue entitled: De-Testing and De-Grading Schools: Authentic Alternatives to Accountability and Standardization. The issue brings together the critique of what has happened in public education in the U.S. – the U.S. system being the main object of the authors – as it fell prey to what Lawrence Bains and Rhonda Goolsby -Smith aptly named America’s Obsessive – Assessment Disorder.
“As testing has become pervasive, the daily routines of schools have become little more than an endless cycle of test preparation sessions. Of course, the compulsion to repeatedly assess often causes distress in children, but testing also disrupts a fundamental, recently neglected purpose of schooling, namely, learning.”
I think that there is an elementary dialectical relationship between the era of intensified testing, which was the whole Bush educational philosophy, and our present era of AI “cheating”. Both are based on a fundamentally perverse idea of learning – which is that all learning boils down to rote learning, and rote learning is the best learning because it can be tested. The test, here, precedes the subject to be tested. It is one of those typical late capitalist inversions that we all swallow with the morning news and our dose of Instagram photos. But swallowing shit over a period of time causes a certain, shall we say, poisoning?
Cooperation, learning, un-grading – something that has been suggested again and again by progressive, Dewey-influenced teachers, and something that is rejected again and again by Milton Friedman-influenced administrators: this is the one way forward as I see it.
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