October 10, 2024 Entrance Slip

As a student bird, I have found that my stance on assigning percentages and other statistical aggregating metrics in assessing student work has changed over time, mostly borne from a gradual development of reflection of my place in the world, and why things worked. When I was in high school, I didn't question why the system worked, or how it affected people. Instead, I was simply benefitting in a literal sense; as a "gifted" student, I was usually able to deliver on assessments and student work with relative ease and success. Math tests? I got most, if not all of the questions correct with minimal studying (aside from the homework assigned). Science labs? Just follow the procedure, and you're good to go. English? ...Well, that one's a little more challenging, and now that I think about it, the arts were my first instances of reflecting on the practice of assigning grades. "English is so subjective, that's why I don't like it! It's so hard to get a good consistent grade!" This is a common lament that many "math-brained" high school students had back in my day -- myself very much included. Some more common thoughts in the form of a ramble: "Why are we even assigning grades to something like poetry? If I write a short story, there's a rubric. It feels so arbitrary and just thrown out there that I don't even know how it's correlating with my work, no matter how I look at it! Why am I always getting 4/6 on my essays? Actually, why are we even using the 6-point scale for essays? If you lose a point, right away you get an 83.3% on the essay, which is no longer an A in our high schools! This sucks!" As you can see, as a high school student bird, I still held percentages and letter grades in high regard... but mostly when I had easy successes. It felt like an easy way to just see how you were doing, and an easy way to compare with others. Like the reading acknowledges, grades were used as an accountability tool and I was fully convinced with it, even in subjects that I found more challenging.

Now that I think about it, maybe the arts that I struggled with so much were a wake-up call to critically think about why grades were the way they are in the subjects I was stronger in. I never struggled with mathematics in high school, but once university rolled around I found myself like many others struggling. For many people, they found that their percentages tanked drastically. "Oh yeah, your average is going to drop like 20% in university," the UBC Imagine Day leaders would say. For people like me, I found that I had to drop the coasting act from high school and actually put in effort to study and do homework well before it was due. To me, percentages were still king. I found myself being particularly motivated to do well in school; not so much for learning, but more so to game the system and get as high of a grade as possible while maintaining my academic honesty. That being said, I don't think I've considered the practicality or implications of assigning grades to assignments even in my final years of my computer science undergrad or even my supplementary upper-level mathematics courses to get into this program. In fact, the upper-level mathematics courses were the biggest offenders of being extrinsically and blindly motivated by grades, because I wanted to be as "competitive as possible" to get into the teacher education program at UBC. I saw the "80% for a competitive average" on the FAQ and right away I didn't even question it, I just went into my courses, guns blazing, and ready to produce the "important results" while learning became an afterthought. Isn't that ironic? Or maybe it was a setup from the TEO so we could reflect on this top-down oddity? Either way, I was content and accepting of grades being used as evaluative pieces, as they were a simple, easy way to understand the means to the end I wanted.

Now that I'm looking at schooling from a teacher bird lens, there has been a series of transformative thinking that has taken place, with assessments and grading being a major topic. While I'm still in the process of wrestling with my previous beliefs on assigned grades, I am slowly questioning my king here. Why are you up on that throne of motivation anyway? What does this single aggregate grade come from, and who is responsible for it? Addressing these questions, I remembered back to when I was a student; grades were based on a weighting scheme, weighting schemes were different between teachers, faculties and schools, and grades were based on overall performance and sometimes irrelevant factors, as opposed to only being a measure of learning. Sure, it's an accountability tool that seems to save a lot of time for students, teachers, statisticians, and external institutions. When you have dozens, hundreds or even thousands of students, a quick summative statistic is the most you can go off of, so there's a practical advantage to it. However, I think that grades are purely relative to the context in which they are born. As such, I believe it's okay to still have grades in place as a way to be accountable, but the scope and caveats should be considered carefully. I surmise that a good use of these grades would be as a general score that encourages further probing into how it got there, or acts as a flagging system. Just this week in my assessment course, we picked at the idea of 50% being a pass, and why it isn't 49, 48, or even 51 or 52%. I think in such ranges, a percentage would serve best as a smoke alarm, and we'd look further into WHY the number came out that way, and if we have a false alarm we override it such that students aren't being denied opportunities because they didn't do any homework, which was worth a large chunk of the aggregate grade. Such overridings can even be beneficial for making the grade represent the truth of a student's learning better. Even more middling ranges like the 60s and 70s could prompt further discussion and feedback, but I agree with the reading that these discussions and feedback are more important. Grades should be used with a grain of salt due to their volatility, but they can be powerful tools for analysis and efficiency. Their effects on motivation may be apparent, but not equally applicable to every student and can override intrinsic motivation, leading to compromised desires to learn (much like my case in high school).

EDIT: While I'm here, I will just lay out a few comments on the idea of grades being given out by instructors such us ourselves in a teacher role. This is a seemingly natural exchange that has gone on in all types of schooling, from regular school, to even my martial arts school during my teenage years during belt tests. After sitting through my mathematics assessment classes, I realize that grades in their pure, one-symbol-fits-student form doesn't have much meaning beyond being just a one-dimensional spectrum indicator. The only reliable information we could garner comes from the extremes, such as a very low or very high grade, when the conversions between grades and evidence/reasoning/criteria are easier to make and less blurred. However, things become more ambiguous to the student and even their parents and other teachers when they have to look at the grade that the instructor gave out. Why exactly is this the case? How do we know that they are proficient in all the critical skills we need from them, and that they didn't just get lucky with something less important? That being said, there is still useful information from these extremes. To repeat myself, the main advantage of a grade is to act as just another measure, another smoke alarm in place, and it plays a part in our wholistic grading practices alongside criteria-based evaluation. As a former student, I can attest to the effectiveness of this, as grades have still served to tell me where I'm generally standing, particularly in courses where nothing else is available for feedback. Rarely would I feel like there's a disconnect between the grade I'm getting at any given time and the grade I feel like I deserve. However, there were enough times where the disconnect was so large that I now lean towards the wholistic approach, which benefits students such that it doesn't shower them in false praise, but also keeps criticisms authentic.

(As a side note, I have decided to spell it "wholistic" because I find it easier to understand the meaning of the word more. The "whole" meaning.)