The use of grades clearly violates the Ten Principles. Grades are the currency of education, and as such, commodify learning and obstruct gifting, self-expression, self-reliance, and communal effort. It is difficult to come up with a more powerful symbol of the ways in which our current model of education is broken, and yet, the suggestion that we abandon grades is treated at best as wishful thinking, and at worst a heresy deserving of hostility and persecution. This series of posts will explore a number of problems with grades and provide references to the scientific literature that give these problems true gravity. I will also describe some alternatives to the use of grades–practical approaches that can be used even within the current establishment.
Why Grades Suck
- What do you mean? How Grades Abuse Statistics
- The Mother of All Token Economies: Why Grades ≠ Money
- Five Ways Grades Kill the Motivation to Learn
- Grades, the Creativity-Killer
Alternative Approaches to Using Grades
- Introducing Choose-Your-Own-Grade
