Recentering learning when we talk about grades

This spring, The Campus has seen numerous articles and editorials discussing grading, ranging from coverage of the Economics department’s new grading policies, to calls for addressing grade inflation with campus-wide grade quotas and caps. The draft of our new strategic plan explicitly calls for action around this issue, with an action item reading “Conduct a review of grading practices, including the causes and consequences of grade inflation, and develop recommendations to support academic rigor.” The Campus’s March 5 editorial puts forward a welcome “call for a more nuanced conversation about grading standards beyond letter grades or percentage cutoffs.” 

We are members of an informal group of faculty that has been having such nuanced conversations over the past decade, comparing notes on how we approach grades across disciplines and discussing alternative grading practices. Throughout these conversations, we always try to ground our discussions around a couple of key questions: what are grades for?, and do our grading practices help accomplish our educational goals?

Reading these recent discussions around grading inspired us to pose those questions again in a public forum. While the specifics might vary widely by discipline and even type of course, the foundational answer to the first question is that grades are supposed to indicate how well a student has learned the material, both to the student and to other parties. Pedagogically, communicating to students how well they understand the material should help facilitate learning — in fact, every aspect of our courses and curriculum (and beyond) should aim toward that goal. Within a course, grades can be one way to reward students for successfully demonstrating their learning, signal when a student might need to deepen or shift their understanding, or potentially inspire students to put in the work. Within a larger curriculum, grades can be one way among many to signal competencies for student readiness for other courses, and ideally could help students assess their own educational strengths and weaknesses. In most cases, a top grade is commonly understood as a signal to students and anyone else looking at their transcripts that the student demonstrated achieving all of the course’s learning objectives at a high level, which is not an easy feat in most Middlebury courses.

None of these goals of facilitating or communicating learning are helped by placing a cap on the number of A’s given in a course; instead, such a policy would result in a number of pedagogical problems. First, we feel strongly that it is not a faculty member’s job to rank students against one another, particularly within a course; instead, we strive to evaluate each student based on the standards and expectations established for the course (hopefully with sufficient clarity so students know what is expected of them as learners). One of the advantages of a small college like Middlebury is that, even in “large courses” (which are far smaller than those found at most universities), we can treat each student’s educational experience on its own terms and strive to calibrate their grades to match what they demonstrated they learned. That is why the idea of combatting “grade inflation” by limiting the number of A’s given in any class (as suggested in the April 16 letter, following Harvard’s recent policy recommendation) runs counter to our core goal to facilitate learning — which students who achieved all of a course’s learning objectives at a high level should be denied an A, just because more than 20% of the students in the course had similarly high achievement? We do not want to make our courses become sites where students compete for limited high marks, as that will directly impede learning. Indeed, this approach suggests that grading should primarily function to facilitate gatekeeping rather than learning.

Second, there is a deeper critique of grading that is worth discussing. Research suggests that grades are actually a poor extrinsic motivator for learning, and often impede successful teaching. Effective learning requires creativity and risk-taking, an emphasis on an iterative process, and learning from mistakes — all of which run counter to centering grades in our pedagogy. Other colleges, including Reed, Brown and Sarah Lawrence, have adopted unconventional approaches to communicating learning to students, and all of us signed below (as well as other Middlebury faculty) have similarly explored various forms of “ungrading” to notable success in our classes. 

Third, the main problem with thinking of grades as the only marker of student learning, and advocating for a highly competitive (as opposed to collaborative) approach to grading and gatekeeping, is that it mistakes the measure (grades) for the goals (learning). If the grade is what students want, and they know there are a limited number of A’s available, that incentivizes students to cut corners, either in their mental health and life balance or academically. We have all seen multiple surveys showing persistent problems with Academic Honesty on campus. Adopting a cutthroat, gatekeeping approach to grading will only exacerbate such behaviors that run counter to Middlebury’s longstanding commitment to academic integrity.

Grading caps and quotas do not facilitate learning. Instead, we suggest an exercise for our faculty colleagues. At the end of the semester once grades are submitted, take a look at your roster and ask yourself if the grade next to each student’s name matches how well they met your learning expectations. Particularly, do you feel confident that each student who received an A accomplished the course’s learning objectives at a high level? If not, then you might want to rethink how you structure and assess assignments for the next time you teach the course — and each of us is happy to discuss strategies with you for doing that more effectively. For instance, we have found ways to recognize students who start at a low level of proficiency in the field but demonstrate a stellar learning trajectory by the end. But if you believe that each of your students earned their A’s through their learning excellence, then congratulate yourself — particularly if more than 20% of students got those well-earned A’s. That’s a sign of a great course (and great students), facilitating and demonstrating high levels of learning!

The discourse around grade inflation seems to presume that it’s a result of grades now being awarded for lower standards, than was the case in some idealized past era of when professors uniformly adopted a higher standard of educational “rigor.” But consider an alternative cause: what if high grades are an indication of excellent students encountering highly effective pedagogy that inspires and helps them to learn at high levels of achievement? Might grades be so high less from inflation, but more due to increasing educational achievement? While we welcome ongoing conversations about grading at Middlebury, we hope that we can focus on our shared institutional and educational goals: to facilitate high levels of learning and academic achievement, so that all students might be able to meet and exceed our expectations.

Editor’s Note: Jason Mittell is currently the faculty advisor for The Middlebury Campus.