Grade Fairness

In a previous post I have covered a grade inflation, but didn’t really respond to what this means.  “Is Grade Integrity a Fairness Issue?” has a good list of reasons why grade inflation has been allowed.  On the surface, giving higher grades feels like upside to everyone (i.e. student, teacher, college, parents, etc).  Worrying about the inherent fairness and integrity of the of grading system is a huge pain.

How does grade integrity/inflation affect the whole system?  Why are we allowing this inflation to occur?  How should this influence how we grade?  What does the grade even mean?  What do we give up every time we give a grade that is undeserved?  Rather than get into the philosophy of fairness, which I could never adequately discuss or defend, instead I want to discuss my beliefs on grading.

As with every problem, you have to identify the goal before you discuss solutions.  In a college classroom there is a diverse set of goals (many fall into Bloom’s Taxonomy).  We want students to understand Concepts, learn certain Information, and gain a set of Skills (CISs).  Once this is achieved we would like to see them apply these to a diverse set of problems within and without the given topic.  We would like these CISs to be retained over time and for students to be able to connect these CISs to others in later situations.  Then there are the goals of appreciation, motivation, and inspiration for the topic.  Also add all the “soft skills” that need to be developed to use the CISs in the real world (i.e. team work, time management, communication, etc).  During this whole process we need students to be thinking meta-cognitively about their learning.  An impossibly long list of goals that range from short-term, tangible to long-term, intangible.

There is no assessment system that can cover everything above.  My feeling is the CISs are the most easy to assess through exams, homework, projects, interviews, etc.  How then do we quantify this assessment?  The system currently requires a simplification/synthesis of all the assessment into a single metric, the letter grade (check out Wikipedia for a long list of possibilities).  A, B, C, D, and F are a pretty simple system and adding “+” and “-” to the list don’t increase its complexity/flexibility much (though it can make you sleep better at night).

So how do we assign the grades?  There are lots of methods of assigning the grades, but here are the factors that must be considered.

1. The grade should reflect performance and ability to meet goals.  Grades should not reflect perceived capacity.
2. The grade scheme should be transparent and “real-time”.  Any usefulness of grades to affect student behavior is based on their ability to understand how it works and their current situation.
3. Student grades should be generally independent.  Every student should be able to get an “A” or an “F”.
4. The grading scheme should be consistent year to year, such that grades given over time have meaning.

I’ll explain my grading system later, but I believe any system that takes into account the above points cannot be inflated and is inherently fair.

UPDATE (8/1/2013) – New study finds that admissions officers due tend to favor applicants with higher GPAs even when they know the school suffers from grade inflation.  This is one of the saddest things I have read in a while.