Clarity is key: Provide crystal-clear instructions for assignments and grading criteria. Avoid confusing instructions. For example, students expressed frustration with assignment details being posted in the LMS but professors requesting submissions via email. Stay in the loop: Communicate with students by offering due dates, announcements, and calendar reminders. Timely and clear feedback on grades on the LMS empower students to track their progress effectively.

“My father stopped hitting me for my grades,” Mr. Lorayne told The Chicago Tribune in 1988. “He hit me for other things.”

Instead, there are many grades of intelligence, ranging from idiocy on the one hand to genius on the other.

Une distribution gaussienne pour les notes des étudiants n’est pas un indicateur de rigueur.

Luisa: I wanted Northwestern. I had my eye set on Northwestern. I don't know what it was about Northwestern that called to me, but I wanted Northwestern. That's what I wanted, and it wasn't unachievable. One of my friends got into Brown University and she had worse grades than I did, so I was like, "Northwestern's going to be easy. I got this." I wanted to be an oncologist—yes, an oncologist, cancer. I don't know why [Chuckles]. I don't know. Human tragedy, I wanted to save people. That's been my thing. I want to save people. I want to make people better. So [Pause] I killed myself in school. 4.6 GPA. I had all these extracurriculars.

monitoring

Yes, I would eliminate grades all together. What we want is students to be engaged and thoughtful participants in their own learning. Grades are not helping us toward that.

Years of traditional education teaches students that what really matters is their grades, not their learning. Students know that while teachers might give lipspeak to “learning,” in the end, the grade is what everyone — teachers, parents, administrators, other students, and society at large — cares about.

Students determine their own grades through self-assessment and a conference with the teacher

Florida Virtual Campus |Distance Learning & Student Services |www.dlss.flvc.org3During March and April 2016, more than 22,000 students participated in a Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey conducted by the Florida Virtual Campus’s (FLVC) Office of Distance Learning and Student Services. The survey examined textbook affordability and acquisition at Florida’s public higher education institutions. Previous surveys were conducted in 2010 and 2012. In this survey, students were asked to use their recent personal experiences to provide insight on how the cost of textbooks and course materials impact their education, purchasing behaviors, academic completion and success, the study aids they find most beneficial to their learning, and their use of financial aid to address these costs.The purpose of the 2016 Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey was to identify:1. The amount of money that Florida's public college and university students spent on textbooks and course materials during the spring 2016 semester,2. The frequency with which students buy textbooks that are not used,3. How students are affected by the cost of textbooks,4. Which study aids students perceive to be the most beneficial to their learning,5. Changes in student responses from previous surveys.The results of the survey are sobering, as the findings suggest the high cost of textbook and instructional materials are forcing many Florida higher education students to make decisions that compromise their academic success.

But I do this only very rarely, and I usually have to raise grades. The most common change I make is from an A- to an A for students who offer no good reason other than modesty for giving themselves the A- grade.

deemphasizing grades r

Why grades are “the biggest and most insidious obstacle to education”

EVALUATION

Without question, there is still value in reducing learning data to symbols for ease and speed of interpretation.

Of course, I realized that I am talking about upending an entire system built on “final grades” by instead focusing on “showcasing a learning process.” Can’t say this change will ever occur,

When we reduce students to numbers and grades, they and we focus on test-taking skills and grade requirements rather than on learning

the harmful impact of grades on creativity is no less (and possibly even more) potent when a narrative accompanies them

There is certainly value in assessing the quality of learning and teaching, but that doesn’t mean it’s always necessary, or even possible, to measurethose things — that is, to turn them into numbers.  Indeed, “measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning”

Grades, a value-laden symbol indicating the rela-tive quality of a performance that is a regular feature of school life(Pope, 2001), are positioned firmly on the evaluative side of thistypology. The value of a grade reflects certain norms, and thegrade attributed reflects the degree to which normatively deter-mined standards have or have not been attained

But grade inflation, and thus grades’ diminishing importance, is real. The question is whether we can see in this trend something better.