The problem with grades

Way too many writers focus primarily on earning the points that will impress the judges and allow them to advance in poetry slams and the result is a narrowing of the art. What a lot of writers primarily learn through poetry slams is how to pander with well-worn crowd-pleasing techniques and opinions. In short, instead of immersing themselves in the arduous, sometimes pain-staking labor of growing as artists, they learn instead how to achieve Poetry Slam success the quickest way possible. They (I did it sometimes too) figure out what the judges seem to want and they perfect the skills and techniques that will please them, thereby resulting in the highest scores.

Academics affronted by that notion should recognize they put numbers on poems too. They just use a different scale. Instead of the top poem earning a 10, it earns, say, a 98%, otherwise known as an A+. Students (mine included) figure out what their teachers (or test-scorers, or state framework designers) want, and they perfect the skills and techniques that will please them, thereby resulting in the highest scores. In short, instead of immersing themselves in the arduous, sometimes pain-staking labor of growing as thinkers, writers, communicators and people, they learn how to achieve academic success the quickest way possible. Instead of going for growth and development, they go for the grade.

Here’s the thing - every emcee who’s ever hosted a poetry slam has said something to the effect of the points are not the point, the poetry is the point. All participants in poetry slams understand, and at least claim to believe, that the points are a gimmick, a way to create excitement and bring people to a poetry reading who might otherwise stay home or pump their fists at a sporting event. It’s a bedrock truth - a foundational philosophy of the poetry slam community - that the best poems and poets often don’t win. We who rep that heritage freely and publicly admit the numbers are a joke.

How many teachers, administrators and parents would say the same about grades? How many would agree the best students, the risk-takers, the ones most concerned with growth and development, often don’t get the A-plusses? How many would freely and publicly admit grades are a gimmick, a joke?

In fact, educational trends seem to be moving entirely in the opposite direction. More and more, the point is the points. The test scores, the grade-point-averages, the data. Ann Arbor Public Schools, for example, recently adopted the use of a grading program called PowerSchool, essentially an on-line report card that makes in-class grades available 24-7 for parents and students to view via mouse-click. And when I say adopted, what I mean is the union agreed to mandate all secondary teachers use this program by contract. What I mean is, in my school, numbers are more important than ever.

But, oh, some will say, that analogy doesn’t hold up. The problem is that poetry slam judges and academics are assessing different things. If students learn the skills to please their teachers (and test and framework designers) they are experiencing growth and development. There is no narrowing of the art.

Really?

Tell that to teachers and professors who read the same kinds of formulaic essays over and over until their brains morph into water-logged sponge-cakes.

Tell that to every instructor who’s ever heard the question, ¬ Why do we need to know this? or, worse, Will this be on the test?

Alfie Kohn, an educational philosopher and, I admit, a hero of mine, points out in his essay From Degrading to De-Grading that research indicates the use of grades in academic settings consistently yields three outcomes. I’m going to excerpt his writing extensively here, though where the text is bold, the emphasis is mine:

1 - Grades tend to reduce students’ interest in the learning itself. One of the most well-researched findings in the field of motivational psychology is that the more people are rewarded for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward (Kohn, 1993). Thus, it shouldn’t be surprising that when students are told they’ll need to know something for a test - or, more generally, that something they’re about to do will count for a grade - they are likely to come to view that task (or book or idea) as a chore….Some research has explicitly demonstrated that a “grade orientation” and a “learning orientation” are inversely related (Beck et al., 1991; Milton et al., 1986). More strikingly, study after study has found that students -- from elementary school to graduate school, and across cultures - demonstrate less interest in learning as a result of being graded (Benware and Deci, 1984; Butler, 1987; Butler and Nisan, 1986; Grolnick and Ryan, 1987; Harter and Guzman, 1986; Hughes et al., 1985; Kage, 1991; Salili et al., 1976).

2 - Grades tend to reduce students’ preference for challenging tasks. Students of all ages who have been led to concentrate on getting a good grade are likely to pick the easiest possible assignment if given a choice (Harter, 1978; Harter and Guzman, 1986; Kage, 1991; Milton et al., 1986). The more pressure to get an A, the less inclination to truly challenge oneself. Thus, students who cut corners may not be lazy so much as rational; they are adapting to an environment where good grades, not intellectual exploration, are what count. They might well say to us, “Hey, you told me the point here is to bring up my GPA, to get on the honor roll. Well, I’m not stupid: the easier the assignment, the more likely that I can give you what you want. So don’t blame me when I try to find the easiest thing to do and end up not learning anything.”

3 - Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking. Given that students may lose interest in what they’re learning as a result of grades, it makes sense that they’re also apt to think less deeply. One series of studies, for example, found that students given numerical grades were significantly less creative than those who received qualitative feedback but no grades. The more the task required creative thinking, in fact, the worse the performance of students who knew they were going to be graded. Providing students with comments in addition to a grade didn’t help: the highest achievement occurred only when comments were given instead of numerical scores (Butler, 1987; Butler, 1988; Butler and Nisan, 1986).

In another experiment, students told they would be graded on how well they learned a social studies lesson had more trouble understanding the main point of the text than did students who were told that no grades would be involved. Even on a measure of rote recall, the graded group remembered fewer facts a week later (Grolnick and Ryan, 1987). A brand-new study discovered that students who tended to think about current events in terms of what they’d need to know for a grade were less knowledgeable than their peers, even after taking other variables into account (Anderman and Johnston, 1998).

Everything Kohn says in the above passages is consistent with my own experiences as both a student and teacher. The learning environments where I grew the most were all in graduate school programs that didn’t have grades (Columbia School of Journalism, University of California State Hayward Teaching Certification, University of Southern Maine MFA in Creative Writing), where we were assessed strictly on a pass-fail basis. It is also true that I not only learned more in those programs than I did under more grade-oriented auspices, but I also experienced a tighter and more genuine sense of community with my colleagues. When we didn’t feel like we had to compete with each other for the highest scores, we collaborated more and supported each other in ways that would have been unthinkable when we were all after the same As, especially when we had instructors who were stingy about giving them out.

As a teacher, my most vibrant classes have been those where I’ve best succeeded in keeping grades completely out of the discussion, in rendering them as close to irrelevant as possible. In the best class I ever taught, the one where students were bright-eyed and diligent throughout and where they produced some of the most poignant and innovative writing I’ve ever had the privilege to read, I can’t remember a single student who asked me can you tell me what my grade is right now?

By the way, when report cards finally came out, 32 out of 34 students in that class wound up with As. The other two got Bs. There are teachers who will read those statistics and see a problem. They’ll say my standards are too low, that those numbers are a classic example of grade-inflation. They devalue what an A means.

I’ll say only those students were phenomenal. Grades devalued them. Every teacher should be lucky enough to teach a group like that. Report cards were a joke, a gimmick. Not the point at all. We wrote. Every day. And we grew. A ton.

I think of that class now whenever a student comes up to me with that pleading look in her eye - the one that tells me she just checked PowerSchool. The one that precedes the question, How come I don’t have an A? It’s the same look I’ve seen writers offer judges at Poetry Slams, the look that says just tell me what to do, just give me that magic one-touch solution, just download me that app. that will give me the high score I want.

Just tell me how to make the grade.

** NOTE ** If you want extra credit … our biggest poetry event of the year is coming up - Poetry Night in Ann Arbor - on Friday night, December 11th @ Rackham Auditorium. This year’s show (our 10th annual) will feature the return of some of Ann Arbor’s favorite performance poets: Roger Bonair-Agard from New York, Kevin Coval from Chicago and Lauren Whitehead, a U-M alum currently residing in San Francisco. Joining these mic-rockers on stage will be terrific high school poets from the nationally acclaimed VOLUME Youth Poetry Project and the spectacular collegiate spoken word troupe Ann Arbor Wordworks. The show starts @ 7pm. Doors open @ 6:30. Advance tickets are $5 for students and $10 for general public and $7 and $12 respectively at the door. For more info or to reserve tickets at the advanced price, contact me @ 734-223-7443 or via email @ eyelev21@aol.com.

Jeff Kass teaches Creative Writing at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor and at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, and directs the Literary Arts Programs at the Neutral Zone, including the VOLUME Youth Poetry Project, which meets every Thursday night at 7pm. He will post new blog entries every Tuesday and Thursday morning throughout the school year.