Some speculative typologies of student reactions to grading

How does quantified assessment shape us as learners?

Last week I wrote about how focusing on long-term ends can make learning more difficult. But a couple readers reminded me that most students are not focused on their career outlook at all times. They are focused on their grades.

Perhaps long-term considerations drive where college students applied or what degree program they chose, but once those decisions are made, many of them settle into a shorter-term focus. I personally see a lot more focus on long-term anxieties in my doctoral program, but that’s likely because I am surrounded by adults and grades are less relevant for us.

But grades come first for many students, And before they can start to un-learn a fixation on grades in grad school, most of us are formed by our reaction to grading practices earlier on. This is a feeling that tends to take hold for students as soon as their school work becomes assessed.

We like to feel good about ourselves. So when the school says we are good, it makes us feel good. And when the school says we could be better, we feel less good. When we hear that the school thinks our peers did better than we did, we feel even worse. That’s what grades are: the school telling you how you did.

Over time, student feelings about grades can solidify along different lines. I’d like to explore a few of these tendencies I observed as a teacher with five student categories.

Strivers

These students try to take on every challenge the school offers. But they so resent the feeling of inadequacy that comes from getting anything less than a top grade that they will orient themselves wholly around avoiding that feeling. This can result in a single-minded fixation on success in class without sparing the mental capacity to think about why they’re learning. It can also lead to cramming, where students will memorize everything they need to know and then make a sincere effort to avoid thinking about it again.

This is an understandable response, honestly. Students who feel that they are subject to the power of the school will resent it, even as they try to be approved by it. This resentment leads them to purge knowledge as soon as they’ve been assessed on it because they feel no sense of personal ownership over what they’re learning. It’s the school’s knowledge imposed upon them, not their own.

They succeed in order to feel good about themselves, but they resent the fact that the institution controls the power to make them feel good about themselves.

The fear of failure and institutional resentment residing malignantly behind this child’s eyes is not yet apparent

Specialists

They still want the satisfaction of good grades, but the fear of failure makes them try to do as much as they can of the things they naturally do well and as little as possible of what they don’t. Now, all of us prefer things we like over things we dislike. But when that’s rooted in a singular fear of bad grades, it can warp a student’s sense of self.

Instead of saying “I need help with math,” they’ll say “I cannot do math.” Whether it’s art or science or gym, students will do all in their limited power to avoid doing the things they fear.

As educators, we might say that they should have a “growth mindset.” But if the subject is graded, that grade will not grow with them. What I mean is that if they get a C- in Algebra, that grade will not change if they get better at math later on. It will stay on their “permanent record.”

We often contrast growth mindsets with fixed mindsets. The issue is that no matter their mindset, their grades are fixed in place. Once they reach high school, many of these avoidant specialists will be thinking about their grades in terms of how they’ll be interpreted for college admissions. They will worry about the fact that every grade they receive with remain on their transcript. With increasing options for electives, they will double down on avoiding the things they’ve decided they “can’t” do.

And typically, by focusing on what they’re already good at, they’ll be rewarded for it, at least in terms of their GPA. Once they get to college, this only becomes more drastic. Aside from a smattering of general education requirements, most colleges encourage students to specialize in major courses of study and set aside the rest.

Their fears of failure confirmed via avoidance, they will graduate college, still convinced that many disciplines are impossible for them.

These children don’t yet know that their artistic self-expression will soon be numerically and permanently quantified

Minimalists

Some students will learn to interpret grades less as an individual form of feedback than as a long-term game to be played.

These are the students who, in junior high, discover that their grades will not end up on a transcript, that they will never be seen again once they get to high school. While a striver might ignore this fact because they still want to be an “A student,” the minimalist will say that the only thing that matters is passing.

These students take on an institutional perspective in reference to themselves. What I mean by that is they learn how the school views their grades and choose to only care as much as the school cares. This also goes for college admissions.

So, if they learn that the college they plan to attend only requires two years of a foreign language, that’s how much they will take. If they learn that the college only looks at their grades in “core classes,” they will put much less effort into their electives.

Essentially, these are students who are taking on a long-term perspective against the short-term objectives of course grades. That may be a better way to avoid anxiety at school, but they are still led to view their education as wholly instrumental, exclusively a means to an end with little value in itself.

Their investment in a course is dependent on where the course sits in terms of institutional priorities set externally. Their goals become subsumed under the goals of the organizations whose opinions matter to them, whether it’s high school, college, or something else. In effect, they hand over the direction of their energy and interest to a third party.

Survivors

These students are just trying to get by. Once they get to the point where grades “matter,” they’ve already been graded for years. If they have done poorly in school, they may make more drastic conclusions about themselves than the specialists. Survivors have not concluded that they can’t succeed in certain subjects, they’ve concluded that they just won’t succeed academically in school.

A common way for students to respond to low grades is to say that the scores are meaningless anyway. After all, they only hold significance in the “school world,” not the “real world.” This is a means by which students contest institutional language of failure by asserting their own definition of success. As such, if they are learning anything in school, it’s outside the classroom. They may have social goals or extracurricular goals, but academics are something to be merely endured. The only real goal becomes to get by with the lowest acceptable grade doing as little work as is necessary.

It’s easy to conclude that this response is some modern phenomenon. Teachers understand striving for academic success because most of us did the same. That’s why we chose to work in education. Since we cannot relate to the survivors, it’s easy to say that there’s just something different about “kids these days.”

I recently read a very interesting book called Campus Life by Helen Horowitz. It focuses on how students have organized themselves socially on college campuses over time. What she points out is that for most of American history, this kind of survivorship mentality was actually dominant in higher education. The prevailing belief was that classes were something to be endured, that grades didn’t matter, and that working hard in school was a signal that you were uncultured.

Instead, students prioritized their social relations, athletic competition, clubs, and success with women. While they believed earning the bachelor’s degree was important as a social credential, academic learning was not. Instead, the social environment of college was the big draw. They were there to learn to be gentlemen. This mentality only really went out of fashion in the post-WWII era with the sea change of student demographics.

Now, high schoolers who hate school and don’t care about grades might not think of themselves as training to become gentlemen. But the common thread is that they believe that if school has any value, it is not to be found in academics. That philosophy is as old as school itself.

Naturals

Not every student is tormented or defeated by the grading system. Some of them like it just fine.

It’s an important thing to remember. Whenever you look at education systems, there will be some subset of students for whom the status quo is ideal. Even when a system is worth changing, you must go in with the understanding that some group of students will be worse off for that change. Some students really do learn best in large, impersonal lecture halls.

So, the natural is the student who takes their grades as feedback without focusing on them as an end in themselves. They can focus on even more immediate issues than grades, like “what am I learning today?” They are also willing to get lower grades in classes that they care about.

But not much lower.

The natural is also typically a good student. They may not let a B+ destroy their sense of self, but they are also likely excel in a traditional classroom without having to struggle too mightily. If they are able to focus on their interests without hyperfixation on grades, it’s only while their grades are generally good. Should things start to slip, should their success no longer be quite so natural, they may shift into the kind of avoidance that typifies a specialist.

And then they all become adults

This exercise cannot encompass every kind of student. But I want to think more about how the way we use grades affects the experience of students in school. No matter how kind and engaging you are as a teacher, grades can function like a blunt instrument of affirmation/rejection for students. And the lessons they learn about themselves from grades are lessons they will take with them out of school. Learning does not stop when you leave institutional education, but they kind of learner you believe yourself to be gets harder to change over time.

So, what did your grades teach you to think about yourself? Do you think those are the lessons your school wanted you to learn?

-Matt