If exams are cancelled, then where will the grades come from?”

When it was announced earlier this year that exams would not go ahead for the second year in a row, this was the question to which everyone wanted an answer. Students worried that years of hard work would amount to nothing if they were denied the opportunity to prove their worth under test conditions; teachers pondered how best to motivate their classes without being able to tell them “this will be in the exam”.

Without test scores, how would we know where students sat in national and international rankings? How would we allocate university places? How would employers distinguish between candidates?

Never before has our reliance on grading become so apparent.

There have been plenty of suggestions on how to make sure students do still get a grade, even if they can’t sit their exams - from teacher assessments to algorithms. But there’s one option that has not apparently been considered: that now is the time to simply do away with grades.

“How would such a thing be possible,” we hear you ask. It’s true that getting rid of grades would require a huge shift. But, when you consider the foundations upon which our existing system of grading students is built, the idea begins to seem far less outlandish.

So, why do we grade students in the first place? And what does this tell us about how we could move towards a different approach?

Exam grades: Something doesn’t smell right…

Let’s start with some background. For many decades, neuroscientists conceived of the brain as a passive processor. It was thought that the world entered the body via the senses, these sensations were analysed by the brain and a largely objective picture of reality emerged. According to this theory, subjectivity is relegated to a relatively late-stage process of interpretation. In other words, human beings all see, hear, taste, smell and feel the same world - we simply choose to describe things differently.

We now know that this conception of the brain is far from accurate. Rather than passively processing the world, the brain actively predicts how the world should be and tunes itself accordingly. This phenomenon is called top-down processing and it suggests that our expectations feed back to alter our perception. In other words, human beings do not all see, hear, taste, smell and feel the same world.

This raises a very important question: where do top-down expectations - these predictions of how the world should be - come from? In neuroscience, it’s typically taught that a person’s worldview drives their top-down expectations. But where, then, do worldviews come from?

As you can probably guess, worldviews are influenced by a number of important sources, ranging from early childhood experiences to education to social interactions. However, there is one incredibly potent source that most people fail to recognise: our tools.

Oftentimes we use tools in a blind fashion, without ever thinking about the larger impact they have on our thinking and understanding. However, embedded within each tool is an ideology - a bias that organises the world in a particular way; that elevates some aspects of reality over others; that redefines common terms; that dictates what can (and cannot) be meaningfully accomplished. This is what psychologist Abraham Maslow meant when he said, “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Tools change our reality.

Grading - whether via letters, numbers, percentiles or smiley faces - is a tool. And it has warped our worldview of education.

Interestingly, we know when and why this tool was invented. In 1792, University of Cambridge professor William Farish devised quantitative grading as a means to quickly shuffle students through his class so he could enrol more pupils and earn a larger pay check. Little did he know that his simple tool would become globally adopted and precipitate an ideological shift across the whole of education.

Today, grades are so deeply ingrained within our worldview that most people never stop to consider how bizarre and unnatural the practice of judging a person’s thinking on the basis of alphabetical or numerical values truly is. As educator Neil Postman notes: “To say that someone should be doing better because he has an IQ of 134, or that someone is a 7.2 on a sensitivity scale, or that this man’s essay on the rise of capitalism is an A− and that man’s is a C+, would have sounded like gibberish to Galileo or Shakespeare or Thomas Jefferson.”

Because grading is simply a tool, we learn little by asking questions like “will students learn better if we employ more nuanced grades?” or “how can we organise assessment in a way that will improve student outcomes?” The more instructive question to ask is “What worldview do grades espouse?” In other words, what does the tool of grading itself suggest about the world, how it functions and how it should be approached?

The underlying credo of grading can be summed up in three words: reify, quantify and rank.

Reify

Reification is the process of treating an immaterial concept, thought or idea as a material thing.

For instance, “beauty” is not a tangible object. Rather, it is a highly abstract concept used to reference a variety of ever-changing physical, emotional and mental characteristics. To reify “beauty”, we must define it as something that can be tangibly located and identified in the same manner as the heart, the lungs or the spleen. When biostatisticians proclaim that “beauty” is simply the degree of symmetry between the left and right side of a person’s face, they have effectively reified this concept.

Why on earth would someone feel the need to reify an abstraction? Because then it can be measured.

Quantify

Once an immaterial concept becomes a concrete thing, we can safely (and seemingly objectively) assign a value to it. For instance, Brad Pitt’s face is highly symmetrical, scoring 96.7 per cent on the beauty scale. In contrast, Ryan Gosling scores a respectable 73.1 per cent, while Ben Affleck registers a paltry 65.5 per cent.

Why on earth would someone feel the need to quantify a reified abstraction? Because then it can be organised.

Rank

Once an immaterial concept becomes a concrete thing and is assigned a value, we can safely (and seemingly accurately) rank it. In this case, Brad Pitt is more beautiful than Ryan Gosling who, in turn, is more beautiful than Ben Affleck. Importantly, if anyone dares to question this ranking, we can assert that this is not mere opinion - it carries the authority of objective quantification and accurate organisation.

Reify. Quantify. Rank. This is the ideology of grades. In a very real sense, grading and modern assessment espouse a worldview whereby all human thoughts, skills and qualities must be reified in order to be considered real; quantified to be understood; and ranked to become useful.

To see this rather peculiar worldview in action, let’s apply a grading system to “sophistication”. As you know, sophistication is not a thing - it’s an abstract concept that changes across generations and contexts. To assess it, however, our tool demands that we first reify it.

Let us, then, define sophistication as the number of countries a particular person has visited. Now that we’ve made it a discrete entity, we can locate and measure sophistication within the world. For instance, my seven-year-old niece (who has visited the US, Canada and Australia) would score a 3 on the sophistication scale, while my 96-year-old grandfather (who has visited only the US and France) would score a 2. Finally, we can objectively rank everyone according to their sophistication score.

In the end, what have we really accomplished? We’ve asked and answered the question “who is the most sophisticated?” in a wholly subjective and restrictive manner. There is no compelling reason to consider sophistication as a byproduct of the number of countries a person has visited (least of which because this would mean my primary-age niece would be considered more sophisticated than my veteran grandfather), but this bias is quickly lost in the measurement.

Once we quantify sophistication, it takes on the feel of an objective measure, and ranking seems both inevitable and accurate. At last, we can decide who deserves admittance to selective sophistication programmes; how to organise sophistication support staff; and how to divvy up governmental sophistication funds - all with an air of authority and impartiality.

If this all sounds absurd (and we’re hoping it does), then why do so many of us fail to see this same process at work when we use modern assessment to grade knowledge, understanding and academic skills? The question “who is the smartest?” is no less vapid than “who is the most sophisticated?” - yet intelligence has been reified and dressed in the cloak of objective measurement for so long that many people believe we can meaningfully answer the former.

In truth, we’ve simply allowed the ideology espoused by the tool to permeate our worldview and alter our top-down perception of the world.

Teaching beyond the test

What about things like creativity, critical thinking and collaboration? These 21st-century skills are doubtless metaphysical, highly theoretical and change across contexts and cultures. Surely these deeply human abstractions can never be reified, quantified and ranked … can they?

In 2017, 11- and 15-year-old students across the state of Victoria, Australia, sat the world’s first standardised test of creativity and critical thinking. The results: only 15.3 per cent of students demonstrated peak creativity - a number the Victorian government hopes to increase to 20.8 per cent by 2025 via the reallocation of already sparse educational funds.

The thing is, when you embrace the tool, you must also embrace the worldview.

Don’t get us wrong. None of this is to say that some arguments aren’t better formulated than others or that some ideas aren’t more agreeable than others. This is simply to say that judging the merit and worth of a thought (and, by extension, the merit and worth of the thinker) using a tool that demands reification, quantification and ranking is a bizarre practice that is neither intrinsic nor required.

Similarly, none of this is to say that reification, quantification and ranking did not occur before the invention of the grade. This is merely to say that such an ideology has rarely (if ever) been so deeply embedded within a single tool and so widely adopted to define an entire social institution. Grades turned this particular worldview from a part-time curiosity into a full-time requirement.

But what are we really ranking students for?

In 2015, the Washington Post published an article entitled “What’s the purpose of education in the 21st century?” The answer was perfectly illustrated in the very first paragraph: “Wisconsin governor Scott Walker recently tried to quietly change the century-old mission of the University of Wisconsin system by proposing to remove words in the state code that command the university to ‘search for truth’ and ‘improve the human condition’, and replacing them with ‘meet the state’s workforce needs’.”

As Scott Walker clearly recognised, the process of reification, quantification and ranking serves little academic or learning purpose. Instead, it ensures that universities and businesses can easily sift through candidates and identify those best suited for various positions.

If you think this is a bit cynical, we urge you to conduct a simple experiment. Ask 100 people not affiliated with education what the purpose of school is. Chances are high that a large proportion will answer something along the lines of “to ensure students have an opportunity to secure a good career”.

But ask 100 teachers that same question and few, if any, will mention anything about helping students to get a job.

This means there is a massive disconnect between what educators and the public think the purpose of schooling is. This disconnect is largely driven by the tool educators most often employ. When the predominant worldview reads reify-quantify-rank, then it’s easy to understand how education would sacrifice loftier ideals, such as instilling values and imbuing wisdom, in favour of simply teaching students a basic set of marketable skills.

If you, like us, believe school is meant for more than training kids for a good career, then why do we continue to embrace a tool that so clearly signals the exact opposite? When we do this, we teach students to become more dependent upon external validation and to base their very identities around that validation.

What’s more, when reify-quantify-rank serves as the prevailing ideology, the practice of teaching becomes nothing more than a set of behaviours that either elevate or diminish rankings. But what if teaching is about more than increasing student rank? What if teaching is about helping students to discover their passions; to ask big questions; and to develop personal agency?

If you, like us, believe the craft of teaching is meant to achieve more than improving student rankings, then why do we continue to embrace a tool that so clearly promotes the opposite?

There’s little doubt that grades will someday go the way of overhead projectors, TV carts and dot-matrix printers. They do not serve students, teachers or learning in any meaningful way. Until that day comes, how might we best navigate this pernicious tool?

First, although many people conflate grades and assessment, the two are not synonymous. When assessment is used to generate personalised feedback that considers past performance, explicates present performance and drives future performance, then it can be an incredibly powerful learning tool. Importantly, nowhere in this process need a grade ever appear.

Once numerical values are removed from assessment, then the definition of “success” becomes more flexible, contextual and reflective of each student’s unique thinking. This is why PhD candidates must perform an oral defence: in this instance, academic supervisors do not make a priori determinations about what they wish to hear, but instead use dialogue to probe deeper into an individual’s unique thinking and understanding.

Next, standardised tests have truly embraced the philosophy of grades. They are unashamedly presented as a means of ranking students according to a set of rigid standards. Importantly, to rank students effectively, these exams have by and large adapted a binary measurement system whereby every question has a single correct answer. Even seemingly open-ended components, such as the writing comprehension section of the SAT exams in the US, are scored according to a strict rubric that defines what words, phrases and/or ideas must be included for a piece of writing to be considered effective.

Here’s the rub: those government, university and business officials who most publicly demand that teachers embrace standardised tests are typically the same people who decry teachers for “teaching to the test”. This is akin to denouncing football coaches for teaching to the game or condemning choir directors for teaching to the concert.

If the parameters of a performance are well established and the specific requirements to achieve success have been determined in advance, it would be morally inappropriate to keep students in the dark and simply hope that they figure out how to make the transition from learning to performance. When the academic future of children rests on whether or not they can answer a predetermined set of binary questions, then by all means we should explicitly teach them how to answer those questions.

However, whereas it’s perfectly reasonable to teach to the test, we shouldn’t teach only to the test. Fortunately, explicitly teaching test material does not require much time or effort. During my four years of university tutoring, I [Jared] dedicated only 30 minutes of each class to explicitly covering test material; the remaining 90 minutes were focused on the type of deep, nuanced, non-binary learning that students were far more interested in. Each year, not only did my tutorial students blitz the final exam, but they outperformed other students on the final written and oral assignments as well. In a very real sense, teaching to the test paved the way for teaching beyond the test.

Turning the system upside down

Let’s conclude with a short story about a small Australian primary school, which shall remain nameless (for reasons that will become clear shortly).

For over a decade, this school scored below national averages on standardised exam performance. In 2016, it decided to realign its priorities by focusing strictly on improving student learning. To this end, one of its first moves was to eliminate all grades and marks. In fairness, students were still required to take standardised exams (as this was a requirement for government funding), but an agreement was made between the school and parents that students would never be told their results.

In 2019, this school scored in the top quartile of growth across the nation on standardised exam performance. In fact, within only three years, its average reading scores moved from one standard deviation below the national average to one standard deviation above it.

The reason we don’t use the school’s name here is because the students, teachers and parents all have no idea that this growth has occurred. The principal recognises that to advertise its standardised-test performance would be in direct contradiction to the new school philosophy. It did not abandon grades for the purpose of increasing test scores; that outcome was simply a byproduct of elevating learning above rank.

We tell this story because it well demonstrates that not only is eliminating marks from school a real possibility, but also that it need not negatively affect student performance.

Jared Cooney Horvath is a neuroscientist, educator and author. David Bott is associate director of the Institute of Positive Education

This article originally appeared in the 26 February 2021 issue under the headline “Why we should do away with grades”