Is Our Grading System Unjust?

[This article is part of a series that discusses university education reform. Previous articles are: I Study in the Market, Life Without Sciences and Arts, The Crime of Reason, Intellectuality and Happiness, and University Dream Land ]

Education can be viewed as a dynamic relationship between five entities: the student, the teacher, the curriculum, the environment (i.e. school) and the evaluation process or assessment (i.e. examination and certification). In my humble opinion, the evaluation process is the most controversial element in the whole educational process. It is controversial in the sense that it tries to measure in discrete formats something that naturally denies quantization. With the exception of this last sentence, the coming discussion should be written in simpler language that is approachable to the readers.

I hope the readers can share with me the observation that measuring cleverness is very difficult and controversial regardless of the fact that IQ tests are popular. I also hope that we can acknowledge that many issues related to our human nature can not be measured accurately, like: beauty, happiness and misery.  Most of the metrics used to measure these human factors are inaccurate in their values and questionable in their outcomes. I simply hereby argue that education is not different than these human values.

This article does not suggest immediate abandoning of our current common grading systems, which I sincerely believe can be used in measuring many shady factors, like the redness of a tomato or the sourness of the lemon, but will impose many injustices when applied to humans. It rather asks for understanding its problems and highlighting the importance of finding alternatives. Finding the alternatives can be left to those whom people describe as: crazy, out-of-reality, impractical, idealist, emotional and over-sensitive. Alas! This is how our societies treat those who question our conventions.

I am currently teaching in a university, so I am not writing in response to the pressure of exam preparations or the shock of receiving an ugly grade. I am speaking from my experience as an instructor and an ex-student. This topic started to bother me five years back when I was in my third year in engineering. It started to appear to me that in the technical courses that the grade is not an actual measurement of my skills in the course but rather a relative measurement to my performance compared to my colleagues. I later worked as a TA in different countries and watched carefully the effect of the personality of the instructor on his evaluation of the students. I am currently teaching and it is straight clear to me that I the system I am using fail in measuring the actual ability of my students. 

Let me give five real examples*, each addressing one aspect of this relative nature of our university grading system.

In an introductory computer science course “Digital Logic Design”, the registration sheet shows 20 students in the class. The class happened to have brilliant students, or all grade-A high school graduates. In the first midterm, the instructor found that all students achieved almost the full mark. How do you think the instructor behaved afterwards? The instructor started naturally and intentionally preparing difficult questions, because it is not ordinal to have all students with grade A. In other words, it is the bad luck of these clever students that they happened to be in the same class, because they will be pushed to their limits to distinguish the differences between them. At the end of the term, we found good number of students with grade A, but also good number with other grades. If one of these unlucky students happened to be in another class, (s)he might have achieved a better grade. If many of us had seen instructors who do not bother the least in failing all students, it is very difficult to find an instructor who accepts giving their entire class a grade of A.

Note 1: The grade has a relative component which is the performance of other students.

In a university requirement course: “introduction to IT”, I have 25 students from different colleges. One of the students is disabled. This specific student showed great care for the course, and I knew that he has to do double the effort compared to the other students. The other students were generally careless but submitted assignments on time and prepared well before the exam. If I am to evaluate the student efforts put on the course (i.e. keenness to learn, attentiveness, utilization of office hours and after class discussions ...etc) I would give the disabled student grade A with honours. However, if I am to follow the traditional method of evaluation (i.e. midterms, assignments and final exam) the student will get a C. Which method is more accurate in measuring the student performance? The “A” describes his education effort and maybe learning skills, while the “C” describes his education outcome. Unfortunately, most of our grades do not reflect the student’s effort, especially if they are bad exam takers.

Note 2: Grades are not reflective of the student’s effort and are relative to the exam taking skills.

In an advanced computer engineering course, we had a visiting professor from UK. The course had two sections, one taught by the visiting professor and one taught by a local professor. It was noticeable that the visiting faculty was applying the evaluation techniques of UK to UAE. The average of his section was low compared to the other section. It was felt that this instructor was not rude or a believer of strict grading; he was merely applying what he used to apply in his local university. The two environments differ in the technical background, student attitude and behaviour and the general strictness of the university. At the end, it was clear that the visiting faculty’s section was a victim of this sudden change in performance evaluation. The issue of the universality of our grades is already under debate.

Note 3: the grading process is relative to the geographical location or the technical background of the instructor.

Think of the following three courses: computer hardware, computer animations/graphics and computer ethics. Suppose the above three discussed relative factors are absent as the courses are taught by excellent local instructors in average classes. Do you think the “A” in computer hardware means the same thing as the “A” in graphics or ethics? Yes, the “A” is an indication of the good performance of the student, probably in different skills, but the “A” remains with a unique interpretation in each course. Grade “C” in surgery does is not equal to “C” in drawing. The first might mean killing future patients, but the second might indicate slow drawing. What we argue for here is to notice the mistake of applying the same grading system (A,B,C,D,E,F) to all fields of study. Some of the courses probably need only: excellent, good and poor, others: A,A+,B,B+,…etc. In our transcripts everything is unified.

Note 4: The grading system is relative to the nature of the course.

The fifth and final example is the issue of edge-grades. I got in one of the numerical analysis courses a grade of 89, which is B. Five other students got a grade of A but with a numerical value of 90. The obvious question is, does the difference between A and B resemble the difference between 90 and 89? Some students are refused admission because their GPA is 3.59 while the minimum grade to be considered for admission is 3.6. Does really this 0.01 make a huge difference, such that the first is admitted and the second is refused admission? This is perhaps one of the most apparent examples that minimizing the educational performance to numbers has many intrinsic problems.

Note 5: The grading system is very vague in its edge values.

There are many signs of the global recognition of this problem. Most of the North American universities require the student to take GRE and TOEFL. This is in response to the relativity of grades to the geographical location. These institutions also require the supplication of reference letters to compensate the failure of numerical values to reflect the students’ personalities and communication skills.  Some institutions use only alphabetical grades like A,B,C without numerical values which I believe is more accurate and successful but still inherit many limitations of the numerical system.

We can not ignore in our discussion the negative impacts of the numerical system on the psychological health of students. There is great pressure imposed on students to achieve specific marks and the incidents of fraud and dishonesty are a serious problem in current educational systems. It is true that such pressure can not be eliminated completely because stress is part of our daily activities; however, learning in a less stressful environment is clearly more productive.

The arguments of this post are generally faced with the following obstacle: “but what is the alternative?” As I have mentioned in the begging of this post, this article does not discuss the alternatives. We have two issues in hand. The first is acknowledging the shortcomings of our system, and the second is finding the alternatives. It is very difficult to jump to the second without having a wide acceptance to the first. In my humble opinion, it is laziness and refusal to change the status quo that pushes away such fruitful discussions. I appreciate that there is some excellent discourse in the field of Education about this topic. However, most of the efforts are concentrated on making more sense out of the numerical values, i.e. marks, on the expense of finding creative alternatives.

I do believe in educational reform in its complete form and I hope this article does not get misinterpreted as putting most of the blame on exams and grades. Educational reform should be approached from all angles. We have seen excellent achievements in the methods of material deliverance and sensory learning. Nevertheless, the overall speed of the educational reform movement remains slow because of dealing with the educational factors in separate entities. To speed this process we need courage, thorough studies and global vision. Before that we need to build trust and hope that we can change.

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* I have slightly changed in the details of the examples to maintain the privacy of all those involved.

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