Axar.az presents an article, "Making The Grade" by John Samuel Tieman.

In pre-Communist Tibet, at the College Of Magical Ritual, courses were offered in internal heat. Not the kind you dial up in winter, but a form of yoga that controls body temperature. Final exams took place on a frozen Himalayan lake in midwinter. Naked students were given piles of frozen shirts, then graded on how many they could wear and dry out by dawn.

I admire the scientific objectivity of such grading. I once was a teacher. I used to do much the same thing with my students. Let them sweat, burn up some paper, then grade them. Joking aside, I would never have given grades at all if I didn't have to.

I think it is time to consider some new form of evaluation. After all, grading has not always been with us. I don't recall Socrates saying, “Plato, that was a B+ dialogue.”

For 40 years, I taught high school during the day and college part-time in the evening. In the latter capacity, I was not only an instructor but also an academic advisor. I saw transcripts from across the country. When it comes to grade inflation, no school is blameless. Grade inflation is not the fault of any one school, university, college, or any one teacher. It's systemic. Everyone does it. It would be unfair to students if we didn't.

So let's say in public what students and teachers have for decades said in private: a C is an F. Most graduate programs drop students who get anything other than A's and B's. A few C's are enough to exclude an undergraduate from graduate school, or a high school student from many a college.

Grading is thought to be scientific. Its progress has paralleled the grading of restaurants, poultry, and meat products. Grading has worked largely because schools have wedded themselves to the notion of “social efficiency”. We like to think that schools are scientific. Tests, tracking, academic placement, all those supposedly link students' abilities to the economic interests of our capitalist society. Presumably, merit and ability are coupled with the free market, which then produces order in the present and a scientific plan for the future. Or that's the way it was supposed to work.

In practice, however, grading is a bit sketchy when it comes to evaluating, for example, the liberal arts. I recall an experiment in which teachers evaluated anonymous essays. The grades varied widely. William Faulkner's essay averaged a B. It must be noted that the sciences have the same problem because not all science can be neatly rated.

I am not saying that the grading system is without worth. Good grades generally indicate a student who is competent, and bad grades usually indicate otherwise. I am saying that is all grading indicates. The system, in other words, is neither precise nor scientific.

The problem is twofold. From a sociological perspective, our society is in flux. Many high school, university, and college students feel that academia presents them neither order in the present nor adequate plans for a post-modern future. And if things can go wrong on such a fundamental level, then grades hardly matter.

From the psychological point-of-view, research suggests that the use of extrinsic motivation, such as a grade, is at least misguided if not harmful. On the other hand, intrinsic motivation also can make grades irrelevant. Struggles with math didn't alter Albert Einstein's penchant for science.

Having said all this, it is worth repeating that there are some things the current grading system does well. Grades do give a general indication as to whether a student is adequate for certain programs, colleges, and so forth. And I think that is a starting point upon which we should build.

When I was a student teacher, there was a lot of talk about a mastery system, a pass/fail evaluation based upon the student's capacity in that subject or this skill. Experiments in this type of evaluation had positive results. Furthermore, the grading system as we know it has evolved into a type of pass/fail system. When I went over a student's transcripts, I couldn't tell what this teacher's A meant or what that teacher's B meant. I could, however, get an overall picture. This student passed everything; that student failed. And that's just about all I could ever tell from grades.

My point is simple. Everywhere we look, society is in a state of change. Our schools are but one aspect of this. In fact, schools could not serve our community if they were immune from change. The grading system served our needs well for a time. Now, like all academic innovations, it's time to find something new. Perhaps some form of mastery system would work. Perhaps not. But it's time to admit we need a new form of student evaluation.