College Grading Practices: An Overview1

Abstract

Record and descriptive grading are also used.The most commonly stated purposes of grades are for selection to more advanced educational programs and employment, for motivating students, and for providing students with information about their performance. Consideration of purposes, however, seldom enters decisions about form. Grades are charged with distorting both learning and teaching and undesirably affecting students' attitudes and emotional states, yet evidence either for or against these charges is sparse. Education is commonly viewed as a vehicle for social and economic mobility, but a contrary view of the educational system as a device for the restraint of mobility and the maintenance of the existing social class structure has also been presented. Neither view can point to convincing evidence in its support, but grades have a major role in both.Although grades are often charged with being unreliable, those charges usually refer to grades assigned to individual pieces of student work, such as test papers or themes. Course grades and grade-point averages h~ve shown -iihigh internal consistency and good temporal stability up to about a year.Treating academic performance as a single dimension represented by grades is therefore justifiable. Nevertheless, situations probably exist in which the widely presumed but infrequently demonstrated multidimensional nature of academic performance should be acknowledged and put to use. ut the attention on grades, while intense, has been spotty, focusing on one or two of the issues raised in 1964 while almost ignoring more important questions.Of almost 200 articles, papers, and reports related to grading that appeared from 1965 to 1970, about one-fourth were concerned with the form of grades, usually whether they should be limited to indications of Pass and l"ail in place of the customary four levels of passing grades plus Failure'.Another one-fourth were concerned with the use of undergraduate grades to predict grades in graduate and professional schools. Half of the papers that have appeared during the recent surge of interest in grading were occupied, therefore, with two limited aspects of grades--their external form and their predictive relationship with later grades. The remaining half of the literature was scattered over a variety of topics, none appearing in as many While experiments with Pass-Fail procedures and prediction studies touc~on parts of these questions, the basic issues remain obscured.Constructive criticisms of a preliminary draft of this review b¥ several people l indicated a serious flaw in the presentat~on. More than one reader interpreted the review as a biased appeal for the abandonment of grades. The review is, of course, biased, but the favored position is that grading practices should be improved to make them serve their various intended purposes more effectively, not that they should be abandoned. This position implies that purposes should be identified and the effectiveness of grading procedures in serving those purposes should be compared with...

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