Social egalitarians associate inequality with a host of evils: servility, contempt, domination, loss of self-respect, and the like. In her famous paper, “What Is the Point of Equality?” Elizabeth Anderson imagines a State Inequality Board, which has the institutional role of compensating people for their bad luck. She wonders how it would feel to receive compensation for being untalented, ugly, or awkward. She even writes a sample letter from the board to an imagined unlucky citizen:
To the stupid and untalented:
Unfortunately, other people don't value what little you have to offer in the
system of production. Your talents are too meager to command much market value.
Because of the misfortune that you were born so poorly endowed with talents, we
productive ones will make it up to you: we'll let you share in the bounty of
what we have produced with our vastly superior and highly valued abilities. (p.
305)
Anderson’s purpose was to expose how traditional
egalitarians had (to that point) missed something that mattered a lot: the bad
feelings associated with one’s lower status being publicly recognized.
Of course, no one really writes letters like that. Well, almost no one. Some people thought that this was an
objection to Anderson, but that doesn’t matter for now. What I want to emphasize is that there is one
place in society where we do issue formal notice of people’s intellectual
standing relative to others: grades. And
in fact, being on the bottom of the grading system is strongly
associated with bad mental health outcomes.
Causation will be a tricky issue here, but my guess is that giving
students grades functions much like Anderson’s imagined letter. Grades expose students who are at the bottom
of the academic hierarchy, and that leads
to feelings of domination, servility, loss of self-respect, and the like. Just
what the social egalitarians had worried been worried about all along. The pandemic
hasn’t helped, but this stuff was true before.
I don’t know why I’m trying to persuade you with internet
explainers and citations. My own
experience of grades is so vivid that I can’t imagine things are too different
for others. There’s a sense in which
grades are even worse than the State Inequality Board’s letter, which is at
least respectful enough to be candid.
It’s weird to me that the one part of the world academics
can actually control is also the one in which the egalitarian dystopia is most
pointedly realized.
Now, you might say that a lot of the objections to grades I’ve surveyed are really objections to grading on a curve. Why not just do away with the curve? Fine, so long as we are clear that once the curve is gone, so too is our ability to use grades to discriminate between better and worse performers. Some people tell me their assessments are non-curved AND still happen to yield a nice, normal distribution of grades. I can do that, too. I have years of data on my exam questions, and intro student cohorts perform remarkably similarly, so I can select questions so as to yield whatever grade distribution you want. But if we’re being honest, this is just building the curve in ex ante. I would bet you a month of lunches in the university dining hall that from the student’s point of view, the feelings associated with grades will be just the same.
I have another worry about putative non-curved or
criterion-referenced grading. Some skills have a clear threshold for competence. Either I can tie my shoes or I can’t. Either I can drive well enough to get around
safely, or not. But for others kills,
competence is not so clear. Consider my
tennis ability. Do I have a competent forehand? Kind of.
I try to keep my arm loose, start the racquet low and finish high,
moving my wrist upward to impart some top spin as I’m rotating my shoulders,
etc. If you don’t play tennis, I hope
you’d think I have a competent forehand.
But compared to the worst person on my university’s tennis team, I’m
terrible.
My point is that in tennis, unlike in driving, there is less
a clear line of competence and more a gradual ascension from worse to
better. Once judgements of competence
are indexed to a comparison group, then we’re right back to where we were with
the curve.
Second point: I strongly suspect that philosophy is more
like the tennis case and less like the driving case. I fully understand that you can set the
threshold for competence in such a way that any student in the class can meet
it. But my guess is that once we do
that, we’ll end up giving out a lot of A level grades, and once again grades
won’t be sending much of a signal.
I’m not against that outcome. In fact, I welcome it. Quick personal story: I went to school for a very long time. If you’ve read
this far, first – thank you, and second – I realize you probably did as
well. For what it’s worth, there are two
classes in my personal history that stand out above all others in terms of
actually teaching me something valuable.
In one of these classes, everyone just got an A more or less for taking
the class. In the other, there were no
grades at all. And that is my experience
more generally. I always love and learn a lot from reading groups, and always
hated classes – excepting those I just mentioned, where grades were off the
table.
Most of the solutions to the problems with grading curves
are really just ways of emptying grades of their meaning.
I think there are three things we might care about in education:
(1) Learning
(2) Fun
(3) Creating a neat ranking of students from best to worst.
Here is my provisional conclusion. We can either have the first two, or else we
can have the third.