Grades Are Dumb.

A rant about pretending to measure the unmeasurable

Back in my teaching days it was inevitable that by the end of September I would have already gotten into an argument with someone about grades and by the end of October would have received the admin email that said “Hey your grade book is too light, you need to add a few things in before conferences.” Know why my grade book was light?  Because grades are dumb. And now I’m going to go on a little rant.

I taught Math, Science, and a MakerSpace class called STEAM. I just could never figure out the right way to handle grading because the whole concept made no sense to me, especially how a good or bad grade could make or break a kid’s day, a family’s happiness, or a teacher’s self-esteem. It’s not that I didn’t try - I experimented with rubrics, portfolio assessments, standards-based grading, mastery tracking. I even broke math tests into sections so that instead of a student getting one C on a fractions test, they would get an A for adding fractions, a B for subtracting fractions, a B for converting fractions, and a C for word problems. I saw what that single letter grade would do to an 11 year old and I hated it. A kid who gets a C on a math test walks away thinking “I suck at this.” A kid who sees that they nailed adding and converting but struggled with word problems walks away thinking “I’m pretty good at this, I just need to work on the one thing.” And for me, it helped me know that this kid is actually pretty good at math, they just need some help on breaking down a word problem. Those are very different relationships to learning - one shuts a door, the other opens it.

We have an education system that doesn’t want component scores. It wants a letter or a number. It wants something I can average, rank, sort, and report. My broken-apart fractions test was a problem because it didn’t fit neatly into our LMS and so, every year: “Your grade book is too empty.”

To be clear, that email wasn’t saying “your students aren’t learning enough.” It was saying “you haven’t produced enough data points.”

What Even is a Grade…

I think we all quietly know this but never say it out loud… a grade is a fiction pretending to be fact. It’s a gray zone, subjective measure pretending to be objective and clear. We act as though giving a student a B+ in science tells us something definitive about what the child knows. But what does it actually tell us? It tells us they scored within a certain percentage range on a collection of assignments and assessments, designed and weighted by one teacher, in one classroom, in one semester. They performed adequately on tasks that measured… what, exactly? Their understanding of content? Questionable. Their ability to take tests? Maybe. Their compliance with deadlines? Probably. How much sleep they got? What their home life was like? How the bus ride was this morning?

A grade attempts to flatten all of that into a single symbol and presents it as though it means something. As if a B+ in my classroom was the same as a B+ across the hallway and a B+ 5 states over. We all know those grades aren’t the same, and now we worry about grade inflation as if that’s the biggest problem facing education today. Who cares. We all continue this charade because they are necessary for the entire apparatus - GPA, class ranks, college admissions, school accountability… it all depends on that fiction.

A View from Nowhere

You know I have to bring phenomenology into this conversation, obviously. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty writes: “The problem of the world - and to begin with, the problem of one’s own body - consists in the fact that everything resides in the world.” What he means is that there is no position outside of experience from which we can look down and objectively measure what is happening. There is no view from nowhere. We are always already embedded - in a body, in a place, in a time, in a history.

Every student walking into a classroom is a particular being with a particular way of encountering the world. They bring sedimented histories - years of experiences that have shaped how they perceive, how they move, how they think, how they feel about math or reading or science. They bring what Merleau-Ponty calls a “body schema” - a pre-reflective sense of their own capabilities, their way of being-in-the-world through active engagement. The kid who grew up with legos encounters physics differently than the kid who grew up playing with stomp rockets or the kid who grew up reading science fiction. The kid whose house is bilingual encounters grammar differently. The kid who has been told “you’re just not a math person” for years encounters fractions differently than the kid who hasn’t. These are all parts of their body schema, good and bad.

A grade assumes none of this matters. A grade says that regardless of where you come from, what you live through, how your body encounters this material, here is your number. It is an attempted view from nowhere being applied to a being who is always somewhere BY a being who is always somewhere.

But We Do it Anyway

At this point either you think I’m crazy or you're with me. I hope you’re with me. Because this is absurd, right!? Why do we keep doing it? Because this is what our market logic brains do when we apply them to something so subjective, so unmeasurable, so personal like learning and identity development. We try to apply measurement. We try to quantify a 14 year old’s relationship to literature into one single English grade.

Competition requires equivalence and equivalence requires measurement. Measurement requires that we flatten the lived complexity of learning into something quantifiable. It’s the same endogenous privatization of education that I’ve written about elsewhere. You don’t need to sell a school to a corporation to privatize it, sometimes you just need to import market logics into the classroom. And what is grading if not the reduction of a child’s growth into a product that can be measured, compared, and ranked?

Think about what we’re actually doing when we give a 10 year old a C. We are telling a child — a child who is in the middle of becoming, whose understanding is developing and shifting daily, whose body is literally growing and changing — that their current relationship to a body of content has been evaluated and found to be average. We’ve taken the messy, nonlinear, deeply personal process of a human being learning about the world and we’ve stamped a letter on it. And we’ve done it with a straight face, as though that letter means something stable and real.

It doesn’t. It means we needed a number, and this is the number we came up with.

I Don’t Have a Good Answer

Sorry. I’m not here to propose a new grading system. I tried, and smarter people than me have tried, and the system eats every alternative and spits out another version of ranking. But I do think it is worth pausing and reflecting on what we’re missing.

When I broke my fractions test up into parts, I wasn’t being innovative, I was just trying to actually see where each kid was. You know, assessing progress. Not where they ranked, but where they were - in their own learning, on their own path, with their own particular way of encountering fractions. That kid who aced adding but bombed word problems is not a B student. That’s a student who understands numerical operations but hasn’t yet figured out how to translate language into math. Those are completely different things and I can only find that story by breaking the test down into parts.

Merleau-Ponty reminds us that we are always perceiving from somewhere. Every student in the classroom is somewhere - somewhere specific, somewhere shaped by everything they’ve lived through, somewhere that mattered. What I was trying to do, before I had philosophical language for it, was to attend to the where rather than pretending it didn’t exist.

A phenomenological approach to learning would start by recognizing that growth is not a line moving from 0 to 100. It is an unfolding. It is a student’s body schema reorganizing itself around new encounters with the world. It is understanding deepening through living experience. It is situated, contextual, and personal. It is not reduced to a letter on a report card.

We can attend to that unfolding. We can know where a student is and what’s clicking and what hasn’t quite landed yet. We can create conditions for that unfolding to continue. Teachers do this every day - the good ones at least. The ones who are paying attention. They do this work despite the system, not because of it.

I don’t know what an alternative looks like at scale but I know that something is deeply wrong when we treat the most complex thing a human being does - grow, develop, and learn about the worlds they inhabit - as though it can be reduced and measured by one single letter. Would we accept this in any other domain? We’re not grading friendships, right? We’re not giving a kid a B+ in being a good sibling. We’re not ranking our relationships on a 4.0 scale. We know those things are too complex, too situated, and too human to measure that way. So why are we doing it with learning?

As in many of my essays discussing phenomenology and education, this is less of an invitation to change your ways and more of an invitation to notice. Check in with your grading systems. Check in with how your kids are receiving their feedback. Does it make any sense? Are we just going along with this because we’re supposed to?