GRADING: CERTIFICATION AND SOCIAL CONTROL

Andrea Ferris, grad student at Brown, has opened up a whole new topic when she reflects on the superiority of written work over objective testing...in brief, she hates objective testing.

With good reason.

First, testing is not essential to the learning and the loving of things scholarly; things scientific...indeed, if the knowledge process is well designed, testing interferes with learning.

Then too, objective testing/machine testing is for the convenience of the professor...and is only marginally connected to the quality of learning and knowing. In mass classes; in reluctant learning; in cheap-jack schooling systems, objective testing generates quick and dirty estimates of material absorbed.

In labor intensive teaching, the teacher can know students as separate people; can gauge their needs and their competencies by watching, talking, working with them. Mass classes defeat personal knowledge of teacher and of student.

In massified education, depersonalization of the teaching process allows the professor/teacher to gauge the capacity of a given student to sit quietly, absorb passively, retrieve and repeat reliably the highlights of a course.

Massified education creates the dramaturgical impression of an education without the depth and breath of one in better educational format. For Chairs who have to provide measures of performance to Deans who have to justify claims for resources to presidents who have to justify expenditures to governing Boards, testing and certification of passage by large numbers of students taking large numbers of credit hours can be used for such justification.

Students know at some level of knowing that the testing procedure create a conflict relationship between professor and student and is offended in that same existential way expressed by Andrea in her post.

Professors too, know that testing turns them into thought police and into class enemy of the student...but we are so inured to it that we turn our own anger against the student and cooperate with a process which labels some good people as failures and some clever people as skilled practitioners.

In a larger frame, grades from objective tests are efficient if not reliable tools with which to asseverate to unknown others that this student is or is not a good candidate for life in a routinized job. Given labor market dynamics, employers want to buy the labor of those who have proven themselves able to follow instructions and accept as normative whatever tasks are set before them...and do it well enough.

To return to Andrea's point, reading assignments offer a more complex way to gauge the capacity of students...in the case of novels, movies and such, the capacity of students to use the sociological imagination offered them in the more formal lecture format.

This alternate and I believe, superior way of gauging performance, remains a political tool in that the grade is used to certify some people called students and to disqualify others...to certify them to unknown persons and unknown purpose. Small wonder that good teachers sometimes lie in letters of recommendation...while bad teachers invariably lie in all manner of evaluation.

If ever we are to be on the side of the student, we have to develop a learning and evaluating procedure which minimizes failure. Mass classes offered by faculty indifferent to the fate of each, any or all students are subversive of our larger charge...to gladly learn and gladly teach.

TR Young

Summer, 1998