If Teachers Can't Give Failing Grades, Why Would Students Do the Work?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder explains how policies that prevent failing grades remove the incentive for students to complete their work.
Key Takeaways
- No-fail policies destroy motivation - When failure isn't possible, the incentive to do the work disappears
- Students are rational - They quickly figure out the minimum effort needed under any grading system
- Grades must have consequences - If grades don't reflect actual performance, they lose their ability to motivate learning
Transcript
If it's impossible for a kid to fail a class, why would they put forth effort?
Tons of teachers have told me that they are just not allowed to fail kids anymore for any reason.
Everybody has to get a passing grade.
And I think it's good to have more tricks up our sleeve than just failure, like the threat of failure only goes so far, and we should be able to do more than that to motivate students to put forth effort and to learn.
But I'm not sure we can get rid of that fear of failure as a necessary incentive.
Because without it, what is the logical incentive for a kid to do the work?
I don't believe that kids can learn without putting forth work.
Like just being in the classroom doesn't really result in that much of the learning that we want to take place.
Kids have to actually do the work in order to learn.
And if there's no accountability for doing the work, it's very logical to just not do it, right?
Kids are constantly struggling like the rest of us.
with short-term versus long-term thinking.
If I can get short-term pleasure of some form by just not doing my work and avoid the short-term pain of doing the work, and the only cost of that is long-term pain that I don't have to think about right now, well, that is going to be very tempting for kids.
to not put in the work to get the long-term benefit from.
So I think we've got to really think about the fundamental incentives in place when it comes to doing the work and passing a class.
And if we just tell everybody in advance, hey, you're going to pass no matter what.
You're going to get at least a 60.
Your teacher's not allowed to fail you.
Why would they do the work?
Why would they put forth the effort necessary to learn?
We have got to figure this out as a profession because i don't know the exact percentage but a lot of teachers are not allowed to give failing grades at all now even to kids who do no work and if they're doing no work they are not learning very much we do not have a passive alternative that results in a lot of learning like we can't just like hold your eyelids open and make you learn stuff from a video like that does not work for most types of material So we've got to find ways to get kids to do the work.
And I think one form of accountability could be not that you like have to repeat the whole grade because I think there are a lot of problems with just making everybody repeat the grade.
But it could be that if you fail math, next year you get double math.
You get a regular math class plus a math support class.
It could be that you get a tutor.
Like not all of the responses to failure need to be punitive or just the things we've always done.
They could be more support.
And I think a lot of kids would say like, actually, I don't really need that tutor.
I'm just going to do my work because then I'm going to have one more person breathing down my neck if I don't do my work.
There are lots of things we could do that can hold kids accountable.
Like, and it's not a punishment.
Like the goal here is to get them to do the work and to do the learning.
But right now we're incentivizing them not to because it's costly.
It takes effort to do the work and there's not really any downside for the kids who don't.
Let me know what you think about this.