Should Grades Reflect Only Mastery — Or Do Effort and Work Quality Matter?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that grades should reflect both mastery and the effort that produces mastery.
Key Takeaways
- Effort produces mastery - Grading only for mastery ignores the process that leads to it
- Students need feedback on both - Knowing they mastered a concept but didn't work hard tells an incomplete story
- Work quality matters - The discipline of producing quality work is itself a valuable learning outcome
Transcript
Grades do not and should not reflect mastery.
A lot of people said in response to my video about changing the grading scale to be a 20 point scale, they said, well, grades should reflect mastery and you shouldn't get a C if you've only mastered 40 to 60% of the content.
And this impulse to make grades reflect mastery, I think, makes sense.
Like it's appealing to people.
But I think it's wrong.
I think it's incorrect to say that grades should reflect mastery.
Nobody really does that, even in places where there are standards based report cards.
I think for the most part, grades are reflecting a combination of learning and effort and, you know, and work quality.
We don't really grade based on mastery.
If a student comes in knowing everything that you're going to teach in a course, you don't just automatically give them an A and say you don't have to do any of the assignments.
If a student does all of their work and yet doesn't meet all of the standards, you don't fail them for not meeting the standards.
And whether we should, whether we should make that change, I think is an important kind of philosophical question.
But we have to think about how grades are used and what they indicate.
Grades currently, like high school GPA especially, is highly predictive of success in college, highly predictive of income as an adult.
and highly predictive of other life outcomes so this idea that that grades don't tell us anything meaningful or that like compliance is bad i think really doesn't hold up you know like obviously we don't want to be too compliance focused but i think when we get too compliance focused in either direction where we think compliance is either everything and we get kind of weirdly fixated on compliance or when we get so opposed to compliance that we think, well, I don't want the students to have to do anything.
They should just get a grade based on what they know.
In both extremes, we go off the rails.
I think grades should reflect compliance and doing your work and meeting expectations to a great extent because that's what's going to indicate your preparedness for future steps.
You are not going to succeed in college if you just act like you know everything and don't do your work, but maybe you do well on the test.
That's not how college works.
That's not how a job works where you get credit for things you know and it doesn't matter what you do.
Life just does not work that way and we're not setting our students up for success if we try to grade based only on what students know with no regard for what they do.
Let me know what you think.