From Degrading to De-Grading- Alfie Kohn

Class 422,

Though Kohn, "perhaps the country's most outspoken critic of education's fixation on grades and test scores" (as cited in http://www.alfiekohn.org), proposes a valid causativeness to abolishing the grading system, I find it to be absurd to think we should consider complete elimination.  Grades are benchmarks for secondary levels of education that push student to accomplish bigger and better things and they do inspire children to succeed.  Where I do agree with Kohn in this very in depth article is on the principles that using a single instrument of measurement to detect students’ motivation to achieve, such as a letter grade, is not the only intrinsic reward students should base their accomplishments upon nor for educators to base their teaching style of assessing individual students. I disagree with Kohn (1999) that, “what grades offer is spurious precision – a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation”; teachers compile information about a student throughout the course study and evaluate with an end result founded on multiple objectivity and assessments.  I feel it is important to maintain motivation in students by emphasizing and critiquing their performance with this multiple assessment criteria; primarily using the grade system, but also with critical thinking, interactive and collaborative learning and “authentic assessment” practices (Kohn, 1999).  As any effective teacher must yearn to learn new ways of measuring students’ success while keeping them inspired and stimulated through reliable teaching strategies; so too, students must be naturally motivated to learn without the preoccupation of knowing a grade is attached to this process and that they are being assessed with multiple methods. In the end though, I feel we still need to keep the grading system in place.

Kohn¸ Alfie (1999).  From Degrading to De-Grading. HIGH SCHOOL MAGAZINE. Retrieved from http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm