Grades as money

...In the last few years, my college has begun to offer merit scholarships, which is to say financial aid to very good students without requiring them to prove financial need...

...My dean tells me that the syllabus I give to students at the beginning of the semester is, legally speaking, a contract, and has been interpreted by the courts as such—it must specify how I will calculate grades at the end of the term, and woe to me if I say that the final exam will count 30 percent and later change my mind and make it 35 percent...

...The point is to develop talents, attitudes, habits of mind that are good in themselves, that will improve their lives (and the lives of their fellow citizens...

...But of course we don't use real money to teach this skill—that would be too expensive and risky...

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...I had no response...

...This all seems so obvious to everyone that it's never even remarked upon, even though it is entirely different from, and even incompatible with, what we normally say about the relationship in the classroom—which is that it's one where I'm a teacher helping my students learn...

...Students expect that their grade will indicate the amount of time they have put into the course, as if they were hourly workers, and many faculty agree that it's important to consider "effort" when they "award" grades...

...One day a student came to me for advice on her course schedule and informed me that, although she'd like to try a philosophy course sometime, she couldn't risk it because she wasn't sure what her grade would be...

...Except, of course, money...

...By tying grades to money, we give students incentives not to take risks...

...If grades are money, and if the product for which they pay is learning, then it's perfectly rational for students to try to minimize that learning while maximizing their "return," and looking for loopholes or strategies that will produce the best possible grade for the least possible effort...

...Everybody seemed a little dubious about the idea of turning college professors into agents of national tax policy...

...When I heard that President Clinton was offering tax deductions for B's, I imagined my own college's program turned into national policy, and I blanched...

...If grades are money, then learning is a costa painful effort one undergoes only for the reward it produces...

...That the learning or the effort might itself be the reward—which is what we say about education—makes no sense or is sentimental rubbish...

...For them the goal of going to class, writing papers, taking exams, and so on, is simply the grade itself...

...It's money that's the crux of it...

...Here the analogy between money and grades is not merely an analogy: a B can now literally be worth thousands of dollars...

...We talk about "docking" students' grades for turning in papers late or missing classes, like finance companies assessing a late fee...

...how dare I tell her grades aren't important...

...But when I read last winter that President Clinton was proposing to grant tax deductions for tuition to all college students who maintain B averages, something about it felt wrong to me, and I started to wonder why...

...As it turned out, that aspect of the proposal disappeared in the final tax bill...

...But one characteristic of these scholarships is that to keep them students must maintain a certain GPA—generally a B average and sometimes even higher...

...Of course it's particularly embarrassing because I've been teaching, and assigning grades, for twelve years, and I guess from my students' point of view it's the most important thing I do...

...Instead, we use grades...

...As far as I'm concerned, it's just a twiceyearly annoyance, and furthermore an impossibility: what exactly is the difference between a B- and a C...

...She kept the scholarship, and never learned philosophy...

...They're the currency around which everything revolves...

...we say that education itself is such a good...

...when I ask why the GPA is important, I'm told that it's necessary for getting into a good postgraduate school, which is in turn important for getting a good job, which is important for making lots of money...

...If this is true, then grades must play a secondary role: they can serve a motivating function, but ought never to be mistaken for the goal of the process as such...

...But the deeper questions were never asked: about why we so easily accept the equation between grades and money that the proposal implied, about what grades really are for and why we take them for granted...

...But we're all so used to it everywhere else that we don't even notice...

...Nothing real is exchanged in the classroom, and so the model of money is out of place there...

...Their learning isn't something they "give" me, not something I'm supposed to pay them for...

...They argue and gossip about them, complain to me and my colleagues about them, orient their whole college lives, as far as I can tell, around them...

...I point all this out to my students when I can, often giving a heartfelt speech on the first day of the course about what I think grades are and how they ought not to be taken so seriously...

...Very good and wellprepared first-year students often come to me to explain that they would rather take Calculus One than Calculus Two, even though they have already taken calculus in high school—or rather, because they have: that way they are guaranteed a good grade...

...we want our students to learn about history and philosophy and literature and science and art and mathematics be102 • DISSENT Notebook cause doing so will make them better people, better citizens of a democracy...

...The effect of turning grades into money is to commodify learning, making it appear as something that is painful in itself and useful only for what it can buy...

...Few noticed because we are all so in thrall to instrumentalism and commodification—and because we no longer feel sure what education is for or why we value it...

...And they do: I'm constantly amazed by the mathematically sophisticated understanding students instantly develop of whatever new grading scheme I announce, and by their ability to find ambiguities and possible avenues for creative interpretation in it...

...When they come into my office to ask (usually in despair or anger) why they got the grade they did in my class, I'm always a little confused, and a little embarrassed, for them and for me: why exactly are we talking about this...

...we use them, in myriad ways, as money...

...These honors students are in some ways the worst in terms of their fixation on grades and their constant and creative search to find ways to manipulate the system: their skill at doing so, after all, has gotten them where they are today...

...What was wrong with Clinton's well-meaning proposal was that it sent the wrong message...

...This is what we say, but it is not the way we act, and it is certainly not the way most of our students see the situation...

...Everything is important for something else, in this litany...

...If grades are money, for us they are funny money, Monopoly money, because it costs us nothing to give them out— and no more, except in terms of our self-image, to give out an A than a C. Thus we get to play out our own fantasies about money—we can be skinflints, stingily giving out one or two A's a year, or spendthrifts, spreading high grades everywhere, or, like that guy on the show about the millionaire, looking for needy cases (troubled students, applicants to tough graduate programs) upon whom to generously bestow our wealth...

...Anyone entering this society surely needs to know all this...

...Me, I'm a college professor, teaching philosophy at a small private liberal-arts college in the Midwest...

...The result, as any economist will tell you, is inflation...

...I always think...

...What grades ought to be is a report, nothing more: how did the student do, how much did he or she learn, how much were his or her skills and critical self-consciousness and knowledge of the world expanded...

...it's arguably the most important skill our culture demands...

...Today some are lawyers, doctors, businesspeople, software designers, bed-and-breakfast hosts, and so forth, but I'd be hard-pressed to guess who were the straight-A students among them and who barely squeaked through...

...this is one of the ways we have helped to build up an excellent honors program that has been a real boon to the institution...

...This is exactly the opposite of what education ought to be about...

...Damned if I know...

...Yet applying it in the classroom produces perverse results...

...On the faculty side, the situation is more pleasant, if no less perverse...

...We let grades count as money—we let education count as money—because money, nowadays, is the only value we know...

...A serious student might indeed want to know that at the end of the course—might want it to check his or her work, might even want to use it as a carrot or a stick...

...But we don't use grades as a report...

...in many of the best colleges the average grade is around A...

...The students look at me as though I'm crazy...

...It's the learning that's the goal, we say, not the grade...

...I say this not to sound self-righteous or holier than they—openness about grades is probably healthier than the kind of highfalutin' squeamishness we exhibited—but rather to explain the difficulty I feel in really understanding grades, in grasping what exactly they are and what they're for...

...She was right...

...Since we all want to be loved, and since the students seem to care so damned much, the misers are few...

...My students are much better at it than I am...

...An important part of what we're teaching in college— not what we intend to teach, but what we do teach nonetheless—is how to think about money, what its relation is to value and effort and selfworth...

...Their incentive is thus not to learn, or to learn as little as possible while maintaining a good GPA—while I am placed in the position of having to figure out new ways to trick them into learning by designing ingenious FALL • 1997 • 103 Notebook new ways to grade...

...And what strikes me today is how different my students are: they talk about their grades all the time...

...In my college, like most others, grades are money...

...When I tried out one of my lines about how "the important thing is learning, not grades," she looked back at me fiercely and explained that if her GPA dropped even a little bit she would lose her scholarship, worth ten thousand dollars...

...To this day, I have no idea how my friends did in college—they all graduated, which I guess means they did well enough...

...we offer "contracts," whereby students are promised certain grades for doing a certain amount of work...

...When I ask a student why a higher grade in a course is so important, I'm often told it's because it will increase the grade point average (GPA...

...The relationship between me and the students is really an exchange relationship: they provide me with work of a certain quality and I reward it—pay for it—by giving them a certain grade...

...nothing is important for itself...

...No, I don't understand grades that well...

...Did we really want to write the current grading system into tax law...

...Everybody in the world of higher education, and most people outside, too, pays lip service to the idea that the point of education is, well, to get educated...