You know how they don’t train professors how to teach? Part of that is not training them to make grades meaningful. https://twitter.com/drlcsquare/status/1245529105539440640

Most professors don’t give a shit about how their grades are determined.

They most likely assign percentages to parts of the course (problem sets, midterms, final) without any thought whatsoever as to why. (Most likely because that’s how their profs did it.)

What should the average grade for a class be? A ‘C’, many will say.

Why?

Is this true for all classes? SHOULD it be true for all classes?

Why? What is the grounding for this idea?

Many professors take certain ‘truths’ about how grades should be delivered as some devine rules set forth by... someone(?) that are too sacred to question.

If you really start digging into what grades means you find that they are kind of arbitrary.

Small changes to ways grades are determined can change the outcomes DRAMATICALLY.

And profs do all sorts of little games (drop an exam or the final can replace the semester grade or extra credit assignments) with how grades are determined that are more or less random.

All this to say that, right now, in this crazy time when everything has changed for everybody in so many different ways, grades have become LESS of an ‘objective’ measure (they’re never truly objective) of student performance.

If we continue to give grades, what do those grades mean?

- That a student was more self-disciplined?

- That a student had more/better resources?

- That a student (or their friends/family) happened to be untouched by the worst of this pandemic?

How should these grades be viewed by others?

Does an A from a school that only did letter grades mean more than a ‘pass’ from a school only doing pass/fail?

Is there any way to determine this? (Is there any good way to compare grades ever, really, even in the best of times?)

And giving students the ‘choice’ of a grade or P/F just turns this into some sick ‘game theory’ exercise for these student.

They have to consider their courses, their personal circumstances, AND how some mythical person 1/510 years down the line will interpret it.

It also builds on the perverse incentives that students already face with regard to grades. Focusing on a ‘score’ instead of learning (which I think is the point of education... or was at some point).

It also builds in perverse incentives for professors. I want my students to succeed. I don’t want their lives to be affected 1/5/10 years down the road by the (uninformed, essentially gamble) of how things are going this semester.

Should I grade a student more leniently because their grandmother died alone in a hospital somewhere and they were not able to focus on the exam while the proctoring services watches them from their computer’s camera?

Why? Why NOT?

What is right? What is appropriate? What do I do for my students? To uphold the ‘integrity’ of academia?

I want trained to teach in this situation. I wasn’t really trained to teach in ANY situation.

We’re any of us?

*’Were’ not ‘We’re’