What happens when we, as a species, “win” work? One of the primary goals of creativity and innovation since the dawn of time has been to make life easier for people, to allow us to accomplish the everyday tasks of existence–procuring food, providing shelter–with greater ease and efficiency. Up until now, no matter how efficient our tools and technologies have made us, there has still been plenty of work to go around and keep everyone on the planet busy. However, it is now becoming abundantly clear that this is not going to last. It is only a matter of time before huge swaths of the global population are rendered “obsolete” by machines. As college professors, it is becoming increasingly important for us to ask the question: How should we prepare students to exist in a world without work?

This is a question that has been on my radar for a long time. As an undergrad, back in 1995, I was struck one day when my professor, Joanne Ciulla (who wrote a book about it), said to my class:

The only logical conclusion is that the purpose of a higher education is to help the upper class better enjoy their leisure time.

What did she just say?!?! Even now I remember how provocative that question was for me, and on some level, the question of what constitutes a meaningful education, has been on a background thread in my mind ever since. It was one of those formative moments that has led me to encourage students to eschew the common wisdom on how and why they should do college.

Already, places like Sweden are shifting to a 6-hour work day, and places like Finland are experimenting with basic income. As manufacturers like Foxconn in China replace 60,000 workers with robots, they are sending the message that it is now more cost effective to install robots than it is to pay employees less than $5/hour. Automation threatens skilled labor and professions as much as it does low-skilled labor. How can we honestly tell our students that the best way to prepare for their future is to start their adult lives out in massive debt to acquire an “education” that may only be loosely related to supporting their futures?

I think the writing is on the wall for colleges and universities. “To get a good job” is an argument that is rapidly losing strength as the main reason to go to college. That being said, I still believe that universities provide an invaluable service. Encouraging people to spend a series of months and years asking vital questions, without pressure to produce something, creates a space where our young people can really think about how they want to approach life. Giving them the opportunity to ask things like:

• What am I good at? What could I be good at?
• What do I like doing?
• What is my element? Where is the intersection of what I like and what I’m good at?
• How can I employ my gifts in service to the world?

These questions need to be decoupled from the common wisdom of the economic models that are crumbling before our eyes.

Below is a very abbreviated list of (quasi) recent resources that prompted my thoughts above.

Articles/Videos on Obsolescence of Work

David Brooks: What Machines Can’t Do

Robert Reich: In our horrifying future, very few people will have work or make money

CGP Grey: Humans Need Not Apply

Ben Way: Jobocalypse: The End of Human Jobs and How Robots will Replace Them

Articles on Negative Income Tax/Basic Income

Dylan Matthews: Basic income: the world’s simplest plan to end poverty, explained

Ben Schiller: A Universal Basic Income Is The Bipartisan Solution To Poverty We’ve Been Waiting For

Books on New Economic Models

Charles Eisenstein: Sacred Economics

Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee: The Second Machine Age–Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

Since 2009 I have been experimenting with a pedagogy in all of my courses called choose-your-own-grade. In a nutshell, I let students choose their own grade for the course–no strings attached. They don’t have to come to class, read a book, take a test, or do any assignments whatsoever. The only requirement is that they come meet me at the end of the semester and tell me face-to-face what grade they would like for me to report to the registrar.

When I first began this practice, in the spring of 2009, attendance increased and the overall quality of student work soared. Students took full advantage of the freedom to focus on tackling challenges of their own choosing, and in the process became addicted to learning the content and also produced much better solutions than anyone could ever expect from beginning programmers.

This has resulted in some extraordinary projects. Several students have released mobile apps on various app stores in their first-ever programming course. Many, if not most, computing students never release any usable software at all during their college careers. One student used his time to develop a food log application designed for people with eating disorders (to help his girlfriend), rather than the many calorie counters and other diet-support apps that are decidedly unhealthy for people with anorexia or bulimia. That’s not the kind of app that any professor would ever think to put on a syllabus.

Of course, there have always been students who did basically nothing over the course of the semester and then asked for an A. They were a small minority, however, and I believed, a small price to pay for the energy and creativity emanating from their more motivated and disciplined classmates.

Over the years, however, as the word has gotten out that “Benton’s class is an easy A,” the number of students failing to take advantage of this more open format has increased. This spring, it resulted in my having an e-mail exchange with a student that went roughly as follows:

Student: You are the most interesting and intriguing professor I’ve ever had, and I’m never coming to your class again.
Me: That doesn’t make sense. If this is really the best course you’ve ever had, why aren’t you bending over backwards to make it a priority??
Student: Well, I want to get this internship this summer that will really help set me up for getting a job in my chosen field (business), and to do that, I really need to do well in these three other courses. By not coming to your class, I can focus on these other classes, which are honestly less interesting to me, and have the best chance of getting the internship.
Me: Oh.

On the one hand, I totally agree with the student. Given the system of which he was a part, he made a completely logical and practical decision. We had a lengthy exchange of emails in which he fully acknowledged that he understood the calculating and cynical nature of his decision. Ultimately, though, he accepted his role as just a cog in a bigger machine, and was content to carry out his plan.

On the other hand, this is totally stupid!!! Why would we agree to live and work and learn within a system in which the most logical and rational thing to do is to sacrifice your passion and interest for the sake of maintaining your commitment to a path that you, admittedly, don’t like.

To be clear, this was not a case of a student sacrificing his love of poetry or dance or the proverbial underwater basket-weaving to do something more “practical.” I teach computer programming. My students routinely are offered jobs well before graduation with starting salaries of $60,000+ per year plus signing bonuses. The choice was not between art and passion on the one hand and a solid job on the other. The student chose to give up something he liked in order to gain something that would “look good on his resume.”

As a result, I decided not to do choose-your-own-grade this semester, opting instead for a version of Nicole’s highly successful points-accumulation system. I’ll save my feelings about this new system for a future post, but as a preview, I’m having mixed results: more effort, less enthusiasm, less creativity.

The question I’m still stuck with is, how long can we as a society continue to maintain structures that, as Ken Robinson says, ruthlessly squander the creativity of our young people? I’m finding it harder and harder to work within this system.

[P.S. In case you were wondering, the student was successful at getting the internship, so I guess his logic paid off. We had a lengthy discussion about the tradeoffs when he came to ask for his A at the end of the semester. We agreed that the whole thing was stupid, but he left feeling like he had made the right decision, and would likely do the same thing if he had it to do over. Sigh.]

Civic Responsibility – All of my statistics classes focus on analyzing real data for real people. I encourage everyone to develop their research questions (and gather their data) in conjunction with an organization that needs help (particularly not-for-profits and small businesses)! By encouraging service learning, students become aware that they can help others as they are in the process of learning.

Communal Effort – Everyone has to bring data to the class, whether they collect it themselves or get it from an archive. Since analyzing your individual data segues into analyzing data as a team, oftentimes, student groups will combine their datasets or interests as they are constructing research questions. Also, I encourage everyone to actively collaborate, and don’t view using each other (or using resources on the Internet, as long as they’re cited) as cheating. It’s really hard to cheat when you are being resourceful and citing all your sources.

Decommodification – The textbook we used to use (published by a Large Faceless “Old Story” Publishing Company) cost about $200 (or $150, if you were lucky and could get one used). This always turned my stomach. I’m thrilled to be able to offer students a textbook that’s much more targeted to the work they’ll do in an intro course for around $30 – and because it also feels like a cookbook or handbook, they’ll be able to use the material for years as they grow and develop as professionals.

Immediacy – Why study any subject “so you can do something with it later”? Statistics provides tons of useful tools that can be used now to explore the stories that a dataset can tell. As a result, I built my course and book around the premise that students don’t want to solve homeworky-style problems… they want to be able to analyze data that interests them now.

Gifting – All of my students get a PDF of their book for free… purchasing a print copy is optional. Because I retained the digital rights, I can share the PDF as much as I want and not get in trouble with my publisher!

Leave No Trace – Remember when you were in school, and you produced all those useless projects that never served to benefit anyone, anywhere? I believe that no work you do while you’re learning new things should be in vain. Either you should work on projects that have the potential for interesting results you can publish (even if you publish them online, on a blog) — or you should use your expertise to generate new exercises and learning experiences to help others who are just starting out. As a beginner, you have a unique perspective that should be shared! Export your knowledge. It will help someone, somewhere, at some point in time!

Participation – Everyone has to bring data to the class, whether they collect it themselves or get it from an archive. This forces people to share their interests with others! Also, when we do inference problems, everyone has to generate simulated data (or find archival data) to do problems with.

Radical Inclusion – Everyone has different skills, talents, and gifts in different stages of development. And everyone has something to contribute to the learning community and the learning experience. In my opinion, an introductory course isn’t the place where you should be expected to get everything right immediately. But as part of a learning community, you should be able to pool your resources to make sure you get everything right immediately!

Radical Self-Expression – By getting to choose your own data, you get to express (and extend!) your own interests. Also, by being given the freedom to grow your skills based on those you initially bring into the learning experience, we drive out fear and make it easier for you to try things that might be a little more difficult, to build your competence.

Radical Self-Reliance – My method fully integrates the analytical solutions (using equations) and the solutions provided by the R statistical software. I believe that it’s powerful to be able to do all of the following: 1) perform the calculations by hand to see all of the intermediate steps in the problem-solving, 2) use the R software to generate the same results, and 3) compare them to each other to validate your solution strategy. By recognizing that there are multiple ways to figure something out, all at your disposal, you don’t need an “answer key”… just the capability for critical thinking, and the ability to check yourself to see if your answers make sense compared to your data.

Billy Hunt’s Scream-a-Tron, which captures the look on your face when you hit a certain decibel level.

“CC DIGs LPs that are Radical-IER.” (That is, more radical than all the other LPs.)

We were giving a talk the other night on applications of the 10 Principles, and I was worried that I’d forget one. Which is not actually a worry, but a likely outcome, based on my past experiences trying to recite them from memory!

So I decided that I needed a little mnemonic to help me along… the stupider the better (more stupid = more memorable, right?) As a result, to remember the 10 Principles, I picture a very hipster looking guy wearing a flannel shirt with an embroidered name patch that says “CC”. Because that’s his name. He really likes OLD RECORDS, so I picture him holding a few (he DIGs LPs). But he only likes the ones that are crazier than all the others (Radical-IER) so the cover art I see is 3D psychelic with programmable LEDs (or something).

• CC – Which 2 principles start with C? Answer: Communal Effort and Civic Responsibility
• DIGs – Which principles start with D, I, & G? Answer: Decommodification, Immediacy, and Gifting
• LPs – Which principles start with L and P? Answer: Leave No Trace, and Participation
• Radical-IER – There are 3 principles that start with the word “Radical” – a Radical I, a Radical E, and a Radical R (hence Radical-IER). What’s the Radical I? Radical Inclusion, of course. What’s the Radical E? That’s Radical Self-Expression. What’s the Radical R? That would be Radical Self-Reliance.

You’re welcome!!

This is part 3 of my series on why grades suck.

On the surface, grades would appear to motivate people to study harder, and as such, be a good thing.  Grades’ power to motivate students is undeniable and real. However, the problem lies not in whether grades motivate or not, but how.

Alfie Kohn, in his book Punished By Rewards (I consider this book a MUST READ for anyone who is interested in this subject), articulates five ways in which grades are harmful (paraphrased):

1. Grades punish
2. Grades ignore reasons
3. Grades rupture relationships
4. Grades discourage risk-taking
5. Grades undermine motivation

#1 Grades punish because in order to have “winners” you have to have “losers.”  Teachers create tests and assignments intentionally at a level where they know that some portion of their students will be unsuccessful.  Let me come to teachers’ defense and argue that the reason they create tests that they know some students will fail is not because they are sadistic or enjoy seeing some people fail.  Rather, they have to teach a lot of students with varying levels of ability, and different life circumstances.  They pitch to the middle intentionally so that hopefully the higher performing students won’t be completely bored, and the lower performing students won’t be hopelessly lost (the Digital Aristotle video below really drives this point home).  Teachers are trapped in an industrial revolution mentality educational system just like everyone else.  Regardless of the reason, the students forced to endure these tests can’t help but feel in many cases that they are being punished.

#2 Grades ignore reasons.  For example, many teachers have an attendance policy.  If a student misses a class, or many classes, the reason becomes unimportant (“I’ve got too many students to review all of the individual reasons and excuses why you can’t bother to show up!”).  There’s a policy in place.  It was communicated clearly on the syllabus.  If you don’t show up and don’t have a doctor’s note, that’s not my problem.  How does this make students feel?  It can’t feel good to be treated as just another name on a roster.  The grading policy in this case, allows us teachers to shield ourselves from the effort it might otherwise require us to track a student down and find out if they are okay.  Grades enable teachers to ignore the idiosyncrasies and individuality of the people in our care.  I know.  I’ve been one of those teachers.

#3 Grades rupture relationships.  This one is mostly about power.  It is very difficult for two people to have a genuine friendship when one has power over the other one.  In the classroom, I have sole power to decide your grade.  The US Supreme Court has actually ruled that a professor can be fired for disobeying the university if he or she refuses to change a grade.  But even after being fired, the university can’t change the grade.  In the classroom, to the extent that you care about grades, I am your god.  I can make you do anything I want to.  While the vast majority of teachers wield this power responsibly, tales of sexual or monetary exploitation are not unheard of, and even in the best of circumstances it’s still difficult to be “friends” with your professor.  How can you say what you really think to a person who might dock your grade for it?  The power dynamics are the primary source of cheating and other academic dishonesty.  Take away the grade and there’s really no reason for teachers and students to lie to one another.

#4 Grades discourage risk-taking.  Have you ever heard anyone ask “Will this be on the test?”  Have you ever hounded an instructor to find out exactly how many pages, what font size, how many inch margins the paper has to be to not get docked points?  Have you ever failed to speak your mind for fear of angering the professor? Have you heard a teammate argue that your team should take the easy and safe option for the group project? “Let’s just get it done and out of the way.” On the contrary, have you ever wanted to take on a more ambitious project, but not done it for fear you’ll fail?  Our grading system is inadvertently socializing our young people to be docile, compliant followers of orders.  It’s ironic given that many, if not most, of our society’s heroes are people who took risks, faced big challenges and succeeded.  We don’t often acknowledge how many times they had to fail to get there.  Classrooms should be the safe place to fail.  The classroom is the environment where the impacts of failure can be contained.  We should be encouraging students to swing for the fence, to shoot for the moon, to go big, and if you’re going to fail, fail hard and know that we’re here to catch you.  Not gonna happen though.  You might get a bad grade.

#5 Grades undermine motivation.  This is the fifth and most insidious of the motivational arguments against grades.  The basic idea here is that because we emphasize grades so much, learning becomes a secondary or nonexistent concern.  How many tests have you crammed for, only to forget everything the next day?  If you really cared about learning, wouldn’t you have studied in a way that would more likely promote long-term retention?  How many times have you finished a particularly grueling class and walked out of the final thinking, “I’m so glad I’ll never have to study that again!”  If the method of our teaching makes students LESS excited about learning, then we, as teachers, are failing utterly.  As it turns out, this is exactly what we’re doing.  I’ll let you read the paper for yourself, but a meta-analysis of hundreds of studies showed that even when they get the maximum reward, i.e. an A, student motivation to remain engaged with the content decreases!  For students who got less than an A, the effect on motivation was devastating.  As a teacher, why would I want to engage in a practice that I know will actually make students LESS excited about what I teach???

Why use a strategy we know kills motivation?

It bears restating that grades have become so taken for granted in our culture that we have difficulty conceiving of an educational world without them. In my search for an ideal grading strategy I found that many of these questions about the appropriateness of grading were asked in the 19th and early 20th century when this became the prevalent practice. I naively assumed that the reason nobody asked these questions anymore was that answers had been found, but this is not true. Far from it, I think that we, as a society, just gave up and gave in to the expedience of using grades because there wasn’t any other better way that we could come up with to shepherd millions of young people through the educational system. Now that we have over 100 years of evidence to show us that this is not the best way to do it, it is time to change.

 THE Argument for Using Grades

Economics provides the one and only valid argument for using grades. There’s only one, and it’s simple: it’s an efficient way to provide feedback to a large number of students (and other stakeholders–parents, legislatures, colleges, employers) in a short period of time. While the early proponents of this argument in the 19th century (when the use of grades really became prevalent) were aware of grades’ flaws and shortcomings, they wrung their hands and argued (probably justifiably) that there really was no other way to do it given the student-teacher ratios and the need to make a case for the value of schools and schooling at all. Keep in mind that the US was still predominantly agrarian at this point in history, and many people did not see a need for anyone to acquire more than basic reading and mathematical skills, if that. It is also important to note that this is the time of the Industrial Revolution, and the standardized, one-size-fits all, assembly line approach to evaluation seemed extraordinarily appropriate given the times.

In short, the primary argument in favor of using grades is economic. I mean, think of the alternative to letter and number grades. Do we really expect teachers to write full essays describing each student’s strengths and weaknesses in detail? Who has such time? How could we afford to pay the number of people it would take to accomplish such a task?

As such, it should be no surprise that the loudest debates about how we grade (not if we grade–that’s taken for granted) tend to be couched in economic terms, e.g. grade “inflation.” (BTW, grade inflation is a myth.) People also try to correlate grades and GPA to likelihood to get a (good) job, lifetime income potential, etc. All of them are primarily economic arguments and do not deal in a truly substantive way with the negative impacts that grades have had on nearly everyone in our society.

Economic Arguments Against Using Grades

This is not intended to be a comprehensive treatment of the economics of grades, but just a brief introduction to some of the basic arguments, starting with one of the most basic of economic principles: the law of supply and demand.

To restate the law, when supply is high and demand is low, prices fall.  When supply is low and demand is high, prices rise.  In the case of grades, the conventional argument would be that A’s are (or should be) a scarce commodity, and therefore the price of acquiring one, i.e. student talent and/or effort should be high.  In the case of grades, this is a bogus argument.

First of all, A’s are not a scarce commodity. From the instructor’s standpoint, they cost nothing to produce and there is a limitless supply. (If they were, lot of techers would be more creful bout wht they typed!) Not only can I assign as many A’s as I choose, but I’m not charged $50 for every A that I assign, $25 for B’s, $10 for C’s etc. If anything, it’s what economists would refer to as an artificial scarcity, which is when a producer intentionally destroys, withholds or declines to produce goods in order to keep prices high.  I guess it’s not unheard of for instructors to intentionally limit the number of “available” A’s in order to scare students into working harder, but I’m not sure that a scare tactic is really a valid argument for using grades.

This begs the question of what is the value of an A?  I’m sure someone has tried to quantify it in monetary terms, but a short thought experiment will show how ludicrous this is.  Is an A in organic chemistry worth the same in 2014 dollars as an A in scuba diving?  How about a 2.9 GPA in the College of Business as opposed to a 3.8 in the English Department?  The artificiality of trying to make such value comparisons quickly devolves into the absurd.

But doesn’t that point out the value of GPA for getting good jobs?  At least one study done at Virginia Tech found that about 42% of the time, college recruiters did not even appear to consider GPA at all in deciding whether or not to award an on-campus interview.  In 17% of the cases, it appeared that a higher GPA decreased students’ chances of getting the interview.  Of course, this still means that in over 40% of the cases, GPA was at least somewhat considered.  Some companies do have GPA cutoffs for new hires. (After reading this, though, you may not want to work for those companies.)  But it’s important to keep in mind that your GPA will only possibly be important for your very first job upon graduating.  After that, no employers will ask for it.  They’ll make their decision to hire you or not based on your previous job performance (possibly). So it’s important to keep in mind that your GPA may not be as important in getting a job as you’ve been led to believe.

There is one important exception to this: graduate school.  Graduate schools absolutely and nearly universally use GPA in their admissions criteria.  So if you plan to go to grad school, an economist and I would agree in advising you to strive to get as high a GPA as possible.  An unethical person would add “by any means necessary.”  This overvaluing of grades is actually a primary source of academic dishonesty and friction between teachers and students, but we’ll get to that in the section on motivation.

The Bogus Metaphor of School as Workplace

In the attempt to make school more like the “real world” many people like to say that going to school is a student’s “job” and that their “pay” takes the form of grades. This is a bald attempt to justify in economic terms why students should work hard, but there are a number of reasons why the metaphor rings hollow.

First of all, for anyone who is in college or private school, students are paying money for the opportunity to be in school. The idea that someone would pay a company for the opportunity to work there is nonsensical. Companies pay employees–not the other way around.

Second, whereas the employees at a company work together to produce a product or provide a service, students in a school are not working together to produce anything. If anything, the students are the consumers of a service and working independently of one another. Collaboration is actually cheating in many instances. It actually might be a good idea to turn schools into places where people work together to produce something, but currently performance and accountability are at the level of the individual students and they are explicitly in competition with one another.

Third, given that school attendance is compulsory throughout the country, if school is in fact a “job” then it must be considered slavery. Primary and secondary school students have no choice about whether or not to attend school, and they have little, if any, choice about what they study and the ways in which they study and are evaluated. They receive no true monetary compensation–quite the reverse, they are asked to pay for many aspects of the experience.

As such, it is no surprise that students are underwhelmed by the argument that school is their job, and less than ecstatic when their “payment” comes in the form of grades. We may try to sell it as such for the sake of “preparing them for their future,” but young people, who are bombarded daily with attempts to sell them things, are pretty savvy to the notion that this is a bogus metaphor.

Grades ≠ Money

Grades are not money and have little, if any, intrinsic value. We should try to stop shoehorning education into just another segment of our economy. It is not.

Most grades are calculated as a sum or average of some set of scores.  Two relevant questions to ask are:

1. What is the source of those sums or averages?
2. Is the interpretation of those averages statistically sound?

Let’s actually start with the second question first.  Statistics is a field of analysis which seeks to use the properties of numbers and mathematics to make justifiable and accurate descriptions and predictions about phenomena in the world.  We typically think of the Mediterranean as a sunny and warm place.  However if you were thinking of escaping a cold Virginia winter, you may be surprised to learn that the average January temperature in Malta is only 50-60°F.  Here we’ve used the arithmetic mean, i.e. the average, a statistical analytical procedure, to interpret weather phenomena.  Your likely conclusion in this case is that if you do plan to go to Malta in January, the interpretation of the statistic is pretty clear: you’d better take a jacket.

Let’s try the same interpretive exercise with grades.  Let’s say that a student, Otis, got an 87 on an assignment.  Here are some plausible interpretations.  In each, pay close attention to how you feel towards Otis.

• Otis, normally an A student, was feeling sick and didn’t perform so well
• Otis, normally a C student, really studied hard and outperformed his usual scores
• Since the class average was 96.42, Otis fell well below his peers’ performance
• Since the class average was 42.96, Otis did extremely well on this assignment
• Otis’ paper was on top of the stack when the teacher began grading so evaluated it more strictly than later papers
• Otis’ paper was on the bottom of the stack, and the teacher, being tired by this point, graded leniently
• The teacher had a mistake on the key used to score the assignment
• Otis has undiagnosed test anxiety disorder, which means he routinely scores below his potential
• This particular teacher really likes/dislikes Otis
• This is a particularly rigorous/unchallenging course, school, etc.
• etc., etc., etc.

I’m sure that many more different scenarios could be developed.  Regardless, based on the number alone, without understanding the context, it is nearly impossible to interpret.  “But wait!” you say, “Wouldn’t such difficulties in interpretation be alleviated if we had an average of all of Otis’ scores for a whole semester?”  Answer the question for yourself by imagining that instead of one assignment, Otis got an 87 for the semester, or a 2.96 GPA for his entire time in college.  Can you not come up with an equally large number of plausible interpretations of such scores?  The problem lies in a misapplication of statistical procedure.  Misapplication of statistics results in the inability to make a reliably meaningful interpretation.

What is different about the average temperature example and the average grade example is the source of the underlying data used to calculate the statistic.  Average temperature is based on quantitative data whereas grades are based on qualitative  data.  “But,” you ask,”isn’t an 87, or a 2.96, a number? Don’t numbers represent quantity by their very nature?” Nope. In the case of grades, an 87 is higher than an 86 and lower than an 88, but these are just indicators of relative quality.

I’ll illustrate this more clearly with another example.  Take the scale below that might be commonly be seen on a customer satisfaction survey in response to a question, such as, “How satisfied were you with your server, today?”

Now it’s clear that “satisfied” is a higher ranking than “dissatisfied,” and while it’s clearly possible (and actually common) to assign each of these rankings a number, say from 0 to 4, does a ranking of 4 (extremely satisfied) really mean that a customer is “twice as satisfied” as one that gave the server a 2 (neither satisfied nor dissatisfied).  Is a customer who gave the server a 3 three times as satisfied as a customer who gave the same server a 1?  I don’t think so.  And even if this were the case, how would we make a meaningful interpretation of these values?  Can you not come up with a nearly endless list of reasons as to why a particular server/customer interaction might have yielded those scores?  Getting back to grades, is a score of 80 twice as good as a 40?  Is 100 twice as good as 50? 60 twice as good as 30?  A 4.0 twice as good as 2.0? Did the person who scored the higher score learn twice as much? Not likely. And it’s because grades don’t represent quantity but quality.

We could dive more deeply into the source of the 87, but hopefully the point is made.  Consult a textbook on statistical analysis and it will tell you that the arithmetic mean is not applicable to analysis of qualitative data (except in very specific circumstances which are not really relevant and beyond the scope of this post).  Grades are clearly qualitative, not quantitative, and therefore should not be analyzed with averages lest they be susceptible to misinterpretation.

Incidentally, I find it painfully ironic that nearly all statistics class grades are determined using averages.  You should note that in ISAT, Dr. Radziwill does NOT do this.  She uses a points accumulation system, and in fact, the points accumulation system in this class is patterned after hers.

In another post I’ll explore a really fascinating 2000 paper by Vickers that shows that because of the inconsistencies in GPA calculations across different institutions, it is logically impossible to rank students using GPA.

What does this mean?

The bottom line is that nobody really knows, for sure, what any particular grade means. Because of the abuse of statistics grades have no reliably meaningful interpretation. And yet, grades and GPA are used to determine:

• If a student passes a course
• If someone should get into college or graduate school
• Who qualifies for scholarships
• Who can get a job interview
• How “effective” any number of pedagogical interventions are

In our hearts, we know that grades don’t really define us. We sense it every time we get feedback that is in conflict with our gut sense of who we are or what we know. Now you know one reason why.

“F This” by Luigi “Zinodaur” Ihnatiuc from Woot.com

The use of grades clearly violates the Ten Principles.  Grades are the currency of education, and as such, commodify learning and obstruct gifting, self-expression, self-reliance, and communal effort.  It is difficult to come up with a more powerful symbol of the ways in which our current model of education is broken, and yet, the suggestion that we abandon grades is treated at best as wishful thinking, and at worst a heresy deserving of hostility and persecution.  This series of posts will explore a number of problems with grades and provide references to the scientific literature that give these problems true gravity. I will also describe some alternatives to the use of grades–practical approaches that can be used even within the current establishment.

Why Grades Suck

• What do you mean? How Grades Abuse Statistics
• The Mother of All Token Economies: Why Grades ≠ Money
• Five Ways Grades Kill the Motivation to Learn
• Grades, the Creativity-Killer

Alternative Approaches to Using Grades

• Introducing Choose-Your-Own-Grade

If I were to paraphrase this as a conversation between a teacher and a student it would go something like this:

Teacher: What would like to study?
Student: Excuse me?
T: You said you wanted to study something.  What would you like to study?
S: I don’t know.
T: Alright.
S: Well, I don’t know.  What would you study?
T: What for?  What do you need to learn?
S: Umm… professional skills?
T: What kind of professional skills?  What do you want to do with your life?
S: Well… I don’t exactly know.
[ teacher stops the classroom ]
S: What’s going on?  Why are you stopping?
T: Look, they just hired me to teach the class.  I’m not here to tell you who you are?
S: But I didn’t ask you to tell me who I am?
T: So you say you want to study something, but you don’t know what that is.  I firmly believe that what you know and what you can do defines how you relate to others in society and therefore who you are. So you asking me what to study is basically you asking me to tell you who you are, and I don’t know who you are or who you want to be.
S: But every other teacher I’ve had before has told me exactly what I’m going to study.  I’ve never had to come up with that on my own.
T: Well I’m not going to do that for you, but if you’ll give me a sense of what your strengths are and what you enjoy, I think I can help you figure out how to spend your time studying something that will help you get where you want to go.

Industrial Education

Educational objectives emphasize and elevate particular bits of knowledge to the exclusion of others. The mechanism by which this happens is all but completely hidden from the people (students) who are being indoctrinated into the church of “this is important” and “this is not.”

Educational objectives are, by necessity, designed for the “average” or “standard” student who is expected to be in the class. The student is an abstraction. It is practically impossible for instructors to design instruction that is specifically tailored and deeply connected to the idiosyncrasies of each individual student.  As such, educational objectives represent a kind of industrial revolution factory approach to teaching and learning.

Deciding educational objectives for the students communicates to them that it is appropriate and necessary for other people to be deciding what is important for them to learn, and trains them not only to ignore their own intuitions on this point, but also to actually reject taking on the responsibility of thinking critically about what knowledge is important or not for them. Even worse, it delegitimizes their attempts to do so.

Educational objectives mislead students into an overly simplistic understanding of what constitutes “important” knowledge in any particular domain. If it’s on the syllabus, it must be important. If it’s not, it’s not. End of story.

Is it even possible to teach without objectives?

If you’re a teacher, at this point you may have a number of questions or objections in your mind right now:

• Without objectives, how am I going to organize my course?
• Without objectives, how are the students going to know what the course is about?
• My school/program/department requires me to have objectives. Are you saying I should just ignore them?

Surprisingly, given my critique of objectives above, I’m not entirely anti-objective. However, I like to think of them in the way that President Dwight D. Eisenhower did when he said:

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

In other words, I don’t think a professional educator should walk into a classroom without having given any thought whatsoever to how the class will spend its time. Mentorship and guidance are useful. Students are genuinely more efficient learners with someone to help direct their energy. That being said, it is important for a teacher not to be dogmatically committed to following a schedule designed to cover all of the objectives regardless of what is actually going on with the students in the classroom.

Personally, I am not qualified to teach about any and all subjects that students may want to learn. My expertise is limited to a small number of domains. As an instructor, it is entirely appropriate for me to develop a set of objectives that will give the class a general direction, and also inform the students about what subject areas in which I might be most suited to direct them. So, yes, I use objectives to organize my courses and to tell students generally what the course is about.

However, once the course has begun, it is important for me to communicate to students that the objectives on the syllabus are merely suggestions for how we might spend our time together. After all, I am there for the students, and not the other way around. If a student wants to come up with a different, personalized set of objectives for the course, I support that. If it turns out that this particular batch of students wants to move more slowly or more quickly through the material, I adjust.

I teach at the university level, so there is no Common Core, no Race to the Top, no set of administrators watching my every move with a magnifying glass. If I can produce a syllabus that has a relatively acceptable set of objectives on it, nobody really scrutinizes what goes on in my classroom to discover whether or not I’ve followed the syllabus to the letter. This is how I thread the needle of meeting the societal needs for objectives, while not cramming them down my students’ throats. I recognize that not everyone shares the same degree of flexibility that I do, but I have found in discussions with teachers at all levels that there is a lot more room to maneuver there than most realize.

So whose objective is it anyway?

For whom is the classroom designed? While I don’t have a problem with the idea that we, as a society, should give serious thought to what we teach in our schools, if it comes down to valuing educational objective more highly than students, I think we’ve gone too far. Bernard Bull reminds us that objective-based education is a relatively new, and more or less unproven technology:

In pre-objective schooling, students learned a great deal. In fact, I’m not aware of any evidence that they learned less in pre-objective schooling than in objective-driven schools of the past and present.

I think we’d all do well to take a look at the post-educational-objective approaches to curriculum and pedagogy design that he highlights.

A core belief of the Burning Mind Project is that every person has gifts. As educators it is our role to help people discover their gifts, support their efforts to hone those gifts, and then use whatever resources we have at our disposal to aid our students in sharing those gifts with the world–regardless of whether or not those gifts happen to fall within the narrow list of objectives we’ve put on our syllabi.

Billy Hunt’s Scream-a-Tron, which captures the look on your face when you hit a certain decibel level.

(I just posted this on my Facebook timeline, but have reposted it here to be able to collect thoughts and experiences from those of you who aren’t FB friends of mine. Thank you for your consideration!)

Dear friends and colleagues, especially Playa/Burning Man artists, musicians, performers, and creatives!! We’d like to enlist your help.

Morgan and I are advising a senior honors capstone project where we’re building an interactive zome (including a responsive sound and light show) to stimulate connections between people in our community. We’re reviewing the academic literature right now to get a sense of the difference between “participatory art” and “interactive art”, but figure that some of you who *do* this all the time might be able and willing to guide us in appropriate directions. Here are our questions: