Marks Without Learning

Helping teach an engineering design class, I was struck by how our addiction to grading interferes with the learning process.

Student project teams were delivering the final oral presentations of their designs (with topics ranging from golf-ball detectors, to heated boots, to pedestrian overpasses), with instructors evaluating them for speaking style and presentation quality. The whole class of eighty students would also watch each presentation, fire a few questions during the Q + A session afterwards, and then grade the presenting group with an automated voting system. Because all of the groups were watching, the groups were not given tips, pointers, or feedback immediately after their presentations; it wouldn't be fair if later groups got to adjust their presentations based on advice to earlier groups.

So, the students would do their presentations, hand in their class work, and then in a month or so, they'd get their final mark, telling them how they did in the class.

If our focus was truly on learning rather than marking, we would make sure each student knew what they did well and what they did poorly, with immediate feedback, coaching and discussion about how to improve. They might get another chance to try parts again, with critiquing and suggestions for further development. In a class where the focus were learning rather than marks, the whole class could progressively improve by engaging in the discussion about each presentation.

So, we have a lot of systems in place to rank people, give them a grade, give them a mark. But we need to clearly understand that this focus on marks doesn't contribute to learning, to improving. We can have learning without marks; let's just make sure that we don't have marks without learning.