Barry Fishman details a need for new infrastructure around student evaluation on Teachers Going Gradeless blog
In a guest blog post on Teachers Going Gradeless, Barry Fishman, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Education, discusses the structural changes to the education system to truly support gradeless student evaluations. Fishman, who recently provided a new foreword to the 50th anniversary edition of Wad-Ja-Get: The Grading Game in American Education, suggests that reforming evaluations to more meaningfully reflect student learning will be a change of both "addition and subtraction," and that while individual efforts are valuable, more systemic change is needed to satisfy the needs of students, teachers, and administrators.
"Many of us on the ungrading journey engage in subtraction, by removing traditional letter or percentage-based grading from our classrooms," Fishman writes. "We also engage in addition, introducing new practices and routines centered around feedback and growth." But, he says, further and more substantive change is required to the infrastructure of secondary and higher education if gradeless systems are to flourish.
Fishman cites rigid systems including traditional report cards, Learning Management Systems (LMS), standardized testing, and other traditional systems as obstacles to meaningful gradeless evaluations. He notes that students themselves often want a quantifiable grade since they know (or believe) that this will affect how they are viewed for college admissions and job applications.
One emerging alternative to the traditional transcript, Fishman says, is the Mastery Transcript, which is now at the pilot stage and is already accepted at several postsecondary institutions including the University of Michigan.
"Ultimately, developing a new and better approach to learning requires building new infrastructure, so that students, parents, teachers, administrators, and policy makers can clearly see how approaches to learning that reject grading enable their full participation and success in society," Fishman says.
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