Dear Students, Grades are points on a rubric, nothing more

Dear Students,

As a professor who has assessed the academic performance of students for more than two decades, I want to help you have some perspective: grades reflect nothing more than points earned on a rubric.

Your capacity to earn those points at any given time and place is influenced by many factors, including the accessibility of the course and the school, and your access to social capital.

For those who have taken an introductory physics course, you may recall that energy is the capacity of an object to do work. Your grades reflect your capacity to earn points on rubrics – a.k.a. your energy.

I have entered grades for thousands of students over the years. I truly hope you all know, no matter what grades you earn, that you are worth so very much more than the number of points you’re able to score on rubrics from playing whatever games (or completing whatever tests and assessments) may be required of you in the courses you are taking.

Just as there are social determinants of health, there are determinants of educational outcomes, which are much more subjectively assigned than health outcomes to begin with and are thus more open to variation due to bias, inaccessible classrooms, and more (i.e. Chmielewski 2019; Karlson 2019; Mishra 2020).

There’s an additional consideration. When something affects everyone, and intersects with other categories, we can have ourselves a period effect. That’s a sociology word that describes the reality that nobody is doing great right now, because of the situations in the world. So. There’s also that (i.e. Mahmud et al 2023; Meinck et al 2022).

If you are struggling academically right now? That would make sense. Nothing is okay or stable, and accessibility is not assured in most spaces. Of course you’re struggling.

What if I’m FAILING classes?

I’m sorry because I know it’s hard. I also know it’s expensive and there might be additional outcomes or costs related to financial aid, athletics, graduation, and other contingencies. When any student fails a class, what it tells me as an experienced educator is that they couldn’t score enough points on the rubric at the time.

So many factors determine whether a student can score points on the rubric. There’s everything from sleep and nutrition to accessibility of the learning environment, labor and work demands, household stressors, family needs, neighborhood safety, food and illness concerns, political stress and safety, environmental fears, trauma, climate…

Maybe you chose to take care of someone you love, or to work more hours because the income was needed. Maybe you needed more rest. Maybe you have been away from classes a few years and you lost track of the schedule and fell behind. See also the period effect explained previously.

Maybe there’s bias involved. Maybe you were treated unfairly. Maybe your access needs were not met. You have rights. If you have the energy, I hope you can get the supports that you need in order to access the caring education you deserve.

Maybe you don’t even know why you failed the class because everything is overwhelming at this point. You might not need to know.

Please do know that failing a class is not creating a personal attribute. Grades will only ever represent the number of points a student was able to earn on a rubric at a given point in time, and the student’s ability to earn those points is influenced by MANY things.

Nobody knows what someone else is going through, and your transcript has no footnotes explaining what you’re going through. Don’t let a grade represent more than it should.

You are awesome. You deserve all the good things. Failing grades are not personal traits. I tell you this as a professor who once failed out of college even.

What if I’m doing GREAT?

I don’t write this article to diminish any pride you might feel for accomplishing difficult things. Please hold onto all of that!

If you are neurodivergent or otherwise disadvantaged, if you had to swim upstream and do most things on hard mode and still managed to earn good grades? Kudos! You figured out how to access other needed resources that supported your capacity to earn the points even while there were barriers working against you. That’s an accomplishment!

Grades still don’t reflect intelligence, but winning a game that is not designed for your thriving is kinda cool! I celebrate this as a part of my own history.

My Standpoint on this Topic

Grades do not reflect intelligence. I confidently stand behind this. And I say it as an intelligent, autistic, multiply-disabled educator with a ton of degrees and good grades and academic awards behind me along with a ton of struggle, and initially having dropped out of college altogether.

I’m the first in my family to have earned a 4-year college degree. I dealt with being homeless, surviving a violent childhood, poverty, and anti-queer oppression. I’m ADHD and Autistic, and I had no accommodations through my bachelor’s degree and my first Master’s degree and graduate certificate. I took a total of three pages of notes through all of that.

My second Master’s degree program was an MDiv at seminary and the accommodations available were more funny than helpful. For example the education professor, when I said that I had trouble reading, would only respond by suggesting more books for me to read. This was hilarious to me but not helpful.

What I did have was a group of friends who explained things to me differently, and who would recap or summarize what I needed in order to be un-stuck and to write my papers. And then I managed to graduate with the only 4.0 gpa in my first master’s program, and with the highest gpa in my second master’s program, and additional academic awards with each, before today’s grade inflation issues had become so prevalent.

I don’t know how or why I did all that. I never even checked out a book from either library or did the things they told me to do, but with the simplified explanations of some friends, I could sit back and write the papers just fine.

Am I “proud of all the awards and good grades” I received? No, because they do not reflect meaningful things to me. They are scores in a game, one in which I was lucky enough to win some rounds. More often than not, grades reflect access to social capital. When I think back on it all, for me I feel grateful for the friends who helped me with notes and sorting my ideas.

Today I’m on track to be the oldest person to ever earn a PhD in Sociology from the University of Minnesota (we think). While grades aren’t meaningful in such a program, getting through some of the other hoops has been tricky for me. This article is on grades though, and only one professor didn’t get me so my final gpa for coursework in this PhD program is 3.956.

 

What are grades?

“Will this be on the test?”

Every time that question is asked, a young, motivated teacher somewhere cries a little, as they realize that the one asking isn’t trying to learn but to earn the highest grade. These are different goals. Earning high grades is incentivized. Learning isn’t. Nobody goes into education knowing that.

Everyone has earned a good grade in a class in which they didn’t learn anything other than how to play the game necessary to earn the A in that class. Grades are not a reflection of learning, intelligence, or knowledge.

Grades are a cog in an extrinsic motivation machine designed not to get students to learn, but to strive for an A. Students tend to view academics not as a chance to learn but as a job, and the work tasks they must perform are outlined on the syllabus. Instead of a paycheck, they’ll be compensated for their labors with grades (i.e. Schneider and Hutt 2023).

This is why it hurts when effort has been high and the resulting grades are low, because grades are viewed as the paycheck for the work rather than what they are (points earned on a rubric).

Grades can create such emotional reactions along the way. And I know they matter a whole lot to you right now. You put in so much labor and passion, hope and effort, all to score points on a rubric because, presumably, these grades you are earning are towards a degree that will lead to a future that you desire. I wish you all the good things as you journey towards that future.

Grade inflation is also a real thing (i.e. Park and Cho 2023; Sanchez and Moore 2022), a trend that has been documented over the past twenty years. And that has led to more competitiveness as students still seek to differentiate themselves within an increasingly similar pool.

This leads to more grade grubbing and academic dishonesty as well, since the stakes seem to be ever higher for the goal of getting the highest grades. And generative AI is messing with everybody full stop, to the extent that I think some students are not even sure anymore what it means to learn versus what it means to provide “the right answer” heedless of how it was obtained, as if the internet search for that answer was the assignment.

Recap for the ADHDers

I encourage you to view the bigger picture no matter whether your grades are currently making you happy or sad, because grades are only after all a function of the number of points you were able to earn on a rubric. And you are worth so much more than 100% of those points.

Sincerely,
Professor Erika Sanborne

– autistic, ADHD, disabled, queer, GenX, first gen, former college dropout, previous high school math teacher, long-time respected college psychology faculty

Want to discuss this topic?

*There is this post on bluesky and this thread on facebook*

 

References

Chmielewski, Anna K. 2019. The Global Increase in the Socioeconomic Achievement Gap, 1964 to 2015. American Sociological Review, 84(3), 517-544. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419847165

Karlson, Kristian Bernt. 2019. Expectation Formation for All? Group Differences in Student Response to Signals about Academic Performance, The Sociological Quarterly, 60:4, 716-737. https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2019.1580549.

Mahmud, Sultan, Mohsin, Md, Dewan, Md. Nayem, and Abdul Muyeed. 2023. The Global Prevalence of Depression, Anxiety, Stress, and Insomnia Among General Population During COVID-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Trends in Psychology, 31, 143–170. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-021-00116-9.

Meinck, Sabine, Julian Fraillon, and Rolf Strietholt. 2022. The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Education: International Evidence from the Responses to Educational Disruption Survey (REDS). UNESCO. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED618542.pdf

Mishra, Shweta. 2020. Social Networks, Social Capital, Social Support and Academic Success in Higher Education: A Systematic Review With a Special Focus on ‘underrepresented’ Students, Educational Research Review, 29:100307. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2019.100307

Park, Byungjin, and Joonmo Cho. 2023. How does grade inflation affect student evaluation of teaching?, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 48:5, 723-735. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2022.2126429

Sanchez, Edgar I., and Raeal Moore. 2022. Grade Inflation Continues to Grow in the Past Decade. Research Report.” ACT Research. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED621326.pdf

Schneider, Jack, and Ethan L. Hutt. 2023. Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To). Harvard University Press. https://amzn.to/3sZ4L4n #ad