Mention to any teacher that you have a big pile of tests to grade, and you will get a sympathetic “ugh” out of them, pretty much without exception. As a general rule, teachers hate to grade. Not me! And I think this difference stems from what grading means to me.

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Feedback, not scores

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When I grade a test, providing a score is the least of my concerns. To me, grading is about giving feedback. If you ever saw a test graded by me, it would be scribbled all over. Moreover, I expect, encourage, and insist on my students looking over my comments, making sense of them, and re-working through their mistakes with my feedback in mind. To me, this is the only way that grading makes sense, since the point of it should be to provide feedback to help the students do better.

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The way grading often works, sadly, is a far cry from this. Too often, students get a number grade and then the class moves on to the next topic, regardless of what their understanding of the tested concept is. If a student gets a grade that indicated their knowledge and understanding is incomplete (or even barely there!), how can we be OK with them simply moving on? It’s as if, when a baby was learning to walk, we gave them a grade of C when they managed just 3 steps and then moved on to them learning to use a spoon instead. Or even worse, if we account for the very real problem of grade inflation: maybe we give the baby an A, since the effort was there, pretend they can now walk perfectly, and move on to teaching them their first words. Humans don’t learn like that!

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The Process of Learning

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Learning is very much a process, and grading to provide a score doesn’t take this into account. Scores are a way to compare students to one another. That was always their function, and that is the only thing they are good for. I’m not arguing that such a comparison is negative or to be avoided (that’s a different matter and perhaps a topic for a different essay). Rather, I’m saying that providing a score has been conflated with the process of learning, of which it’s not really a part. When we wish to rank students, whatever the reason, then giving them a score on a test of their comprehension makes sense. But if we want to help students in their learning process, the score on a test provides nothing helpful (and possibly quite a few very unhelpful things).

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Does this mean students should never be tested on their knowledge? Not at all! The process of sitting down and taking stock of what you know and don’t know is absolutely essential to the learning process. Tests are good for that. But we learn by making mistakes, so punishing students for making them goes entirely against their learning process. Pointing out a mistake that the student might have missed is helpful – if it’s followed by encouragement and advice on how to do it better.

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Grade the Student, not the Test

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Moreover, a test can never be the only thing a teacher bases their evaluation of a student on. The learning process happens constantly and gradually, so the feedback given should also be so. If we give a student feedback (or a score) for a test they took on a single day after 3 weeks of learning a topic and say nothing about the entire 3 weeks during which they were learning, we are basically saying the focus should only be on the final result, and the process matters little or not at all. Which is exactly the opposite of what we should be saying! Going back to the example of a baby that’s learning to walk, that would be the equivalent of saying nothing at all when the baby learns to stand on their own, or when they take their first steps while holding on to us, or when they take their first couple of tentative steps, and only acknowledging their achievement when they can finally walk across the room without stumbling.

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The goal of a teacher should always be to make themselves unnecessary in the long run. We should be teaching our students to learn by themselves in such a way that makes the presence of a teacher superfluous. A big and very important part of this is teaching students how to recognize, address, and learn from their mistakes. A simple tally of the number of incorrect final answers doesn’t achieve that. Honest, helpful, and ongoing feedback is the way to create independent lifelong learners.