The End of Grading

How the irrational mathematics of measuring, ranking, and rating distort the value of stuff, work, people -- everything. From a report: More irrational even than pi, assessing people amounts to quantifying a relationship between unknown, usually unknowable things. Every measurement, the mathematician Paul Lockhart reminds us in his book Measurement, is a comparison: "We are comparing the thing we are measuring to the thing we are measuring it with." What thing do we use to measure undergraduates? What aspects can be compared? Quality or quantity? Originality or effort? Participation or progress? Apples and oranges at best. Closer to bananas and elephants. Even quantitative tests mark, at most, a comparison between what the test-maker thought the student should know and the effectiveness of instruction. Grades become the permanent records of these passing encounters. And how do we grade the grader? When a physicist friend found out that a first-year Harvard student he knew -- a math star in high school -- got an F in physics, he said: "Harvard should be ashamed of itself." A Harvard grad himself, he believed that schools fail students far more often than students fail schools. Some STEM profs, I'm told, tell the class at the outset that half of them will fail. I give that teacher an F. I'm not alone in my discomfort with the irrational business of ranking, rating, and grading. The deans of Yale's and Harvard's law schools recently removed themselves from the rankings of US News & World Report, followed by Harvard Medical School and scores of others. "Rankings cannot meaningfully reflect ... educational excellence," Harvard dean George O. Daley explained. Rankings lead schools to falsify data and make policies designed to raise rankings rather than "nobler objectives." The very thing that's been eating education is now devouring everything else. My doctor recently urged me to get an expensive diagnostic test because it "makes our numbers look good." Her nurse asked me to rank my pain on a totem pole of emojis. Then after the visit, to rate my experience. The numbers are all irrational. And rather like the never-ending digits of pi, there seems to be no end to them.

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