Guilt-Driven Grading Policies May Ease Our Guilt — But Are They Better for Students?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder introduces the concept of 'guilt-driven policies' in grading — changes that make educators feel better but don't actually improve student learning.
Key Takeaways
- GDP: Guilt-Driven Policies - These are policy changes that alleviate adult discomfort rather than improving student outcomes
- Feeling good isn't the same as doing good - Policies should be evaluated on their impact on students, not on how they make educators feel
- Ask the right question - Instead of 'does this ease our guilt?', ask 'does this lead to more learning?'
Transcript
What is a GDP, a guilt-driven policy?
Let me give an example, because I introduced this idea in my last video, but I want to be really specific about what I mean by a guilt-driven policy that alleviates our guilt as educators that we can't fix everything for our students, but actually makes things worse for them.
When it comes to grading, there's a lot of opposition now to the idea of grades.
There's a lot of belief emerging that grades harm students.
And I think we have to recognize the job that grades do, right?
to get kids going in the direction of things that will serve them well in life, right?
Like working hard, meeting deadlines, learning things.
You know, the whole process of going through school is designed to prepare students for life and not like school is a job.
I don't mean it that way.
But if you develop good habits in school, it's likely that those habits will transfer.
The thing is we know many of our students don't develop good habits in school.
Many of our students don't get good grades.
Many of our students don't learn what we want them to learn.
They don't pass standardized tests.
And we think, well, what if we took away like the punishment aspect of grades?
What if we said, well, the grades aren't gonna really like count against you.
We're just gonna have like pass or fail and basically everybody passes.
Well, I think we have to ask ourselves, again, what job those grades were doing not only for the students who get good grades, but for the students who are not getting good grades.
We want students to have opportunity.
We want students to benefit from their education.
And if we think of grades as a punishment that like you did bad, so we're gonna give you a bad grade as a punishment, then like, yeah, we should probably not do that.
That doesn't feel good.
But if we go farther and make the mistake of thinking that it is actually, you know, the feedback to students that is harming them, like we want grades to be feedback on how well a student is working, how hard they're trying, how much they're learning.
You know, there's this kind of collective measure that's represented in grades.
that I think is better than the very narrow measure that we get from standardized tests, right?
Like it is demoralizing to take a test and do badly on it, right?
Like if you take the SAT and you bomb, well, that's probably not super encouraging in your further endeavors.
But with grades, we have an opportunity to positively motivate students, to help them understand if I work hard, good things will come from that.
And that might not get me into medical school.
Like if I'm kind of a D student, I'm probably not gonna get some high paying career out of this, but I can at least see the connection between hard work and learning and good things and if we eliminate that if we say grades don't matter grades are bad for you any kind of negative information any kind of negative feeling is bad for you what's going to happen for those kids then like what's the plan there I think the idea is that like maybe the student's self-esteem will be higher because we didn't give them any kind of negative information about themselves that would cause them to feel bad But I think what's really happening is we're trying to not make ourselves feel bad.
I think it's us.
It's our guilt.
We are the ones that feel bad.
And these guilt-driven policies are not actually better for students.
And I have yet to see a really good explanation for any of these policies that explain how it is supposed to be better for the student.
Like, if you could...
have your students live in an imaginary world that you could just invent out of your head for them to live in despite kind of not having what it takes to succeed very well in the world that we actually live in okay great that's another story but all of our students have to grow up and live in this actual world and we don't have the ability to make them all super successful like we just don't we want to do everything we can and for the students who we know are going to struggle like we would love to alleviate that struggle we feel guilty that we can't But I'm not convinced that getting rid of grading or giving everybody good grades, no matter how they apply themselves, I'm not convinced that that makes things better.
Let me know what you think.