Why grades and scores are bad incentives

 

An edited letter to the New York Times in 2019. The paper had run a story about Alfie J Kohn’s campaign against standardised testing.

Alfie Kohn [https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/fighting-the-tests/] is right. "People respond to incentives" is true, but when the incentive is a letter or number in a little box on a report card, the incentive is unlikely to produce learners.

Anecdote: Early in my career, one of my students achieved 19/20 on a short-answer test. I saw this student in the hall, and explained the incorrect answer. The student's eyes glazed over, the first time I'd ever seen that cliche operate in real life. The student didn't care about knowing the right answer, they cared only about the score. 19/10 = 95%, that's A+, that's all that mattered. I found out later that too many of my "best" students had exactly the same attitude.

Tests and exams are at best diagnostic. For the student and teacher, they may tell how far the student has come since the last test, and may provide guidance for future learning. For other people, such as college admissions officers, they provide some data (mostly over-rated and misunderstood) about the odds that the student will continue learning.

You might as well grade students on their height. Tall ones worked hard to add an inch or two, the lazy ones just sat around and shrunk. Silly? Sure, but that's how people too often think about students. In a typical class, there's about a one year range in chronological age, and usually much more than that in psychological age, which includes cognition. We humans develop at different rates, and development is never uniform. To expect grades to show that some students are "better" than others is asinine.

The supporters of grading, significantly I think, are mostly academics, whose working life consists of grading students. It's difficult to accept that a tool you've been using all your working life is not fit for purpose.

Unfortunately, people treat grades as rankings. They look on them like scores in a game. Winners score high, losers score low. That is no way to incentivise learning.

The only real regret I have about my teaching career is that I didn’t oppose the misuse of tests and exams.