Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today on episode number 533 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, more on the problems with grades with Josh Eyler. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:20]:

Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. I am thrilled today to be welcoming back to the show Josh Eyler. He’s the director of the Center For Excellence in Teaching and Learning and director of the Think Forward Quality Enhancement Plan at the University of Mississippi, where he’s also clinical assistant professor of teacher education. He previously worked on teaching and learning initiatives at Columbus State University, George Mason University, and Rice University. Josh is the author of the book How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching, which book authority named one of the 100 best education books of all time. It was also named a book of the year in the Chicago tribune.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:36]:

His latest book, Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students and What We Can Do About It, is about one of the most urgent issues in education today, grading and alternative assessment. Josh Eyler, welcome back and back and back and back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Josh Eyler [00:01:55]:

Thank you so much, Bonne. It is always so fun to be here and talking to you.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:00]:

I have so many fun memories with you. In this this last summer, in June, I celebrated 10 years of having aired an episode every single week. And so I’ve been doing a lot of reflection about that, those early days, and you were early days teaching in higher ed. And I we’ve we’ve laughed together. We I have some you’ve challenged me in such important ways, both in public and also just interpersonally. You’ve I’ve been able to ask you for advice over all these years. I’m just so grateful for your contributions to me as a person and to this field, to this work, to our our work in solidarity.

Josh Eyler [00:02:37]:

Well, thank you so much. That that really means a lot to me, and congratulations on a tremendous milestone. I think that this podcast has done an incredible service for higher ed and for teaching and learning. So many congrats to you, Bonni.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:50]:

It’s been really really fun to do it and to have generous people like you to be throughout the woven throughout the fabric of the of all these episodes. So besides your name, which of course show up in the book, there are 2 other names that I want listeners to be familiar with with as we talk today, Kariann and Lucy. Could you introduce us to these 2 individuals and how they relate to grades in your life?

Josh Eyler [00:03:16]:

Absolutely. It’s one of the easiest and and yet a a challenging question too. I rarely get questions that that on podcast that kinda tap into my emotions. And so as I as I thought about, or as I was thinking about how to introduce them, I was also just reflecting on just how how much meaning they have brought to my my life. So my wife, Kariann Fuqua, is an amazing teacher in her own right. She teaches in the art department here at the University of Mississippi. She is a brilliant artist. She’s a master gardener, and she has just enriched my life tremendously.

Josh Eyler [00:03:54]:

As I say in the acknowledgements that just simply due, due to the privilege of getting to share this journey with her, I’ve learned so much about myself, and it’s, been truly meaningful in my life. So we, as you might expect, as 2 teachers talk a lot about teaching and academics and grades come up often. We have talked about every word in this book, I think, and share different approaches and philosophies about grading. And so it’s certainly been a part of a part of our work together as educators, but we also have an amazing daughter named Lucy, and she she is now 12 and about to go into 7th grade. And so part of what we talk about when we talk about education and grades now is how it affects her and her journey as a student, as a person. And so what I have found in addition to just the joy of being a dad is that also being a dad who is an educator takes things from the academic and intellectual. And so the the kinds of debates we have about teaching in our intellectual communities, it takes those and brings them immediately to the surface and to the the real world and to the real consequences for students and families. And so it has been, both interesting and kind of discombobulating to be a writer about education and the dad of a student going through our educational systems.

Josh Eyler [00:05:30]:

And so I have seen Lucy both challenged and successful in a variety of these educational circumstances that we think about and talk about a lot, and grades has certainly been a big part of that. When Lucy began her educational journey, we lived in Houston, Texas when I worked at Rice. And so for kindergarten and 1st grade, she was in Houston, and it it was a traditionally graded system. And so when she entered 1st grade, and I talked a little bit about this in the introduction, suddenly, a lot of conversations were about what does an a mean, why didn’t I get a 100, why did the what does an 86 mean, all the sorts of things that you don’t want a 6 year old to be thinking about when they’re in the classroom. What your hope is is that that’s a time when curiosity and a love of learning is really being fostered. So it that brought things in the issue of grades kind of into my into my world as a parent in a way that had not been true of my work in education writ large. We now live in Oxford, Mississippi, which on the surface has a standards based grading system. But in reality, everything gets a grade.

Josh Eyler [00:06:46]:

It’s just a a 4, 3, 2, or a 1. In some grades, now that she’s in middle school, it’ll be an actual percentage that’ll then be translated into a kind of standards based system. It would take us 19 hours to talk about the ins and outs of that system. But needless to say, it is really a traditional grading system in sheep’s clothing, and the students feel every bit of of the same kind of pressure as they do in an a through f kind of culture. So we’ve talked a lot about how to navigate that as well. So, really, grades are both my intellectual work and also work that I’m navigating in a very personal way personal way with my family as well. And so it’s it it covers a whole whole spectrum of my experience with the educational world. The other thing that oozed out of the pages for

Bonni Stachowiak [00:07:33]:

me as it relates to Lucy is, I mean, I’ve known you now for almost a decade, and I’ve known of her. We’ve never met, but I’ve known of her now for that length of time. And then to just discern the ways in which she’s a she’s a different person in terms of the stories that you may decide to share. She’s a participant. It was very evident to me that there were conversations happening before those words ever hit the page about her own sense of what she may want to share with the world through your writing. And I just felt that integrity with you as a parent and and and really your partnership that you described so beautifully, both in the dedication of the book and also in the words you just shared about Kariann. And I just think that’s when when we are reckoning with the fact that we love these individuals, and they’re going out into a world in which there are systems and structures that do not align with our values, you know, what to do about that, and also recognizing they the goal here is to raise fully independent such that they might one day be interdependent, you know, with with lives of their own and choices of their own. I mean, that’s the goal there.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:08:53]:

And so it’s a it’s a really tricky thing. I I don’t wanna be too time specific here in terms of my my short story, but just transporting my children this morning. And one of them really, really didn’t want to go to what they had on their plates. And I’ve my heart went out to them. And yet I just know that yes, I I I wouldn’t wanna go either. You know? It’s like I have was having one of those moments. I’m like, I totally get why you don’t wanna go. I wouldn’t wanna go either.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:09:18]:

And yet, just knowing that sometimes what is best is to help them face those things and realize that that they already even at these young ages, our kids are similar in in age, are already much more equipped than I think sometimes people realize, and we might extrapolate that even to higher education. So many times people kinda get this more paternalistic, legalistic sort of view that that might be best. And I’m thinking, oh my gosh. These are young adults that many of us are are educating and far more equipped and maybe need some good healthy, to quote Sara Rose Cavanaugh, you know, compassionate challenge might be more helpful in terms of than than some of the ways we try to have grades solve problems for us in in sort of misguided ways. But I I guess I’m getting ahead of myself. So I do have, one more question as it relates to Kariann and also if you wanna bring Lucy back in too. But can you tell us about a specific time when you can recall just having those visceral feelings about how grades might impact Lucy and her learnings or something that a memory that just stands out where you go, where it just kinda stung, maybe a realization in a new way?

Josh Eyler [00:10:31]:

Right. Yes. Well, I think so some of what I, you know, I think we’re about to talk about is the whole messy entanglement of grades and behavior and motivation and compliance and and all that. And so I know that there have been several times even within the last year where and I know that this is not a unique circumstance to our family, but that we have just Lucy has had moments where graves were used as rewards for either either immediate or or used to used to to qualify for particular rewards in school. That’s a better that’s a better way to say it. Sometimes immediate. So performance on a particular worksheet or assessment in the class would get them candy. Sometimes, overall performance at a certain level would get some kids within the class a special ice cream treat or pizza treat or something like that, leaving the kids who did not get the qualifying scores without those things.

Josh Eyler [00:11:36]:

And sometimes she was the beneficiary, sometimes not. And really seeing her wrestle through both sides of that, like, why why does this make any sense that I am getting pizza because I got some artificial score? And why and why do I not get the reward, whatever it is? Because I because I didn’t. Really trying to help her understand that or just work through that psychologically, both the emotion of being in or left out. And also, how on earth does this have anything to do with what you are learning in a class? I think it those are the moments most recently where all of this has really, I think, come to a head for the ways we think about grades kinda, again, both in a scholarly way, but then in a real very human way as well.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:12:25]:

My husband has had on his podcast, Coaching for Leaders, the author of one of the co authors of No Drama Discipline, the whole way the whole brain way to calm the chaos and nurture your child’s developing minds and your story there. That book, by the way, if if anyone is a parent and interested in in similar themes that Josh was just talking about, having the consequences of the choices that we make at lots of different ages in our lives make a little bit more sense, It it can be really I I I just I guess, as we enter into more of this conversation, I wanna make sure I’m rooting myself in the humility that we can talk about these things and point at other systems that we wanna criticize and we absolutely should, and that’s a lot of why we’re here today. But at the same time, it is so easy to fall into these traps in our teaching or in our parenting, in our leadership approaches. I mean, so many ways where just because that’s what that’s kind of the water that we’re swimming in. We’re it kinda sometimes makes sense that pizza might you know, we talk a lot in our family about really trying to break some of the bad modeling that both my husband and I got growing up around food, you know, food as a reward. That’s something that, my gosh, or even the idea when I grew up was growing up, you clean your plate and they’re starving children out there. I mean, and to try to eradicate ourselves of that, and we can and should look at external systems while also looking inside ourselves and going, oh, it is so hard to do this. It is so hard, and that’s why I’m grateful, by the way, for for people listening.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:14:03]:

That is one of the reasons I’ve decided to do I don’t know if I’ve ever in 10 years done a 2 parter. I might have, but if if I have, it’s been a very long time. This is just such an important topic, and I wanted us to be able to extend it well beyond the length of a of a typical episode. And and so I guess we should start before we get into motivation because I want us to spend some time on motivation. But could you help us back up just a little bit? What’s a grade?

Josh Eyler [00:14:30]:

Yeah. Definitely. And I I just wanted to say that to your the point you were just making that we’ve had lots of conversations now with the school about using food as rewards for these things, especially in an area where some of the the a significant percentage of the students in Lucy’s school are food insecure. And so it just it just elevates the problems that are inherent to grades. And to also echo the fact that all of this is really complex and tough. And so things that we can sometimes say in an intellectual or scholarly way are are more difficult in an interpersonal way. And so I wrote this book for a very, Failing Our Future for a a broad audience, acknowledging, especially in the chapters for parents, those very traps that you’re talking about. That it’s one the conflict between what we what we think and what we value and what we want for our kids and what the world and our school systems say are important can sometimes be almost irreconcilable.

Josh Eyler [00:15:27]:

And and part of, I think, addressing the issues with grades means dealing with that reality. And so, what is a grade? I think a lot of people have a definite definitions here. But I think very simply, a grade is some kind of mark, a letter, a percentage, a number, even a smiley face or a check mark that is meant to convey information to a student about his, her, or their work, and to parents about how their students in k twelve are doing, and to administrators and school systems and universities and all sorts of other outside entities who are looking at transcripts. So they are both supposed to be a reflection of performance and also a communication device to lots of different audiences. But the key for, for, I think, the conversation that we’re going to have today and for many larger issues with grades is the difference between intent and effect. It may be that we intend very genuinely to use a grade to communicate specific information about performance or to communicate with external audiences. But the effect on an individual human being who is receiving that grade is varied, widely varied, and covers a whole spectrum of potential responses. Right? And so it’s the effect that is most important about the grade, not necessarily the intent of giving it in the 1st place.

Josh Eyler [00:17:05]:

And that that is where all of the challenge, all of the problem, all the difficulty arises.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:17:13]:

And one other area that I can use help, and I suspect others can use help as well, helping us distinguish the difference between an evaluation and an assessment.

Josh Eyler [00:17:24]:

Right. Yes. So I think sometimes when we talk about all these issues, we use those two terms as synonyms. But when you start to dig around a little bit in the literature, you see and and I think philosophically in practice as well, you see a difference. And evaluation carries a a connotation of judgment. I am evaluating your performance. It is an 86. It is a c.

Josh Eyler [00:17:49]:

It is not ready for prime time. And so students take the the they receive that. They the effect of that is as a judgment on their performance. And, also, we also have research to show, not just on their performance, but many people see their grades as a judgment on who they are as individuals and their possibilities for achieving in particular disciplines. So evaluation carries a tone of judgment. Assessment carries a tone or or connotes coaching and feedback. Right? If we are assessing something, we our intent again, it goes back to intent and effect. But the intent is to coach people along, to give them guidance, to, to help them see what their not next steps may be, areas they need to maybe study a little bit more.

Josh Eyler [00:18:43]:

And the skeptics out there say that’s exactly what grades are supposed to do. But the problem is that is not what grades actually do. They can say it all they want that grades, give are are intended for coaching, but that is not how students receive grades and the effective grades on students because of how much weight grades carry as currency in our educational systems.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:19:08]:

And now you’re reminding me of another book. I promise I’m not gonna sit here and just prove that I’ve that I read books sometimes, but I reread one of my favorite books from, my my masters in in higher education was the book called difficult conversations, and they just redid redid it. I mean, that was after some number of decades that, they had a second edition, or I might not have my editions right here, but a new version. And they talk about separating the intent from the impact. So even when we’re just communicating with people, just trying to be human beings, being good to one another and clear and kind to one another, it doesn’t help if you confront me, Josh, and say, you know, I can’t believe that you said that. That really, you know, I felt this way when this happened, and I go, well, that’s not what I meant. Well, that doesn’t really matter if the impact on me was different than what your intent was. They they talk about in difficult conversations, and that’s what I’m hearing you say about the really confronting in ourselves and some of the ways in which we have instilled this inside ourselves with perhaps not always recognizing the weaknesses of our approaches, that we also need to separate our intent from the impact and really allow you to help us look at the research.

Josh Eyler [00:20:21]:

Exactly. And so if you take that dynamic that you just described, Bonni, and you scale it into a system, and then you use that system to open or close doors to possible futures for students, you have just multiplied all of the the problems that are inherent in that, that simple communication breakdown of intent and effect. So it really spirals out of control very quickly.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:20:47]:

And this is the point in the show where I prove that I don’t read all the books because I don’t recall ever reading the scarlet letter. If I did, it didn’t certainly didn’t stick with me. I certainly have heard it referenced a lot. I sort of thought I got it, but I so appreciated your your refresher for me. So in case there are others like me, could you give us a little bit of the plot of the scarlet letter? But, specifically, how do you argue we might extend that metaphor of Hawthorne’s scarlet letter in having to do with grades?

Josh Eyler [00:21:17]:

Yes. Absolutely. So this is kind of an an interesting and twisty story, but I was writing the the preface, and the the image of the scarlet letter occurred to me. And I wrote it out, and I I sat there for a minute and said, that’s an interesting metaphor. So I I typed a little bit more, and it it sort of blossomed and grew in my mind as a really useful literary metaphor for understanding the the impact of grades. And so it it quickly became it moved from a paragraph to the title of the preface. And at one point, it was the title of the book, but, Amazon’s algorithms were having none of that, Bonni. There so, we changed the title.

Josh Eyler [00:22:00]:

I love the title of the book now, failing our future, but it was once the title. That’s how important and useful, I think scarlet letter is for understanding the role of great. So a a brief overview of the novel, which I read in in high school and college, and I don’t remember liking it in high school, but appreciating it in college by Nathaniel Hawthorne written in the 1800. It’s about the Salem. It’s about Puritan, New England. And what we see is Hester Prynne, who at the beginning of the novel is being pilloried by her by the local community forced to wear a red a on her on her garment, on her chest as proof that she was, convicted, found guilty of adultery. The story plays out that her her husband, who she thought was dead, comes back. He’s a very cruel man.

Josh Eyler [00:22:54]:

The man with whom she she committed adultery supposedly, right, was was a local preacher who dies. And when he dies, he he reveals an a carved into his chest. It’s all very horrible and and twisted and turned. But the the idea that she as a woman would be publicly chastised and forever marked by this letter a, I think, is really important for us to think about the ways grades, marks are used to marginalize students, to mark them out for qualities that have nothing to do really with who they are as human beings. Right? And so let’s think about let’s think about a scarlet letter as being both kind of a universal symbol of shame and and and societies or groups, a community’s judgment of guilt or a lack of worth. Right? Regardless of how regardless of who Hester Prynne is in that book, society sees her in a certain way, and grades in the educational community operate very similarly. So in a universal sense, Scarlet Letters works as a kind of metaphor for thinking about how grades marginalized and marginalized students convince them, send them messages about their worth academically, personally, about their their futures, their lives, all kinds of messages that are communicated from external audiences to that student through grades. I think more specifically, the novel has a lot to say about gender, about sexuality, lots of different ways that people are marginalized.

Josh Eyler [00:24:40]:

And when you start to look into the research on grades and inequities, you also see that grades grades further marginalize students from minoritized groups more frequently than they do, you know, white affluent students. And so grades further further inequities that are already baked into our systems of education in America. And so in that way, they also function like the scarlet letter in that it was used to marginalize Hester Prynne, and grades are used to further and deepen inequities for students who are already trying to navigate those inequities in our in our educational system.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:25:24]:

Alright. So motivation.

Josh Eyler [00:25:26]:

Sure.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:25:26]:

We we talk a lot about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. We’ve had lots of conversations about that. I’ll just quickly note that one thing I’ve been intrigued by is James Lang between his two editions of small teaching. In the in the second editions, he talks about his own changing views on motivation to to he doesn’t express it as thinking in a less dichotomous way. I’m gonna ask you, Josh, if you think we might think about it, that as a spoiler for you. But what he says is he changed his mind because he seemed to really stress in the first edition according to his own words, only intrinsic versus wanting to come to the reality that that there are ways in which extrinsic motivators can be helpful to us across a number of contexts in our lives. He doesn’t you know, he’s not only saying within teaching and learning. But I’m curious now for you as you as you are thinking through all the research that you’ve done on motivation, would you say we need to start thinking in less dichotomous ways? Because I guess when we sort it out, it feels like we list we miss some of the nuance to me, I guess.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:34]:

I’d like to your reaction to that to that thought.

Josh Eyler [00:26:37]:

Right. Yes. So there’s there’s so much in that question. I think,

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:41]:

I Seven episodes later.

Josh Eyler [00:26:45]:

James and I have had friendly disagreements about about this very point. But so, I think it’s important for those who are listening to know that of all the research on grades, the most fully developed research program out there is the connection between or the the interactions between grading and motivation. So there’s so much work out there, but the best I can describe all of that work is that it’s kind of a big, messy, tangled up knots. Right? There’s nothing or there’s very little that we can say absolutely clearly about grades and motivation. Right? Except that a dichotomy between just intrinsic and extrinsic is too simplistic to really get, a clearer sense of what is going on. So what do we know? We know that grades are extrinsic motivators. Right? That is one thing we know. The Alfie Kohn in Punished by Rewards a long time ago made made that very clear as have many other researchers since then.

Josh Eyler [00:27:45]:

Grades are extrinsic, meaning they do not come from within. They are given from outside as a as a a marker of performance. Right? So we know that. We also know that extrinsic motivators can can work for some purposes. Usually, to get people to comply to rules or to get them to do things that they’d rather not want to do. So, like, all extrinsic rewards in behavioristic systems, they can get people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. If, on the other hand, what you want is learning, meaningful engagement with activities and assignments and and the learning environment. What you need is intrinsic motivation.

Josh Eyler [00:28:34]:

You need to want to do it because it is something meaningful to you that you find will be meaningful to your own life or your future career, something like that. So if that’s what we want, we need to create environments that will cultivate intrinsic motivation. So the way I like to think about how grades kind of play into all this is a simple image that grades, because because they work as extrinsic motivators, which are tied to compliance, grades can get people into learning environments. They can make them people do the things that are that we are requiring them to do. Come to class, participate, turn things in on time. What they can never do is ensure that just because the student is in a learning environment, that that means that that student will, by necessity, learn because they are there. Right? Grades can never ensure that because that is what we need intrinsic motivation for, to learn once we are complying, once we are in the system. So the various interactions of extrinsic and intrinsic, I think, are really important here to to think about.

Josh Eyler [00:29:53]:

It is true in some cases that extrinsic motivators can get students into a classroom, and those some students may, once there, become really interested in something, a particular topic that the teacher is talking about or a line of questioning or a particular activity, and it will, it will, begin to although it began as extrinsic motivate motivation, it will transfer into a kind of intrinsic motivation. So it’s pretty complicated. What a lot of what I talk about in the book is related to self determination theory, a really, I think, useful and meaningful theory of motivation that goes beyond the binary of extrinsic and intrinsic and sees motivation as more complex and more like an umbrella that there are different kinds of intrinsic motivators, some of which can transform over time into intrinsic motivation. So that is all in the water. And that is why I really I I’m often careful when I talk about this because I know you have psychologists listening to this, first of all. But also because we want if we want to engage this this conversation about grades successfully in order to advance change, we have to be really honest and transparent about the research. In this particular case, a a simple binary does not serve us well because motivation is so complex. The same person could be motivated by different things in the same environment within, you know, a a span a short span of a number of minutes.

Josh Eyler [00:31:33]:

Right? And so we can’t just say extrinsic versus intrinsic. Beyond that, what we do know is that in situations where grades are given, students tend to be more fearful of making mistakes. They produce more behaviors of trying to get the grade rather than learning. There are classic studies from the 80s on this. More recently, Alison Koenka and her lab have really furthered our understanding of what happens when students get grades. So what we know from all that work is that the students who not only perform the best over time in these studies, not only do they perform the best over time, but they show continued motivation to learn in an intrinsic kind of way are those students who get feedback only, not grades. And in one study by Koenka and her lab, they had students who got only grades, students who got nothing, students who got grades and feedback, and students who only got feedback. And it was it were the it was the feedback conditions where you saw more learning take place and more motivation for learning.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:32:42]:

Well, this is going to be in just a few minutes. Josh and I are going to get to the recommendations segment of today’s show, but I I really I wanna give listeners one reminder, and then I wanna bring up one topic that’s a super softball one, Josh, I say very sarcastically.

Josh Eyler [00:32:59]:

Oh, good. This is a big

Bonni Stachowiak [00:33:01]:

big thing I want us to talk about before we go to the recommendations, but I I do wanna remind listeners that this is going to be a 2 part episode. You don’t necessarily have to have listened to this one before the next one, but we’re focusing a lot on the problems. And if that’s kind of hard and it feels like some things have gotten dislodged, that’s good. That’s what I’m hoping for. Because in order to create own personal and then systemic change, it starts with creating that sense of urgency and and dislodging some things. So please know that the next conversation next week will be okay. So now what do we do about this? You’ve really depressed us here and angered us, and and maybe, you know, people might be very well disagreeing, and and and this could be confronting some real real points in which, you know, so what do we do? So if you’re having that feeling, that’s next episode. Can’t wait to have you back.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:33:50]:

But but before we leave, I I do just wanna I I wanna talk about, on the more systemic level, another area of huge disconnect, and that has to do with grade inflation. And for the sake of time, I’m just going to share some of the I wanna be fair to those who feel so strongly. The grade inflation is a real concern. And in the past, when I brought this up, I have been rather cavalier about it. I I mentioned to you on social media, Josh, that in the interview with David Clark, I really appreciate it because I was just like, that’s not a thing. And then I moved her down. He goes, like, he pushed back in a really good way. So I’m just gonna, for those of you who are very concerned about grade inflation, I’m going to attempt to make some of your arguments for you and then invite Josh to respond to that.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:34]:

So those of you who really are concerned about grade inflation, let me share with you what I’m hearing, some of what you’re concerned about. So you’re concerned about wanting to have there really be a a standard of of academics, and you don’t wanna see those things be eroded in some way. You don’t want to misrepresent student abilities. You don’t want this everybody gets a trophy sort of a culture out there. You don’t want to have there be a lack of motivation, and you might have that belief that the more we instill grading systems, the more we’ll be able to real motivation to have people work hard for their grades. You might think that it creates an unfair advantage. Earlier, Josh, you said that grades are creating, you know, not opportunities to address these opportunity gaps. Well, what about that’s really not fair if you didn’t have to work hard in order to get that grade? Some of you may be thinking that it could create for employers or for other educational institutions, a real diminished trust in higher education, so employers may be concerned.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:35:41]:

You might think, hey. It compromises feedback. Grades are a form of feedback. It’s representative of how hard they worked or how much they learned or some some sort of value attributed to that as a metric. And then you might feel like it it just would without having this with if we have rampant high grades being distributed out there, it just really challenges our learning assessment. So that’s the best I can do, Josh, with making the argument that some people really do. And I wanna take it real I’ve had colleagues who contact me and be like, I it’s gonna bring up a lot of strong, strong feelings.

Josh Eyler [00:36:18]:

Right.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:36:18]:

And yet I have been convinced when I say it’s not a thing, I certainly don’t mean to be cavalier, but it’s one of those things that I don’t think the system is doing what you think it’s doing. So those are some of the arguments why grade inflation is a real concern, and I’d particularly love you to stress both for potential employers and potential other schools. How are we ever gonna sort out students for getting into grad school or sort them out for the employers so the employers only get the best of the best as represented by their grades?

Josh Eyler [00:36:50]:

Right. Okay. So I love the approach that you’re taking, Bonni, of acknowledging people’s legitimate concerns, or they they feel these concerns legitimately and and intuitively, personally, intensely. So I think that we are at our best in these conversations when we confront each other with a generosity of spirit and intent. So I really appreciate this approach. I have three things that I think about when the issue of grade inflation comes up. The first is that there is nothing necessarily inherent to a grade, a through f, what whatever it is, that is of its nature to communicate is necessary to communicate that a student has met your academic standards as an instructor. That can be conveyed to students in lots of different ways, and nothing is taking away from the the standards of your course, the integrity with which you teach your discipline, the the amount of information students are learning.

Josh Eyler [00:37:57]:

Nothing is taking away from that by focusing more on feedback and other kinds of grading systems than it would if you stayed with traditional grades. There’s nothing about that letter that necessarily communicates, that a student has met your standards. Right? So I just wanna make that because that sometimes gets so tied together, standards and grades, that it becomes difficult to even have this conversation. So we need to just for just for a thought experiment for those listening to just take those apart for a moment and really think of what that might mean if we conveyed information through feedback to students about whether they’re meeting the mark. So that’s the first thing. That’s the thought experiment part. The second thing is research on what I call the measurement fallacy. There is more and more research coming out, and I’ll I’ll, you know, give you a title for 1, a century’s worth of of grading research, great paper.

Josh Eyler [00:38:58]:

But there there’s a lot of research coming out now that puts pressure on the objectivity, the scientific nature of grades. Right? In other words, we have research to show that grades do not measure what we have been told and or assumed they measure. Grades are not objective accurate measurements of learning according to this research, and I I think this really bears out. The most you can say that a grade measures is a student’s progress on an individual instructor’s subjective learning intentions in a given semester, at a given time, in a given course. What what do I mean by learning attention? Those are the learning goals that I myself set for my course. And so a grade that I would give would simply measure a student’s progress toward improvement on those learning intentions that I set. What that means is a grade is in no way some kind of universal certification that a student who gets a b in my course has mastered the material that would be present in every instance of that course that a student might take, nor does it mean that if a student took my colleague’s course down the hall, that that student would get the same grade. It is a subjective reflection of progress on individual instructors’ goals.

Josh Eyler [00:40:28]:

And, again, if we start thinking about grades in that way, it not only takes the pressure off of those letters and numbers, but also can change our perspective on why they hold so much importance. If they don’t measure what they’re supposed to measure, why are we using them, and why are we putting so much pressure on them? So that’s the second thing. The third thing addresses inflation very specifically. I honestly think that when most people are or when a lot of people are talking about grade inflation, what they actually are referring to is what we call grade compression. Grade compression is the effect of a smaller range of grades being used over time at a particular institution. Right? That is not grade inflation. There are lots of reasons grade compression can grading compression can occur. In my book, I cite a study from Cornell that was trying to figure all of this out, and it came to the conclusion that maybe they were just getting better students.

Josh Eyler [00:41:32]:

And other institutions have come to that conclusion as well. So lots of reasons why grade compression can occur. Again, a smaller range of grades being used over time. Grade inflation is a whole other ball game, and I’ll explain why I think I I think it is not happening in our institutions. And that is, in order for us to say that grade inflation has happened, we would need to have a lot of information of how grades have been given in certain courses over time. So let’s just take intro to biology as an example. We would have to know a lot about how grades were given in intro to biology courses at a particular institution across the decades. Right? And not only would we need to have that information, but we would also need to know a lot of information about the criteria by which those grades were given and the assignments that were used to determine those grades using the criteria.

Josh Eyler [00:42:33]:

And the reason that’s important, because if you’re going to argue that grade inflation is happening, you would have to say that the people in 2024 using the same criteria as the people from 1974 on similar assignments were giving higher grades over time. At the and the reality is we don’t have any of that information. I bet if you really dug around, you would be hard pressed to find grades from the 9 from 1974. And even if you did, what you would find is very little information about how those grades were determined and the assignments that were used to give those grades using those criteria. So those those are the the necessary kinds of information you would need to argue for grade inflation, and we just don’t have it. It’s a it’s a it’s a an absence of information. And without that, we can it’s impossible to say that there is grade inflation. Grade compression, different story.

Josh Eyler [00:43:28]:

We’re gonna have a a debate about that and why it’s happening, but grade inflation is something that I think that we just don’t have any information on, actually.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:43:38]:

I didn’t know it was possible to get that tight of a set of arguments. It’s almost like you’ve talked about this before. Thank you so much for Maybe a couple of times. I really do appreciate, and I appreciate your generous spirit, like you said, just to recognize there’s really strong feelings here and to help us dislodge some of the things that may be faulty in our own thinking just because we’re victims of our work. I don’t wanna say victims. We are often because of what was fostered within us in the environments in which we think we learned how to teach and think we learned how to learn over time. It can it can we can really be susceptible to those things. I find it really helpful.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:44:17]:

So well, this is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. Mine happens to be quite, related because I knew we weren’t gonna have enough time to talk about all the things I wanted to talk about. One thing that didn’t come up in today’s conversation has to do with time, timed tests and angst, test taking anxiety. And Josh writes a wonderful column for the Saturday Evening Post, and a recent one was titled the math wars, timed tests, math anxiety, and the battle over how we teach our kids. If you have done any thinking or even if you haven’t done thinking about the impact of requiring timed tests, and do they actually measure what we think they’re gonna measure, and are they authentic assessment as in matching the circumstances in which someone would need to demonstrate the learning or behaviors or skills that are we’re attempting to teach. That’s a really good read on the column in general, but that one specifically. So that’s what I’ve got for today. And, Josh, I’ll pass it over to you for whatever you’d like to recommend.

Josh Eyler [00:45:18]:

I appreciate that shout out, Bonni. So I have 4, and I focus my recommendations on similar topics to what we’ve been talking about today, the problems with educational systems. And so my first recommendation is related to grades. It was a book that came out last year called Off the Mark by Ethan Hutt and Jack Schneider. It’s a different look on on the problems with grades than I think the one I give in failing our future, but also useful perspective for people who are interested in this. Anya Kamenetz The Test, which came out a few years ago. It’s an overview of how standardized testing has been so detrimental to to our our kids, but also to just our educational systems. Tressie McMillan Cottom’s amazing book that I know everyone probably already knows called lower ed about, the system of of for profit institutions preying on on on certain populations of in our country.

Josh Eyler [00:46:13]:

And then also Sara Rose Cavanaugh’s mind over monsters, a very recent book that does a lot to illuminate the mental health challenges amongst college students, and mental health issues are something I address in a whole chapter that covers the k twelve and higher ed range. So those are 4 I’d really recommend to anyone who’s interested in more more in-depth reckoning with what is wrong with our systems.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:46:42]:

I’d like to thank Josh Elyer for joining me on today’s episode, and thanks to each of you for listening. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroeger. Podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Priest. And if you’ve yet to sign up for the weekly updates from Teaching in Higher Ed, I encourage you to head over to teaching in higher ed.com/subscribe. You’ll get the most recent episodes show notes. And, Josh, this is going to be an excellent set of show notes, so you’ll get them without having to remember to go visit the page. And you’ll also get some other resources that don’t show up in those show notes.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:47:24]:

So head on over, and thanks for listening. And we can’t wait to see you next time because this conversation will continue.

Josh Eyler [00:47:31]:

Looking forward to it. Thanks, Bonni.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.