[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on Episode 401 of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast. I welcome back to the show, Josh Eyler to talk about the problem with grades.

[00:00:11] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning: Maximizing Human Potential.

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[00:00:20] Bonni Stachowiak: 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 and our lives and be even more present for our students. Josh Eyler is Director of Faculty Development and Director of the Thinkforward Quality Enhancement Plan at the University of Mississippi where he is also on the faculty in the Department of Teacher Education.

Josh previously worked on teaching and learning initiatives at Columbus State University, George Mason University, and Rice University. His research interests include the biological basis of learning, evidence-based pedagogy, and disability studies. He is the author of How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching. Josh is a frequent speaker at colleges and universities across the country, and he often consults with centers for teaching and learning on a range of issues related to programming and research. Josh Eyler, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:01:43] Josh Eyler: Thank you so much, Bonni. It’s always great to get the chance to talk to you.

[00:01:47] Bonni Stachowiak: I have been eagerly awaiting a book that I know you are working on, but it reminds me of when I first met you, you were working on a book and I eagerly-

[00:01:54] Josh Eyler: It’s really come full circle.

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[00:01:56] Bonni Stachowiak: -I eagerly awaited that one and so enjoyed reading it. Today, we are going to be looking at the problem with grades. For listeners, we already know that you’re willing to come back and look at other things besides the problem with it, but I want to start out just by having you tell us a little bit about what do you remember about your early educational experiences and how grades played a role or didn’t?

[00:02:22] Josh Eyler: I’ve been mentally time-traveling here trying to think, and the biggest impression that I think I have is that, for me, the competitive nature of grades took over everything entirely. I was an athlete growing up and I think psychologically, grades were no different than any other competition that I was a part of, that the goal was to win. In the arena of school, that meant getting an A. What I think is natural and understandable about that is that grades are, in fact, a kind of award, a kind of extrinsic motivation that, by their very nature, drive that interaction, particularly if you’re prone to being competitive.

What I regret about that, and I think is true for a lot of these scenarios that grades are part of, is that it became solely about getting the best grade I could. It was not about the learning that happened along the way. I think that’s really some of our great writers on education and a lot of people that have been on your podcast make that point over and over again that the more we focus on grades the less we focus on the learning. I think that is true for me and that there are areas, subjects, ideas that I know that I’m now interested in as an adult.

For that last book that we had talked about before, science, and biology, and evolution, I’m just so naturally curious about that, but I think my experience with those subjects in school was that I got better grades in other areas, and so tended to focus more on the areas that I was succeeding in grade-wise and focused less on what I could learn just because I was interested in it.

[00:04:15] Bonni Stachowiak: You talk about being an athlete and that competitive nature that shows up in athletics. I actually took ballet from the age of 3 until 14. Oftentimes I realize such a difference in my own mindset of the way that I view some parts of the world because I tend to be more achievement-oriented. Certainly, there’s a lot of competition that parallels someone with more of achievement orientations. Anyway, our kids, their school put out a lovely series of videos. They do a State of the School, and it’s just a beautifully produced website with some video content.

We were in here in the studio where I’m speaking to you now last night and they just kept wanting to watch video after video of we want to see what the kids who are younger– They’re about to turn 8 and 10, so

They wanted to see the preschool and the ones that are littler. “Then can we watch ours? Then can we watch the next?” It was so funny, but in the one that was about– They don’t do grades but they’re like, “Can I see my grades?” As a parent, I’m not sure how much of that is just my paradigms or whatever, but they will officially start.

Right now what they did is, “Did you meet the benchmark? Did you exceed the benchmark or are you still in need of development?” That’s where they positioned those types of feedback mechanisms. It talked about, in the video, for the middle school, for those not familiar with middle school, this would be kids who are about, I was going to say what grades but that doesn’t help people in other countries either. This is kids who are–Oh gosh.

[00:05:52] Josh Eyler: It’s roughly 12 to 14– Sorry, 11 to 14.

[00:05:56] Bonni Stachowiak: Perfect. They were talking about how they haven’t had grades before and then they’ll start to have grades. Then they mentioned, “As your last year in this middle school will be the first year you receive grades that will be reported on a transcript.” I’d love to have you talk about your life but also what you’re noticing as a parent and also as research for the book, that distinction where grades may go from competition to– and maybe they matter, maybe they don’t to, this is going down on your permanent record if you will.

[00:06:36] Josh Eyler: I started noticing that the messages that are often sent in most elementary schools are very different about achievement. It is not unusual to have the evaluation system that you just described for your kids. For my daughter, it’s similar standards-based, and so it’s 4-3-2-1, 3 is mastery of the standard, 4 is succeeding, and 2 is still some work to go. It’s not uncommon to view things that way in elementary school, but as the distance between the grade they’re in and potentially enrolling in college shrinks, the more emphasis gets put on grades, and the more competitive that environment gets.

I see a lot of things and a lot of problems with that, and we could jump into the research later on the obstacles that grades set up to learning, and to many other things that are important as well, I think. What I’m seeing is a transition point that happens around middle school where grades get a lot more emphasis. This is also the point, and this is where the research on learning and the research on mental health and grades meet up. That as the competition increases for what college students are going to get into, so too does the pressure that begins to be put on children by teachers and by parents.

I love the terrain that was new to me. What is really fascinating about what happens in the home with parents and guardians and family members and the kinds of messages that get sent to kids that push back against or add to the pressures that they’re feeling from teachers and principals in their schools. The pressure gets ramped up. I see a lot of what I’m now understanding are misunderstandings about the admissions process. There is a lot of I think it’s not really magic thinking but it’s maybe faulty mental models about the admissions process.

There’s pressure heaped on kids, but the more I talk to admissions counselors about grades and about transcripts, the more you figure out that colleges are really interested in what’s behind the transcript. I spoke to an admissions director at an Ivy League school and she was really clear that so many of the kids who apply have exactly the same grades. If that’s true, you have to look at all the other stuff that’s going on. Right? Now, there’s an issue with that too of piling on extracurriculars, and so that adds to the pressure.

The moral of the story for me is that the grades are not the end of your story, they are not even the bulk of your story, they’re a chapter of your story. Thinking about that reality or increasing the awareness of that reality is absolutely key in helping those students who are in middle school and high school right now. That’s a big thing that I’m seeing. I’m also seeing though, high schools especially, which is pretty revolutionary, began to experiment with their grading models.

Moving to standards-based grading, proficiency-based grading, other kinds of grading models, other kinds of transcripts that move toward, I think, the progressive models of education that we’ve been talking about that we’re interested in. I’m seeing that as well. There are lots of pressure points on those schools and lots of ways that it can go wrong or go right. It’s been interesting to see the stories of the schools that have succeeded, and those that faltered along the way, but they are trying. There are more and more schools every year that are making steps in that direction.

[00:10:47] Bonni Stachowiak: Josh, do you have any searing memory for yourself of a time when you totally bombed a test or an assignment or a class that’s still stuck in your head?

[00:10:57] Josh Eyler: They may just all gel into one terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach, I think. I can’t remember a single moment, but I can remember the feeling of letting myself down, letting other people down, having betrayed a trust in some way. Even though all those feelings are incorrect, they are rooted in the dominant story that grades are really a part of. I certainly had my share of bombed tests and bombed papers.

Each one of those, I just remember feeling guilty, which is not something that I think we want people to be feeling in education. Right? Certainly, awareness of what happened and how to maybe study more or study harder in certain areas, but not guilt, and that kind of pressure. I think that’s really what I remember from those moments.

[00:12:02] Bonni Stachowiak: What have you identified about what may be different about your relationship with grades versus what some of our students may be experiencing? I do need to add the caveat, of course, our students are not a monolith, but what are some of the patterns that you start to identify of how those relationships could potentially be different?

[00:12:22] Josh Eyler: That is a really great question and I think uncovers so much of what lurks under the surface of grades, especially with equity and bias. Let’s start with me, my experience, I think in some ways, in many ways, most ways probably, my experience is that I am a white man from a blue-collar town. That I think affects my story in two different ways. One is that my experience with grades is rooted in privilege. The grades were never a hindrance to me, they were never set up as obstacles, my experience in school was never one of having to break through barriers. Right?

Grades in that way, my experience with them is very privileged. Our students who are from are from historically marginalized communities, things like that, they have a very different relationship with grades. For example. One example, there is a story that I read from Florida. I think it’s Tampa, but I don’t really want to say for sure that that’s it because it’s a really terrible story. It was in the news local newspaper of the police department looking at grades and using it as surveillance to determine which students they should watch out for for potential crimes.

That’s certainly not something someone in a position like my own would ever experience. There are students for whom grades are not just obstacles, they are markers. The title of my book is Scarlet Letters. Grades can have this function of marking you, who you are, what you are, rooting your story in Amber that you are a C student, or you are an A student, you are failing. It sets the road in many ways for some students. On the other side, from a very blue-collar town and a first-generation college graduate, in that way, I came from a school that had okay resources, but not great resources.

Entered college not really knowing the lay of the land, and not having had some of the educational experiences that peers had in college. In that way, one thing that we know about grades and the relationship to students who come from under-resourced schools is that those students can often experience what we call an opportunity gap because they haven’t had the same resources or opportunities. Grades, in those first two years of college especially, do not really demonstrate or are not really markers of what that student can know or can do, they’re really measuring the systemic inequity.

They’re measuring the gap of educational opportunities, not really what the student can do. I think that’s really important for people to understand. There’s lots and lots of data out there looking at grades in Gen Ed courses broken down by demographics, and it will show the same thing. The students from those schools that traditionally get fewer resources, that the grades are setting them up, setting them on a road where they are judged by many in the institution to be unprepared or just not quite ready for college when, in fact, it’s really what they have experienced in their prior educational institutions. The grades are the means for labeling them in that way.

[00:16:18] Bonni Stachowiak: Yes.

[00:16:19] Josh Eyler: That was a lot.

[00:16:19] Bonni Stachowiak: No.

[00:16:21] Josh Eyler: I am really passionate about this, so I like to get the word out.

[00:16:25] Bonni Stachowiak: Earlier you touched on this and, and you just echoed it now. I think it’s so important that we recognize that how we talk about grades– Typically, at least my experience is very different from what we actually are doing with them. We say that they’re a measure of what someone’s done, which you’ve already pointed out that’s problematic in and of itself because it doesn’t account for the opportunity gap.

You brought up the competition element because then it’s like, “Oh wait, no. You should only have 10% of your students earning a particular grade, an A grade in your class.

Then you should have the grades that come out of that- should map to some arbitrary thing.” It really does become pitting the students against one another, and I never felt that as a student. I also didn’t feel it early on in my teaching because I just bought into it like, “Oh, Okay. This is how things are done.” It felt weird to give grades. Today, I feel so passionately. You just mentioned feeling so passionate of– Well lets at least call it for what it is. Let’s name that thing. I was remembering when I had the opportunity a couple of times to talk to Cathy Davidson.

She talks about the meat industry in that even the grades of meats weren’t good enough for them. At least I laugh because I don’t know a lot about the meat industry, but I’m thinking that meat doesn’t compete with each other. [laughs]

[00:17:57] Josh Eyler: Right, exactly.

[00:17:58] Bonni Stachowiak: It wasn’t good enough for me and it’s failing us. Could you talk a little bit more about this, the dangers of saying it’s one thing, but what it actually is, is this competition? We’re arbitrarily sorting people against one another through the grading process versus actually any true evaluation.

[00:18:20] Josh Eyler: Absolutely. There are a couple of threads there. The first thing is to say that, even in situations where an instructor is trying absolutely as hard as possible to make grades objective, they are still subjective. That’s really important to know. You can see that, for example, if you look in your department, any department at any course that’s taught over multiple sections by multiple instructors, you can see that an A is not an A, it’s not an A. It is determined by individual instructors’ standards that they set.

Several people on social media, David David Buck is one, but there are others, they call grades, “objectivity theatre. The veil of objectivity that really covers over the extremely subjective nature of grades.” When you say, “Let’s just name it,” I think that’s, first and foremost, the most important thing that we have to name. That even if you have, let’s say, a common exam across all introductory sections that students are taking, looking at their performance on that, it’s still the level of preparation, the resources that go into individual sections, and the background of those students. It’s never really objective, it’s always subjective.

You have to name, that’s important. Then if we know that, if we know it’s subjective, then pitting students against each other, and the grade brackets that you were talking about or the grade collars or grading curves, there’s nothing less equitable in education than a grading curve. I’ll plant my flag on that hill, and there I’m talking about the grading curve where the student who does the best gets the 100 and everyone else is judged and rated accordingly. That sets up an extremely competitive environment where I’m trying to beat my colleagues in the race, not actually worry about my own learning and how I’m developing within that course.

Also, if grades are subjective, no matter how hard we try to make them objective, using introductory-level courses and their grade as gatekeeping mechanisms is entirely unfair to our whole wide diverse range of students that come to us in our universities. It borders on unethical, honestly, to use that measure to keep students out of departments, out of majors, out of fields of study.

I really think we need to think very carefully about what our goals are for education and to allow the assessment means that we use to match with those goals. For me, right now, looking broadly across our educational systems, the grades that we give do not do that. People are trying valiantly within that system to use different kinds of models on grading, standards-based grading, contracts, all of it, and I think that’s the push that we need, but this is a major issue.

[00:21:39] Bonni Stachowiak: What do we know or not know about any relationships between self-efficacy and grades or academic performance?

[00:21:49] Josh Eyler: We know a lot. In fact, I would say, if we think of self-efficacy under the rubric of motivation, then we know a lot. In fact, that is probably the area of research on grading where there’s the most work, the connection between grades and motivation. People are starting to look at self-efficacy more, self-determination theory, things like that, so really connecting some of those dispositions to work. We know that grades, as an extrinsic motivator, stand in the way of the intrinsic motivation development of self that we would hope is actually happening in our classrooms.

Now, this gets dicey because there are undoubtedly many psychologists listening to your podcast. I know because I follow them on social media. It’s not to say that all extrinsic motivators are always bad, that’s not true.

It’s not to say that just because you’re prioritizing intrinsic motivation, that automatically, students become intrinsically motivated. That’s the tricky part. It’s easy to say grades are extrinsic and therefore we should get rid of them because we want students to be intrinsically motivated. It’s easy to say that. The tricky part becomes well even if we do that, how do we help students to become more intrinsically motivated? T

hat’s about course design, assignment design, relationship building with students, that’s where the self-efficacy comes in. That’s where the real conversation is, how do we enhance that? We do know some things about it, and that reorienting students’ approach to grades and to learning and to schoolwork does help them does enhance their self-efficacy. I think you’re starting to see this on the nascent research on these progressive grading models. I just saw on standards-based learning, those students who had a standards-based model in high school and how they approach learning in college.

It’s the dispositions like self-efficacy and confidence that you can really say improves. Whether achievement improves or not, that’s really where this research gets interesting. Whether we could say someone achieves more using X grading model versus Y grading model, that’s still too new, and I think we need a lot more there. What we are seeing though is the improvement of self-efficacy, confidence, taking intellectual risks, those sorts of things in this research.

[00:24:34] Bonni Stachowiak: The example that you gave of if I experienced standards-based learning when I was in high school and then what that may do to my college experience reminds me just overall of we can’t think of it just as our class. Our one or two or five opportunities to have an impact. To think that someone could walk into that class and be able to unlearn what their prior educational experiences have taught them to think about grades as, and even to trust us enough.

We’re not just that educator for them, we are an amalgam of not just what we bring there, but unfortunately, and sometimes fortunately, we’re also a representation of past teachers that they’ve had. Could you talk a little bit more then about that unlearning process that would maybe need to happen a little bit more holistically that yes, we do this as individual thinkers and educators, but that this also needs to be thought of more holistically?

[00:25:42] Josh Eyler: Sure. I think that you’ve just hit on the work, the important work of this. At an individual level, we can do some of that work in our classes, and we can adopt our own grading model that can begin this ball rolling. Until students are hearing that message from all corners of the institution, and until they are really engaged in that metacognitive work for themselves of unlearning at least 12 years of conditioning of what school looks like to them on, what they expect school to be, and their relationship to grades, their ability to, I think, adopt the benefits of changing these grading models is limited until they see more of it and they go through more of this process and they’re helped to advance in that work.

That is hard work, but it’s really important. For the project I’m working on, I’m featuring Evergreen State College in Washington, which is a gradeless college and has been gradeless since its inception in the ’60s. They have narrative evaluations, narrative feedback, no grades whatsoever, no numbers. The faculty and administrators there talk a lot about this unlearning process, and how it has to be holistic across the institution. They have to constantly get this message that learning and education does not have to be related to the artificial constructs of school. That a grade does not measure who you are as a learner or as a person. It’s a lot of work that needs to happen.

[00:27:31] Bonni Stachowiak: I’d like us. before we get to the recommendation segment, just to reflect a little bit then back on the person, somebody listening to this podcast who maybe has heard prior episodes talking about different kinds of grading mechanisms, maybe has read a book, maybe hasn’t, what are the kinds of questions that you invite us to be asking ourselves? What reflective work would you encourage us to do in order to begin to plant those seeds, get the fertilizer going before we really start to make any dramatic changing to our own practices?

[00:28:05] Josh Eyler: When I work with faculty on the issue of grades, we start with questions like, “What grading models do you currently use? To what degree are the models that you use connected to your beliefs about higher education? To what degree are they connected to your beliefs about your discipline? To what degree are they connected to your perceptions of the expectations that your colleagues have of you?” We really work at the psychological level before we even really get to the pedagogical.

So much of what is bound up in our thinking about grades is really connected to our own educational experiences, our training in graduate school, the messages that we get sent from our department, and so we have to really unpack all of those questions before we can get to the research on grades. That’s where I would encourage listeners to start. Really take out what we do in the classroom, take out our models, and look at where do they come from? How are they deeply rooted in our belief systems about education and our discipline, and how can we work from there?

[00:29:21] Bonni Stachowiak: I don’t often tell too many tales out of school about my specific university, but this story is from 15 years ago. I suspect I’m fairly safe to tell this. I have a vivid memory of someone applying to be a tenured track faculty, and not getting the job because she was perceived as being too easy in her grading. I distinctly remember at the time saying, because she had taught as an adjunct for a couple of years for us, “Has anyone discussed that with her?” “No, no.” They said that would go against academic freedom, you would never speak to someone about such a thing.

I’m thinking, “Well, it is getting in the way of her getting this job. She’s been an adjunct, the students really seem to like her and get a lot out of her teaching.” It makes me angry that we sometimes– The reason I’m willing to tell this story is I know we’re not alone in sometimes having these unwritten rules, the unwritten expectations around it. I think if we ask the kinds of questions that you’re talking about here, and we are trying to pursue whether it’s a position to teach a single class or something a little bit more significant, to have thought through these questions, and to then be going to do a little bit of reflective writing about that.

I don’t want to sound too idealistic here, Josh, but maybe we could educate other people and get them asking some similar questions if this was part of our teaching, philosophy statement, that kind of thing.

[00:30:45] Josh Eyler: Well, absolutely. I’m an eternal optimist, and I think that that’s part of why I do this work. Yes, I think change is possible. Especially when you’re talking about systemic change like this, it can seem really hard and way too big at first, but the more we have individuals taking these small steps, the more we become a collective, and that’s when you start to see the work of change. I really liked the example that you used because I think it’s a perfect representation of something that is tied purely to belief systems.

Why do we immediately jump to the conclusion when we see a lot of A’s in the class that that must mean lacks standards or easy grading when it could mean, in a different narrative, that that teacher has knocked it out of the park, and those students have learned a lot. Those are the kinds of narratives we really need to deconstruct in order to build a new story about learning.

[00:31:47] Bonni Stachowiak: I love that. Thank you so much. Well, this is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. I have two movies to recommend, and they go all the way back to a conversation you and I had from long ago about what we’ve learned about teaching from Pixar movies. I have two Pixar movies that I’d like to recommend. Although before I do, if people haven’t listened to that episode, that’s a great one to go back and listen to in the catalog.

[00:32:10] Josh Eyler: That was fun.

[00:32:11] Bonni Stachowiak: So fun, I love that. The two I’d like to recommend, one is a movie called Luca, and I’m reading from the movie description on the Italian Riviera, “An unlikely but strong friendship grows between a human being and a sea monster disguised as a human.” Just a beautiful movie. I have a colleague whose daughter got to work on the movie, and it’s so fun to be able to see those credits roll and see the … take a quick snapshot of it on my phone so I could text it over.

Then the next one is Soul, his daughter also got to work on this one. “After landing the gig of a lifetime, a New York jazz pianist suddenly finds himself trapped in a strange land between Earth and the afterlife.” If you’ve not seen either of those, just exceptionally great music, acting, plot, I love them. I know, Josh, do you have things to recommend, but if there’s anything you want to say about either of those two Pixar movies, I welcome you to we’ve got the time.

[00:33:06] Josh Eyler: You know we could talk about all this for a long time, Bonni, but I have seen both of those, and they’re both amazing. Luca in particular is such a moving story about difference and being accepted and figuring out who you really are. I can’t recommend either one of those enough, they’re just beautiful movies.

[00:33:26] Bonni Stachowiak: Thanks. I know you brought some recommendations for us today as well.

[00:33:30] Josh Eyler: I do, I have two. One is a book that I’m trying to recommend to everyone. It’s so amazing. It’s called We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina love, who I believe is a faculty member at UGA. It is just an incredible book about education as liberation and how we can use our classrooms to undo some of those inequities that we were just talking about. I really think it’s a successor to bell hooks, who just passed away and leaving a big hole in education, I think. The book is a real successor to bell hook’s trilogy on teaching. It’s really amazing.

That’s one recommendation. The other recommendation, Dr. Alanna Gillis, who is a faculty member in Sociology at St. Lawrence University. She wrote a paper when she was a graduate student on a new way of evaluating participation. I just was floored by that article and the model in it. I’ve been using it ever since and promoting it and handing it out like it’s trick or treats to try and get as many people to know about it as possible. Having some of these conversations over the last number of months about this model, she’s just made a lot of resources connected to it open access on her website. I really, really want to encourage people to have a look at those

[00:35:01] Bonni Stachowiak: Wonderful those sound like such terrific recommendations. I’ve got to see Bettina Love speak in person once.

[00:35:08] Josh Eyler: You did?

[00:35:08] Bonni Stachowiak: Yes. She spoke at the Canvas Learning Management System Conference some years ago. I want to read that book, so thank you for that recommendation. The article sounds great too. I can’t wait to check that out and pass it on in the recommendation segment. I guess the other thing I’ll say, Josh, is thank you for today, thank you for yesterday, and thank you for tomorrow because you’ve said that you’re up for coming back as we could potentially even maybe do a series more on grading and what we can learn from you and the research you’re doing read your books. Just thank you in advance for that too.

[00:35:39] Josh Eyler: Oh, absolutely, Bonni. That sounds like a lot of fun, but thank you. Thank you for this podcast that you do. I listen to it all the time and I think it’s a great resource. Thanks for the conversation today.

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[00:35:53] Bonni Stachowiak: Oh, it was so great to have this follow-up conversation with Josh Eyler after a couple of years. It’s been a while since I talked to him. Thank you, Josh, again for being on the show. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you’d like to access the show notes, they’re probably already available in your podcast player, but you’re also welcome to head on over to teachinginhighered.com/401. You can also sign up for the weekly update that’ll get those show notes and other recommendations and quotable words in your inbox once a week. That subscription is available at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe.

Thank you for listening, and I’ll see you next time.

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The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. 

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