How Grades Harm Students And What We Can Do About It

A Q&A with Josh Eyler about his new book.

I was reading Ken Bain’s now classic text, What the Best College Teachers Do, not long after it came out in 2004 and I came across the chapter on how these best teachers evaluate students and themselves.

Bain’s summation of what he observed is pretty straightforward: “The outstanding teachers used assessments to help students learn, not just to rate and rank their efforts.”¹

I knew that I was not doing this in my teaching, but I was at a loss how to bridge that gap. I started experimenting with alternative grading, an experiment that ultimately bore fruit, but which also had a lot of failed harvests along the way.

Times have changed around what we know and how we think about alternative grading and I think we’re in a moment of opportunity where people truly are questioning a system that is primarily designed to rank and sort, rather than help students understand themselves and and their learning.

One of the people leading the charge is

Josh Eyler

, the Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning and Director of the Think Forward Quality Enhancement Plan at the University of Mississippi, where he is also Clinical Assistant Professor of Teacher Education.

I’ve known Josh and his dedication to helping students learn for years, which is why I’m so excited to have this chance to ask him a few questions about his new book, Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, And What We Can Do About It.

Josh previously worked on teaching and learning initiatives at Columbus State University, George Mason University, and Rice University. A sought-after speaker for his expertise about the science of learning and about compassion in education, especially in connection with students, grades, and mental health, he has spoken at college and universities across the country, including Yale University, University of Texas, and Johns Hopkins University.

In addition to Failing Our Future, Josh is the author of the acclaimed How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching, which in 2019 Book Authority named one of the “100 Best Education Books of All Time.”  Called a “splendid repository of ways to rethink how we teach college” by the Los Angeles Review of Books, it was named a “Book of the Year” in the Chicago Tribune.

Josh answered my questions over email.

John Warner: Give me the elevator pitch for why grades are damaging the future prospects of students and society. One sentence max. (Though I’ll let you have multiple clauses.)

Josh Eyler: The research on grades is pretty clear–they affect motivation and our ability to learn, mirror and magnify inequities that have always been a part of the American educational system, and contribute to the mental health crisis in teens and young adults, but there are strategies we can use in our homes, classrooms, and schools/colleges to mitigate these harms.

JW: Given that you have a PhD, have been a tenured professor, and have been working in teaching and learning for a long time now, I’m going to assume that at some point, grades “worked” for you. Is that a fair assumption, or am I off base?

JE: I’d say I was as caught up in the game of school as much as anyone else. I was an athlete in high school and college, and I treated the classroom as any other competition. I wanted to win, and winning meant getting an A. If I learned along the way, so be it, but really I was very strategic. This, as astute readers might suspect, is not really a healthy way to go about one’s educational journey, but the system is set up in such a way to encourage students to approach academics like this, because all of the emphasis is on the product (grades) rather than the process (learning). I also benefited from all kinds of privilege, which allowed me to learn the rules of the school-game and to make them work for me rather than against me. 

JW: When did things change for you? I’m sure it’s been something of a journey in terms of a shift in mindset, but was there an inflection point where something just clicked and you said these things are not well-suited to helping students learn and develop?

JE: It was a combination of things, really. I’ve wanted to be a teacher since I was a little kid, and what drove that passion was an interest in helping people, in coaching them. From the beginning of my time in the classroom, then, I felt a real tension with all of the bureaucracy and emphasis on evaluation that stood between my students and me. Later, after years of teaching and after having graded thousands of papers by that point, I became completely disenchanted by traditional grading. I felt like I was spending a ridiculous amount of time determining what the grade was and then using the comments I made on the paper, at least in part, to justify that grade rather than focusing solely on the student as a writer. It was maddening. I was also writing How Humans Learn during this period and doing research for my chapter on “Failure.” All the signs were pointing to the problems with grades, and I really started to reflect on this. 

At about this same time, I began to pick up on the grading reform movement and noticed lots of folks I really admired changing their grading models (yourself included, John!). That’s when I took the plunge. Since then, I’ve used portfolio grading, contract grading, and collaborative grading (which is also often called upgrading), and I’ve never looked back.

JW: One of the encouraging things from my perspective is that we’re talking much more about grades and alternative systems of grading. When I first started experimenting in my own teaching, I felt like I had to do it in secret. Where are you on this? Surprised? Encouraged? Worried it’s not enough?

JE: Surprised, encouraged, and optimistic. We are in the midst of one of the most productive moments of grading reform in our country’s history–fueled in many ways by technology and social media–and I think we’re just getting started.

JW: Not trying to start a beef here, but last year Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt published Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To), which maps similar territory in different ways from your book, but comes to a different conclusion, that while grades as we use them are a problem, they’re here to stay, for mostly good reasons. How and why do you see things differently?

JE: I like their book very much, and I’ve learned a lot from their work, especially their detailed study of the history of grading. You’re right, though, that we come to very different conclusions. Schneider and Hutt feel that grades are ultimately valuable and necessary, despite their serious flaws, because of they way they communicate student progress and performance to parents, administrators, other institutions, etc. in a neat, tidy little package. They wave their hand at other kinds of models for this (like alternative transcripts in in high school and gradeless colleges like Evergreen State in Washington), but they never take these alternatives seriously because the core of their argument is that grades communicate as well or better than any other system we could come up with and that this communication is essential. 

In order to fully embrace this argument, though, you have to believe that the communicative function of grades outweighs the role played by grades in hindering student learning, contributing to the mental health crisis, and extending inequities in our educational systems. That’s where I get stuck. I think all of those factors are much more serious and significant, and I think we can be more creative and compassionate as individuals and as institutions in developing or implementing alternatives. Colleges, for example, already have mechanisms for translating nontraditional transcripts when they make admission decisions, so writing this kind of solution off with a wink and a nudge, a kind of “that sounds nice but it will never work,” seems like the easy way out. Do we need to think about scale? Yes, absolutely, but there are already inventive folks at our institutions and even for-profit companies that are working to develop these kinds of solutions.  

JW: What’s your advice for anyone who wants to explore moving away from traditional grading systems? 

JE: First, start small. I often encourage folks to select a single assignment and experiment with that. Don’t grade it. Just provide feedback, and ask students to self assess their work as well. See how it goes. Ask the students for their impressions too. You can also test the waters with a course policy like evaluating participation, which is traditionally kind of a fraught process. A sociologist named Alanna Gillis has some great resources for thinking about participation differently. Her model includes asking students to set goals for participation and to assess them along the way. It’s a start. Beyond these experiments, though, it’s also important to know that they should feel free to mix and match different models. There is no orthodoxy here. Find a system that works best for you, your students, your courses, and your context.

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