assessment, testing, grading--wtf?

When I was studying to be a high school English teacher--back when I believed that this was my true calling--I was taught to make a distinction between assessment and grading. Assessment, I was told, was an ongoing process of monitoring student progress. The goals of assessment were to verify that learning had occured, and to ensure the appropriateness of the curriculum. So-called formative assessment included frequent systematic observation (including anecdotal records) and necessitated the ongoing provision of feedback for students. Assessment was to be intimately linked with instructional planning. It was not to be thought of as a thing added on at the conclusion of instruction. It was a way of evaluating whether or not your teaching had been successful, not a way of determining if your students had been successful. It was a way of identifying when concepts needed to be taught for the first time or retaught if learning had not occured.

Grading was different. Grading certified completion. Grading suggested finality. Grading offered conclusive judgment: A B C D F.

Because of my training, I have tended to continue to make the distinction between assessment and grading to this day. I have also noted a kind of tension between the two. Assessment, by this definition, seems to be never ending. It's something you do over and over again--to inform teaching and reteaching, learning and relearning--and to make both teaching and learning ongoing, recursive practices. Yet, in the end, we are still asked to grade. The ongoing process of assessment is forced to a halt by the singular moment of the grade. This leads to a kind of conundrum. E.G: Help your students to work on, I don't know, MLA format. Sit with them, work with them, write to them, comment on their papers: Assess. Then, at some point, put a letter on their work--how about a C (they just don't get it!). Grade. Now try to assess--since that's ongoing--try to go back and help after you've put that C on their work--except now they don't want to talk to you, or worse, you can't go back because they are gone. The semester has come to an end. The grading session is over and students have been "marked."

Aside from this tension between ongoing assessment, on the one hand, and conclusive grading, on the other, I also find that while grading is something that I observe frequenlty, assessment is exquisitely rare. In my admittedly few years of teaching, I've very rarely seen a teacher say, "hey, my students aren't getting this concept. I guess it's back to the old drawing board for me. How can I reteach this content?" By contrast, I've seen an alternative scenario rather frequently: "Hey, my students didn't get this concept. Guess they'll have to accept Cs so we can move on to the next concept (or reading assignment, or paper, or whatever)."

Of course, the dominance of the grading-mentality as opposed to an ongoing assessment-mentality can be see in the standardized testing movement. Kids are tested like mother-fuckers. They're stamped with grades so that they may be "placed appropriately." Of course, in practice, the kids who aren't succeeding simply get flagged and plopped into remedial courses or lower tracks. These kids are, needless to say, disproportionately poor people of color. The remediation they receive--even in cases where it is helpful--also has the effect of labeling these kids as "Other" for the rest of their educational lives. Once they are classed and tracked, they remain in their class and in their track and never rejoin the masses of "normal" children. The grading system, then, helps to reproduce existing social inequities. After all, we NEED kids to fail. We NEED, some of them anyway, to fill the low-end jobs. We need optimum rates of unemployment, and thus optimum rates of failure and drop-outs. Might as well be poor black kids to fill that social role.

So, what's the solution? Well, as Madaus has pointed out, the solution has been to test our way out of it. Keep testing. Keep providing grades. Keep tracking. Don't bother to look at any of the social dynamics that may adversely affect educational outcomes. Don't bother to look at the adverse effects of testing/grading. Don't bother to reduce class sizes, increase teacher-support and training, make room in the curriculum for reteaching. And, above all, don't question why grading--stamping letters on people--is necessary. Don't question how grading is inextricably linked with an economic system that requires failure, poverty, and unemployment.

This begs the question: WHY the eff do we need to grade? Or, at least, why the eff do we need to grade student writing? I'm not sure I've ever been satisfied by an answer to this question. I can see grading people if they're brain surgeons, say. I can see grading people if what we're grading has life-and-death implications. But writing? If a kid can't write a college essay, no one is going to die. If a kid can't write in this context, it doesn't mean s/he won't be able to write in some other context. So, the grade doesn't even tell if the kid is a good writer. And it sure as hell doesn't assess. If I give a kid a B in my College Writing I class, his College Writing II teacher doesn't even see the goddamn B. Nor does that teacher have any goddamn clue from that B, what this kid does well or poorly, what s/he needs help with, whether the B was 'cause I sort of liked the kid's growth over the semester; or because s/he really did "A-work" but missed a few assignments; or because I found him/her slightly more pleasant than the others, even though the writing kind of sucked; or because, when compared to classmates, the kid's papers were just a little worse than some better papers; or because B is the highest grade I give out; or because I have some arbitrary, yet dynamic, idea of what the fuck a "B-paper" is and this kid's paper reminded me of it. The grade is meaningless as an assessment tool.

So, is there any reason to put it on some kid's paper? Is there any reason that a kid NEEDS a writing grade, other than to tell him if s/he's good or bad, right or wrong. And, if this is why, do you really need a goddamn grade to tell you if you're writing is good or bad, right or wrong? Isn't it already obvious where your writing stands when someone says, "I don't know WTF you're saying in this paper"? Or do we give grades simply so the kid can show them to his or her employer? If so, is there any reason that an employer needs to see a letter grade that "reflects" a kid's ability to write rather than some kind of writing sample from the kid, or, better yet, some non-letter-grade assessment about the kid's qualifications for that particular job?

Why do we grade writing? Is it only to be gatekeepers? Is it only to ensure that the right kids "make it" and the wrong kids don't? I still see no reason for it--other than to reproduce and sustain an unfair social system.