Entrance Slip Oct 9

 As a student bird, grades are a currency, indicating your worth relative to your peers and serving the purpose of ranking students (hierarchy). As the article notes, students like Charlie admitted that grading allows them to "compare my marks with others." A high grade is a reward and a low grade is a punishment. They are arrived at a combination of memorization and complying as Lucy from the article mentions, trying to figure out what the teacher wants. While they provide motivating goals "try harder" and a way to measure progress, they also cause significant stress shifting the focus from understanding to performance. Given the choice, a student would almost always pick the easier problem for a higher grade rather than the more difficult one out of curiosity and as a challenge. 

As a teacher bird, grades indicate a student's level of understanding, skill, and growth. Not how smart that student is but their ability to comply with specific tasks at a specific time. As in they could have memorized all the steps to a problem but not actually understand it and get higher marks than someone who understands most of the problem but did not memorize. Grades arrive from assessment, mainly from standardized test as it is the most efficient method. Grades themselves are also the most efficient tool for reporting to parents and schools. Unfortunately, they corrupt the teacher-student relationship as they make the teacher play the role of the judge and executioner. It forces teachers, as Sarte and Hughes observed, to suspend interesting discussions to "plow through the prescribed curriculum."

All in all, despite all the disadvantages to numerical grading, it is extremely difficult to think of a better way to report a student's assets if there even is a better way. Therefore, I believe they are necessary but we should do our best to stray from assessment purely on something like a big final exam to determine overall understanding. As a student, I would also rather do a final project over an exam 11 times out of 10.

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