The Grading System in Schools

The grading system used in schools has a number of consequences, from making the entire system effective to creating some resentment among students because of the need to compete with others. There are many critics of the system who find that grading creates more problems than it addresses. At the same time, it is difficult to see how the system could be completely replaced given the degree of dependence placed on grades by employers, colleges, parents, teachers, and the students themselves.

John Leo in his essay "A Proposal to Abolish Grading" writes about what he calls "grade inflation," or the idea that many instructors give few grades lower than a B-, thus placing a number of average students together at the top of the grade curve. This makes these students seem to be doing better than they truly are, at least as Leo sees it. One result would be that average students are disappearing from the campus, and leo says this is due to grade inflation.

Leo believes that this is taking place because colleges are competing for students who, along with their parents, demand high grades and who are more willing than students in the past to complain when they are graded as being poor students. Leo suggests different reasons why this has come about, perhaps beginning with the Vietnam era as professors gave students higher marks than they deserved in order to keep them out of the draft, or because of a rise in the philosophy of relativism as professors avoided using high standar

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Category: Psychology - T