The Risk with the Grade

Recently a professor, curious about my interest with linking grades to students' emotions and motivation, asked me if I felt safe when I took an introduction to literature class.

I didn't know how to respond. She reminded how I once expressed to her how much I learned in the literature class, and she wanted to know if I felt safe to take risks there. I answered, "No."

She said to me that safety is a privilege and by keeping students safe we may be denying them particular learning opportunities. In other words, teachers who sometimes push students outside of their comfort zone (as I experienced in the introduction to literature class) can teach some of the strongest and most valuable lessons. 

But what does this have to do with grades and evaluations?

Generally speaking, anytime one is evaluated on their performance they are pushed outside of their comfort zone. As students know their work is being evaluated and marked with a letter grade, they place more value on the assignment.

For example:

As a student who has taken several pass/fail classes, I know the level of importance students place on assigned writing tasks in these courses.  Many of my peers -- myself included -- have said these words, "It's only a pass/fail course," meaning that the level of work required is the bare minimum.

However, had a grade been assigned to the writing task, the level of commitment and effort given by myself and my peers would have skyrocketed. This reaction might be because the grade itself pushes students outside of their comfort zone and motivates them to do better work.

I initially thought, as I have began the early stages of my master's thesis concerning the link between grades and evaluations to emotions and motivations with writing, that harsh grading and strongly critical evaluations must decimate a student's motivation to writing.  But this cannot be the whole story.

In the introduction to literature class that I mentioned above, the first grade I received in the class was an F.  Through much work and determination, I squeaked by with a B for the semester. The F placed me outside of my comfort zone and motivated me to up my performance level. I know without a doubt that my dedication to that class far outweighs any of my undergraduate work from a pass/fail course. A evaluations from a pass/fail course could never motivate me the way the F did. 

Without the risk, uncertainty, and the lack of security grades provide, will student motivation decrease?

Please share your thoughts with me as I explore this topic.

Let's Talk about Grades!

"Most students hate to be graded, most teachers hate to give grades, and everyone hates to talk about grades" (Edward White, "Evaluations: The Enemy of Learning").

Except me!

For the rest of the semester, I resolve myself to tackling issues surrounding grades, particularly on papers.

But I will not focus only on grades. There are many ways students are evaluated, and many ways students respond to these evaluations. What I am interested in and what I plan discuss (in spite of how much we hate talking about it) is particularly those issues that involve student emotional responses to these evaluations.

In other words, I want to talk about what the "grade" does to us.

To begin, I believe it is important to empathize with students as they enter into the world of collegiate writing. Writing, at any level, in any academic form, often provokes what I believe to be a strong sense of vulnerability in students.

This idea of vulnerability stems from Brene Brown's relatively recent success with her Ted.com presentation which propelled her into the limelight.

Vulnerability, as Brown argues, is not a weakness but an opportunity to learn and cultivate a new skill. However, vulnerability is steeped in fear of judgment or receiving a poor evaluation from our peers, our superiors, and as I argue, the red pen. 

If students are saturated in the feeling of vulnerability as they enter into the language of the university, then they may step too cautiously. They may, as Brown argues, refrain from "entering into the arena" of academic discourse. Vulnerability limits our ability to be creative, to take risks, and to dive into a project with the conviction necessary to achieve the level of work we desire.

To combat this feeling of vulnerability in students, teachers can expose their own vulnerabilities to students. Self exposure in this form can help to alleviate anxieties that cripples students' writing abilities. 

When teachers simply allow students to see their imperfections, it encourages risk taking behaviors in students, dissolves much of the defeatist mentality students have when approaching writing, and allows them to see themselves as humans with the ability to improve. 

If vulnerability is based on the fear of judgment, or in this case grades and evaluations, then how do educators ultimately overcome vulnerability?  Do we eliminate grades altogether as some have argued?

I don't believe so.

I believe, with a little effort and imagination, students can be graded, evaluated, and offered feedback in such a way that encourages students to take risks, to be creative, and allow them to make embarrassing mistakes - as learners often do - without capitalizing on their vulnerability.

I have not developed a system to propose here. When I do, I will sell you my book. I do, however, invite the conversation to begin in the comments section below. Students voices are especially appreciated.

Tell us how you feel about grades!

Grammarly: “Another Set of Eyes to Help Perfect Your Writing”?

Grammarly is an online service created to help anyone with grammar usage, word choices, and possible plagiarism risks. The website grammarly.com advertises that over 3 million users trust the site to find over 150 types of grammatical errors. The site also claims to compare all submissions to more than 2 billion online sources to check for plagiarism. In short, Grammarly is supposed to be “another set of eyes to help perfect your writing” (Grammarly.com).

It sounds fantastic, right! 

But how effective is the program? 

Here’s how it works: Once a user of Grammarly creates a document, all he or she has to do is copy and paste the text into Grammarly’s text box via the webite. In a few seconds the site will compute a score ranging anywhere from 1-100. The program will also inform the user if plagiarism is a risk factor. 

The details of these critiques are not available to the user until the user creates a free account. Once that occurs, Grammarly will take the user step by step through the document highlighting problem areas while offering a description of the error highlighted. In the event of plagiarism, the website will provide a link to the likely source of the material.  

It actually works well for what it is. 

It is not, however, another set of eyes to help perfect your writing. 

Take these scenarios for example:
 
To test the site, I grabbed my Oxford Book of Essays sitting on my shelf. I found E.B. White’s essay “About Myself,” and I copied the first paragraph from the essay exactly as it had been published. I then plugged it into Grammarly’s program. 

I purposely chose an essay example to avoid any creative writing problems that may become problematic in my experiment. I didn't want poetry, or dialect to factor into the results, just nice clean prose. I chose E.B. White for his efforts in discussing grammar usage in the popular The Elements of Style handbook. 

Out of the 1-100 scale, E.B. White received a 67!

The program critiqued the essay in this way:
Review this sentence for adjective and adverb use
Review this sentence for comma use.
Review this sentence for use of the passive voice
Spelling
Spelling
Commonly confused words

Grammarly did highlight most of the document as at risk for plagiarism citing a New Yorker article from 1945 as the source.
For my second experiment, I chose Oscar Wilde’s “The Truth of Masks” essay. 

Again, I picked an essay form to use as an example for the same reasons as above, and I picked a seemingly more obscure essay to test the plagiarism program.   

Only 25 points for Wilde.

The most common problem with Wilde was “wordiness." Again, the plagiarism tool caught the text. This time the site provided a link accrediting the work to Wilde.

I did my third experiment for fun, mostly. I chose Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs & Ham. This text includes sentences like “Would you? Could you? In a car? Eat them! Eat them! Here they are.”

Dr. Seuss received the highest score of the three: 75 out of 100. I did not check for plagiarism.

So what does this mean for writers using Grammarly?

It means that Grammarly may be a useful tool to some degree, but it is not another set of eyes, at least not human eyes. If it were another set of human eyes, the grades E.B. White, Oscar Wilde, and Dr. Seuss received would have been outrageous results. These guys are masters! They are pros at what they do. But Grammarly cannot recognize the human nature in language.

Why? Because it is not a human. It cannot considers a piece of writing according to its rhetorical context: purpose, audience, subject, genre, and rhetorical aim. 

Therefore, the site does not provide a replacement for the human reader. As a tool to objectively place value and merit on a piece of writing, Grammarly leaves much to be desired. The fact that the program even offers a grade is dumbfounding.

Here's my advice with using Grammarly. 

First, ignore the grade. The grade Grammarly provides is clearly nonsensical and is in no way useful. 

Second, the grammar tool does well to point out possible problem areas. Use the tips as suggestions only but do not compromise the integrity of the document to please the Grammarly program. Remember, it is not human.

Third, Grammarly should never be used as a tool to predict a grade from a teacher and should never be used by a teacher to grade the work of a student. Doing so will only lead to the degradation of both. 

My final suggestion is to take the plagiarism tool seriously. The program seems to be thorough and can even be useful in finding sources to reference in the document. One can never take the risk of plagiarism too seriously. 

However, in the E.B. White example, the first sentence, “I am a man of medium height” (which received a plagiarism flag) is simple language and a common description of many people. Flagging this sentence as plagiarism is iffy at best.  

Just because I was curious how Grammarly would evaluate my own writing, I ran this blog post through Grammarly to see how it stacked up against the heavyweights mentioned above. 

I received a 73. 

According to Grammarly, I’m not quite to the level of essayist that Dr. Seuss is, but I have E.B. White and Oscar Wilde beat by a mile!

A Writer's Motivation

Dan Pink’s presentation “Drive: The Surprising Truth about what Motivates Us” (video shown below) discusses the science of motivation in the workplace. With the visual help from RSAnimate, Pink makes a surprising argument. 

When a task becomes more complicated than grunt work and requires some conceptual, creative thinking, exterior motivators no longer work (Pink). In fact, exterior motivators have the opposite effect. A large prize puts more pressure on an employee and reduces the chances of success. 

Too often employers find the work of their staff to be flat, insufficient, and simply bad. Offering a larger bonus only makes the matters worse. These descriptions of performance are not limited to employer-to-employee relationships. Many college professors make the same comments in regards to their students' work.

Motivation is a common topic in pedagogy just as it is in the business world. What exactly motivates students? If the grade is not a motivator, what else is there?

Just as employees, students perform better with a sense of having purpose, a sense of contributing to society, a sense of mastering a skill. When students believe they are leaving a mark on the world, they are better motivated.  With better motivation and a lack of pressure from an exterior motivator such as money or a good grade, the final product may improve immensely.

Students cannot escape the pressure grades place on performance. However, they can move the focus away from the grade and complete the task for more important reasons. This may sound like heresy. The grade is the goal; the goal is the grade! 

But the philosophy of grade-getting turns a student’s work into basic hoop jumping that Pink argues may hinder the performance.

If a student can integrate their work into a community that values the work (i.e. study groups, writing centers, club organizations) and/or believes the tasks will lead to a pride of accomplishment, then the work they produce will have much stronger potential.