In this post I will share my ideas about the concept of abolishing grades for students.
My opinion about flipped learning you can find here on an old blog of mine.
These sources gave me information:
A Lecture From the Lectured
An A+ student regrets his grades
Should grading systems be abolished?
The Day I Abolished Grading
In general I find that this way to teach a good thing. What I don’t like is how the students in the first source argue. It sounds like they go to class with zero motivation and no discipline and blaim the teacher afterwards for not making it entertaining enough for them. It is good to give feedback to teachers, but it’s still your choice to get educated or not, which is why you should definitely learn to have some discipline if you want to go to school.
Anyways, if you want to realize an abolish grade system on a big scale, you should take two things into consideration:
- Not only school would need to change, but also the whole industry. At the moment grades are being asked if you want to start working at a company directly after leaving from school, all over the world.
- In some situations (e.g. in courses with 1200 people) it’s just not possible to abolish the grading system.
Things like this are obstacles on the way to get rid of the current grading system.
Nevertheless, I find it a good idea. In Finland the system is less evaluation-driven and PISA confirms a better education there. (But there are other important factors as well, that improve the quality of education in Finland. E.g. the average amount of students in one class is far smaller and teachers get different trained than in other countries.)
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