Lecturers develop a module or course because they are, supposedly, experts in the area and decide course content. Now, in my own case, I *could* just refer students to a text book, and say ‘read that’. But of course, I don’t simply want students to memorise information and regurgitate it into an exam script. I want them to be able to take that material and place it into some sort of historical context concerning the development of ideas within the subject area. I want them to be able to apply that knowledge to problems they may not have encountered, or adapt it for situations outside the narrow ‘examples’ they were given. I want them to see some sort of wider relevence of the topics, or think about the problems yet to be solved. And when I award a ‘grade’ I’d hope it is an assessment of more than just ‘what they remembered from the text’.

This ‘grading’ system is advantageous to all involved. Employers increasingly look at individual grades in individual subjects. Why employ someone in a computational role if every computational mark, as evaluated by the ‘supposed expert in uni’, is poor? It benefits the students who quickly see where their aptitudes lie and where they need to work harder. I’ve lost track of the number of students who weren’t great on the theoretical parts but we magnificent at the experimental parts of our courses. That tells THEM something about where their career directions might lie, or where their interests might be. And, in terms of postgrads, it helps us match the right person for the right research.

I think abandoning that would be crazy. And I think it would harm students more than some poorly defined notion of ‘destructive effects of grades’.

It’s interesting that for all our rhetoric about graduate professionals, university practices aren’t aligned to these future professional horizons. We don’t aspire to train students to understand how the working world functions (perfectly well) without grades; instead we march looking backwards to the value systems of high schools.

The second thing that we do while grading is the work of career shortlisting for graduate employers – we presort the pile for them.

I’m not sure either of these dependent practices are really worth defending.

“…they should avoid putting a number or letter on individual assignments. This helps to make grades as invisible as possible for as long as possible – and therefore minimizes the harm they do when students are thinking about them”……….Why of why are we so afraid of excellence? Why do we hide behind letter/numeric grading structure? Why not go further? What’s wrong with saying that a student got 84% for his Maths exam instead of allocating an ‘A’ or a ’6′?

Why does everything and everyone have to be seen as equal in all things when we all know that they are not.