Academic evaluation is a bitch. The problem of grades, of what to grade and how to grade it, is the permanent affliction of academia. Even in a class whose subject presents clear problems with clear solutions, where the ability to demonstrate material competence is unproblematic, the decision an educator or an institution makes of what exactly to evaluate and how exactly to evaluate it introduces the prejudice of arbitrary decisions and subjectivity. And how much greater, how much clearer is the problem in classes of greater artfulness, of greater creativity and creation, of greater reflection. Some radical institutions have tried to do away with grading entirely; my own little college, by recording grades unceremoniously into a computer, yields to the artificial but more-or-less efficacious necessities of admission to other institutions, to demands for documents to prove and to benchmark ineloquently and without precision; but those grades are not reported to students, who must fill out a form to view them, and the primary evaluations are presented to students orally by their teachers.
I did not come to Mississippi to attend graduate school; I came to teach, to be helpful, to know the South. I am nevertheless enrolled in the School of Education at the University of Mississippi, and my performance in a curriculum culminating in a master’s degree must, of course, be evaluated. I do not envy the School of Education, its dean or its teachers, for this task. Nevertheless, their performance at this task is my single greatest annoyance and complaint with the program I have entered (my not being here primarily for the degree precludes bitterness, but not annoyance). I do not know whether it is endemic to the department or peculiar to the program, but in either case I am faced with a blind, unwavering, pig-headed fidelity to the notion of objectivity, which here, of course, is a joke.
I do not mean to deny the possibility of objectivity in the abstract, or to entertain absurdities about teaching being impossible to evaluate. Of course there are good teachers and bad teachers, great ones and lousy ones, and some significant possibility for rather broad agreement about which are which. But assigning them scores on a 100-point scale with a 20-point rubric and expecting that a 93 presents a real and substantial difference from an 88, or even a 76, is a particular kind of lunacy, and it misunderstands, I think, something very basic about what it wants to do.
I made my peace with subjective grading a long time ago. Sure, it stinks. All right. And that’s why unthinking or desperate educators invented the formulaic five-paragraph essay (or, hell, the formalized definition of the paragraph itself), which is not more expressive or beautiful (usually less, in fact) but is more easily and consistently evaluated, and which thereby makes young people not into students of the Liberal Arts or of the humane or of themselves or even of their world, but into students of standardized tests; and which is perhaps why (or is a contributing reason that) education has almost entirely ceased to be education, becoming instead training for evaluations of arbitrary or somewhat arbitrary content memorization, leading eventually to different levels of job training. The monomaniacal pursuit of objective evaluation is destructive of real education. Objectively evaluatable pursuits, or at least those pursuits that are easily and consistently objectively evaluatable, are usually the least interesting, the least insightful, the least enlightening, the least lovely, the least worthwhile, and certainly the least worthy of the dignity of the name “education.” And all those minutes spent studying the test are minutes wasted, minutes spent learning how to be evaluated, learning how to fill out the form (be it a multiple-choice bubble form or a five-paragraph essay form or an STAI lesson plan form), learning what will be evaluated and how; those minutes remind the student that he is studying for a score, that he is playing a game, and that the goal is not self-cultivation but winning; they pervert the education of the students who are good at this empty game, and they discourage the students who are bad at it from pursuing education at all.
Performance in education, the question of whether someone is becoming more educated, is fundamentally subjective, and is only answerable subjectively. Even objective evaluations of a student’s ability to solve mathematical problems and perform drills, while themselves objective, reflect implicit subjective decisions about relative importance and do not necessarily correlate with education (how many students who can perform calculus drills all day really understand or appreciate the calculus?). Its being subjective does not mean that it is not real, or that it is not absolute, or that it is not knowable or even evaluatable. But any “objective” system of evaluation, any contrivance that allows very precise rather than very broad gradations and that allows those gradations the conceit of reflecting anything real, is a ruse.
So how do you evaluate and assign grades to student-teachers? I don’t know. You do it subjectively, though, however you do it; and the extent to which you pretend to do it objectively is the extent to which you are evaluating nothing, or are evaluating the ability to learn and adjust to the system of evaluation.
There is a manifest absurdity in a rubric that assigns the same weight to the important and fundamentally subjective “classroom management” and to, say, writing the date on the board. Some people have defended the absurdity by calling the latter “free points,” but I do not see how they can defend the existence of “free points” while also maintaining the conceit of objectively evaluating something real. There should be no “free points” in any evaluation system at all; least of all should they exist in a system that objectively evaluates something real. What the “free points” serve to do is minimize the influence of the fundamentally subjective: there’s nothing subjective about writing the date on the board, so you can’t contest that; now the fundamentally subjective “classroom management” has a smaller influence on your overall grade. If we bloat the rubric with arbitrary and mostly meaningless requirements, we effect the air of an intricate and calculated system while minimizing the role of subjective judgment (which, of course, is the only judgment, since judgment requires a subject-judge).
But the subjective is still in there, and the numerousness of graded items encourages a kind of carelessness in the precision of each: with 20 five-point items less care is allowed to each small distinction than would be given on rubric of only three or five items. This teacher’s classroom management was good, it presents no obvious suggestions for improvement, but is it worth four points or five? With nineteen similar questions I reflect less on the subtlety than I would if there were fewer, and the evaluation risks becoming more, not less, haphazard. And how likely is it that a given evaluator, for no conscious fault of her own, would reach more readily for fives when evaluating women, fours when evaluating men? Or vice versa? Or when evaluating pretty or plain teachers, or tall or short ones? Such unconscious prejudice is inescapable, surely, but is it more likely when evaluations are performed simply on simple (though subjective) criteria, or when they are complex on very numerous criteria?
Having seen many of my colleagues teach, and having heard some talk of grades, I find no consistent and substantial correlation between evaluation and quality of teaching, and I suspect that while some reflection of our teaching does exist in our grades, it exists primarily in those very subjective parts that make the formulators of the system so uncomfortable; and unfortunately the greater part of the grade reflects our quickness in adapting to the grading system.