Why Grading is More Important than Teaching

At one time or another, most of us have quietly uttered the sentiment, “teaching would be great if only I didn’t have to do all of this grading.”  Giving a great lecture is energizing: Grading a giant batch of student work is exhausting.  Each and every day of teaching inquisitive students brings new challenges to overcome: Grading is monotonous.  Teaching a single class takes about 50-minutes: Grading that same class can take the better part of a day or two.  And, creating that perfect, magical example on the spot where students respond with the “ah ha, now I’ve got it!” is euphoric: Grading is an isolated, joyless, task that seems relentless.  No wonder teaching without grading sounds like so much more fun!

This romanticized version of teaching exists to be sure, but darker, less spoken of sides of teaching exist—the time spent in isolation preparing lecture notes, dealing with the heart string pulling student situation who wants to pass but hasn’t achieved sufficient mastery, the non-teaching related administrative work handed down from top-level administration, and, of course, the monotonous chore of grading student, after student, after student in our burgeoning classes.  Grading is a chore that too often eats into evenings we should be spending with our families and friends.  Grading is a task that too often consumes weekends where we should be interacting with our communities or living an intellectual life of reflection that academics were implicitly promised.  Grading often seems to loom quietly and incessantly in the darkest, hidden corner of academic life.

Perhaps we should absolve ourselves of grading responsibilities altogether?  We could decree that we are simply going to teach by telling our truth and students can get it or not, and they themselves can go about the process of checking their homework solutions against a posted key.  Or, one could hire a student-worker or virtual assistant to do all of the grading for us.  Even better, we can hope that computerized auto-grading of the future with virtual, artificial intelligence-driven “smart tutors” will do all of the grading and fulfill their promise to return us academics to the intellectual life of ease and contemplation that we were promised. What if there is a different worldview of testing and grading out there—one that is not so ominously dark and full of dread? What if a refreshed view of testing and grading made thinking about testing and grading worthy of embracing as just as valuable and rewarding—if not more important and intellectually stimulating—than delivering that perfectly paced lecture, conjuring that insightful illustrative example on the spot, or creating that cleverly illustrated PowerPoint slide that becomes a repeated course touchstone?  Might that capture your interest?  I’m inviting you to take a reflective pause for a moment and be open to the inspiring possibility that testing and grading can be intellectually invigorating, socially interactive, less time consuming … and above all, fun.  In order to do this, you will  need are new tools and ready-to-go strategies and—above all else—a fresh mindset set to elevate your teaching effectiveness, enhance your end of course evaluations,  and reinvigorate courses you have taught for many years.  In other words, to develop a mantra of testing & grading matters!

Just what grades are for, anyway?  There are two perpendicular, if not skewed, worldviews regarding the purpose of grades: the apathetic & cynical view and the testing & grading matters view. The apathetic and cynical view of grading is the one I’ve mistakenly held for too much of my three-decades long teaching career and is quite common among my colleagues, if water-cooler and coffee-hour casual commentary are to be considered seriously.  The core idea underlying this professor-centered worldview is that teaching is fun, but grading is not. The foundation of this perspective is based on the idea that the teacher is the most important person in the teaching and learning process, whereas students are secondary, if not perfunctory.  In short, this notion is best described as one that advocates that teaching would be most enjoyable without having to grade.

Imagine being the respected “sage on the stage”, class after class, dispensing wisdom and insight, and then as a reward being left alone afterwards to ponder greater questions of the universe. When teaching from this apathetic and cynical point of view, it doesn’t really matter if your class has 12 students, or 120 students, or 1,200 students—the job for the professor-centered teacher is to present the class content in a logical, and perhaps entertaining way, and then figure out how to assign grades to a long list of students. We call this cynical because the professor operating from this perspective often feels like the students don’t really care about the content and that they just want to pass the class with the minimum amount of work possible so that they can get their class credit.  And, this viewpoint is additionally described as apathetic because it seems that by and large the professor doesn’t really care either. Such a notion is characterized by philosophical statements such as, “I put the information out there in an understandable fashion and if students don’t get it, then it isn’t my fault.”  The underlying idea here is that teaching is a one-way transmission of information from the professor to the students.  The professors’ responsibility is to tell students what they are expected to know.  Likewise, it is the students’ responsibilities to demonstrate that knowledge on graded assignments and scored tests, and the level at which students display their knowledge earns them a grade score on their transcript. If this painted this picture of teaching and grading seems to be rather disheartening and impersonal, that is because it is shallow and self-aggrandizing.  Teaching from the apathetic & cynical philosophical perspective is tedious and boring for professors and students alike.  Course content and structure in this genre barely changes from year to year except to update the textbook reading assignments when new editions are printed or in the quite rare event that a major conceptual paradigm shift occurs within the discipline that is worth teaching to undergraduates.  And, more to the point, there is no real reason to shake up the course structure just because a new group of students with more diverse backgrounds, motivations, and aptitudes enrolls in the class because it is all about the professor’s content knowledge, not about the students.  Face-to-face, small seminar room, large lecture hall, zoom or blackboard at a distance, or pre-recorded—the format doesn’t matter in this case as it is all the same. In the end, the widespread and limiting notion that “teaching is telling, and grading is scoring” is boring for everyone.  Especially, but not just, the professor. And, truth be told, it doesn’t work well for a diversity of students.  The only people highly successful in this modality seem to be the narrow demographic of people who enjoy what might be called conventional schooling, have always excelled in conventional schooling, and found themselves succeeding in entering the ruling social class who build modern looking schools filled with the latest technology that continue to teach conventionally that largely only succeed with people just like themselves.  Each year, 30% of college freshman don’t return for their college sophomore year—that’s losing more than one million freshmen, and statistically they will never return to higher education.  There has got to be another way. What if there was another way to frame teaching a class that wasn’t boring?  What if there was a way to dramatically shift a class’s style from being a predominantly professor-centered information-download class where achievement is impersonally scored to instead by a two-way, transactional-style class format which is exciting and new each and every day for both professors and students alike?  What if you could design a class that is invigorating and challenging to teach that thrives on the diversity of the students?  What if you had a class design that performed best when there is a robust mix student abilities, life-experiences, and motivations—high and low?  Then, might teaching and grading be more fun and less drudgery?

Consider instead, if only for a moment, a starkly different teaching philosophy we affectionately call for lack of a better phrase, testing & grading matters.  This perspective is built upon an intellectual ponderance of, “what if grading mattered more than teaching?” What if class time was redefined from information going from the professor’s notes into students’ notes without passing through the brains of either to a new definition of two-way, transactional communication of ideas? What if the scare time faculty have available for planning their teaching was reallocated away from preparing PPT slides to instead designing ways to interact with and acquire data on how their students are thinking?  What if instead of lecturing for an entire class period, a professor spent more time listening to students and giving them feedback.  What if instead of mindlessly transcribing lecture notes, class time was spent instead on learning and thinking? Enter the intellectual arena a notion of FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT.  In the next series of blogs, we systematically will explore formative assessment as an underlying strategy to refresh, revitalize, and reinvigorate your teaching. If you just can’t wait until the next blog installment, I invite you to watch a movie showing formative assessment in action at the high school level in an experiment, The Classroom Experiment, featuring formative assessment and interactive teaching guru Dylan Wiliam, in two parts (part 1 and part 2) on YouTube. If we’ve caught your attention, you might also consider exploring some other earlier blog posts on the topic of testing and grading, including, among others:

• Posing questions for class discussion. SCST 4(10).
• Is it time to take advantage of automatic grading?  SCST, 3(7).
• Five (or six) secrets and grading hacks to keep up with grading. SCST, 2(8).
• Get the vote out: New options for polling and soliciting students’ ideas. SCST, 2(7).
• Creating the most effective final exam review sheet, if you must. SCST, 1(9).
• Higher level exam questions that are still quick to grade. SCST, 1(5).

Suggested citation:  Slater, T. F. (2020, August).  Why grading is more important than teaching. Society of College Science Teachers Blog, 6(1), https://www.scst.org/blog