Why Grading Is Good

¶ … Abolish Grading" by Paul Goodman

Paul Goodman's essay entitled, "A Proposal to Abolish Grading" is analyzes the effect of grading to student performance. Goodman's essay raises the question on whether grading is a good measure of determining student performance in schools and universities. The author's position in the essay states clearly that he is against grading as a measure that will be used in determining school performance, and this position is supported by three primary reasons. Goodman's first stance is that the pressure that a student gets from trying to achieve a higher grade in order to pass results to plagiarism and cheating; the second stance concerns the 'irrelevancy" of grading as a measure that will determine whether a student performed very well in school or not, and this is crucial when grades are used for appraising a student for his or her future career; and lastly, grading results to poor student performance because it lacks the personal interaction between the instructor/professor and student, which is a vital element in motivating the student to perform properly in school. These points raised by Goodman can be considered viable, but this does not mean that his stance regarding grading in universities can be accepted earnestly by the author. In fact, although Goodman raises good points in his essay, the author of this paper contend that grading is still a necessary aspect of a student's academic experience because it provides an objective method in measuring student performance and serves as a psychological motivation for the student to perform well in school.

The first contention, wherein the grading system is an objective measure of appraising student performance, proves that the effectiveness of a student's studying and schooling primarily depends on objective measures, specifically the grading system in schools. Grading is vital in school because it eliminates the possibility of creating a 'personal bias' in the instructors/professors' judgment if personal appraisal were to replace grading in determining student performance. In contrast to Goodman's belief that personal interaction improves student performance, personal involvement can only result to unequal treatment of instructors to their students, which will then affect the instructors' evaluation of a particular student's performance. Thus, grading is a good measure of student performance evaluation because of its objectivity and reliability in measurement (since grading is mostly quantitative in measure).

Another reason why grading is a necessary aspect to a student's academic experience is because it serves as the student' psychological motivation to study harder and perform well in school. Grading provides the student an idea of what a student's class standing is, and the student will strive to study harder in order to come out on top and be considered as one of the top students in class. Grading is a psychological medium of a student to achieve self-gratification and satisfaction in his or her performance at school. Issues of plagiarism and cheating to achieve a higher grade is an altogether different issue, since these forms of student misconduct can also occur even without the pressure of achieving a high grade. In fact, students are more susceptible to acts of misconduct and dishonesty when they personally know that they will not be appraised objectively and numerically in their school performance and skills.