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Testing & Grades Are Obsolete

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“One looks back with gratitude to those teachers who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the soul of the child.”

– Carl Jung

This morning I saw an ad for an app called Cograder. In the advertisement, a teacher spoke directly to his colleagues, “I teach high school English in Colorado”… He complains about having no time to do anything personal because grading takes so long-until he discovered Cograder, his A.I. assistant. Rather than teachers using artificial intelligence to help them grade, further separating the relationship between teachers and students, I propose a completely different solution: Eliminate tests and grades.

For an educator to suggest doing away with tests and grades is tantamount to blasphemy. But I believe that it is vital at this juncture in time when the uses of artificial intelligence are increasing on every front, to take a very close look at how we teach now and what the expectations are for students to come. 

The current concept of how schools should be was devised during the Industrial Revolution. We are currently in the midst of a Technical Revolution. Just as at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution there was no way to conceive of what the future would bring, in a rapidly evolving technology explosion, it is equally, if not more, impossible to predict our future. However, there are some things that we do know, some things that do fit a current and future world’s needs.  As the modern world becomes more and more divided into us and them, there is a desperate need now for building relationships, social skills, critical thinking, and empathy. 

A.I is here, it will evolve as it will, and let’s hope it’s for the best, but more than ever in an increasingly technical world, teachers’ relationships with students need to be built on compassion and understanding of each and every student as a unique individual.

When I say that our schools would work much better if we did away with testing and grading, I do not mean to suggest that we lower teaching standards, quite the contrary.  What I mean is that we must offer an environment that actively encourages learning, an environment that supports the innate yearning to grow, to lean toward truth and understanding.

Testing, grades, awards for high achievers, etc, are designed to promote competition rather than excellence, orchestrated to encourage children not to make mistakes, to be ashamed of mistakes, and to avoid them at all costs. Yet just about every professional in the field of education agrees that thinking of mistakes as the perimeter of a students’ mastery of a concept, and using that benchmark to create a better path to increased understanding, is the very best way to learn.

An atmosphere of discouraging mistakes creates a class room of children who inhibit their creativity out of fear of being thought foolish. Essentially, students silence themselves. They do not feel free to follow the rabbit trails of connections that lead to true perception. Comprehension of new concepts is a process that involves curiosity, creativity, and an open mind. It takes place in an environment of trust. Mistakes in a classroom should be  seen as opportunities to learn, and children should be encouraged for thinking outside the standardized boundaries.

Testing is too often a stressful experience that leads not to true or lasting understanding, but short term memory, all night cramming, and sometimes, cheating. Cheating (which, ironically, may entail a student using A.I.) may seem a viable alternative to failing if mistakes bring your grade down, which could affect your final GPA, which could affect your admittance to a prestigious university, which could affect your ability to get a decent job, which could affect your entire life…ad nauseam. Even if these strictures once were true, technology is changing our lives so rapidly that they can no longer be true, as we have no idea what the future will require.

Rather than doing things as they have always been done, let’s ask the question: What do we want to achieve through education? Are we succeeding in these goals by training students to test well, at the expense of teaching them to think?

At the risk of sounding utopian, try to imagine a school in which a child is truly respected. Although we cannot know what the future holds, one thing we do know is that our children are the future. Let’s stop expecting them to go into the factory of our current education system and come out a fully formed human ready to follow all the rules. Instead, let’s encourage them to wonder, to explore, to be curious and caring individuals. Let’s teach the whole child, and this means truly seeing the individual student, being sensitive to the nuance of how each student expresses herself. This cannot be accomplished by feeding a child’s responses into a virtual assistant without capability of emotion or nuance.

What is needed now, what is vital,  are teachers who are more human, not less.

When AI tears up at hearing an old song, knows the heart ache of seeing children suffer in senseless wars, stares in wonder at the night sky, falls down on its knees awestruck by the splendor of it all, the magnificence, the marvel, and the miracle of this beautiful blue spinning planet, when this happens, I will consider changing my opinion. 

“When I say it’s you I like, I’m talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed.” 
-Mr. Rogers

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“She’s flighty.” “He’s a dreamer.”

Should these children be diagnosed, labeled and medicated to make them conform? Are they abnormal, or just marching to the beat of a different drummer? Perhaps she’s flying somewhere and he’s dreaming of something far more interesting than the worksheet of the day. Are we creating standardized children to excel on our standardized tests? Our culture values achievers. Does enduring the weariness night after night that many children feel at finishing their homework count as an accomplishment? How does a child who continually fails, who is labeled as a troublemaker, who never gets the shiny sticker awards, or the stellar grades, develop belief in himself?

When, in the United States, approximately six and a half million of all school age children, one in five of every high school boy, and over ten thousand toddlers are taking powerful medications after being diagnosed with ADHD, it’s time to change the system, not the children. How do we teach both the child and the teacher the difference between bouts of creative distraction, when one thought is allowed to pinwheel into a beautiful display of many thoughts, and distractions that are indications that the child is not connecting, for any number of reasons, to the subject being taught?

It is not likely that the educational system will soon change to accommodate different types of learners, but individual teachers can. It is a teacher who often is the one to bring up the possibility of ADHD to the unsuspecting parent at the first parent/teacher conference. Although the diagnosis is purely subjective, there being no definitive test, either psychological or physical, for this condition, parents assume that the teacher must be right. Of course there are teachers who may be right, who with much serious forethought have made the difficult decision to approach this sensitive issue. But, more often than not, the teacher is wrong and herself a victim of the aggressive pharmaceutical marketing campaigns that are truly shameful considering the grave side effects and the unknown impact on brain chemistry that can afflict a child taking Ritalin, Adderall, Concerta, or any of the other potent psychotropic drugs. In the last 20 years the number of narcotized children skyrocketed from approximately six hundred thousand to over 3.5 million.

Psychologist Dr. Keith Conners, Professor Emeritus at Duke University, who was one of the first researches to bring ADHD to the public’s attention as a neurobiological disorder, states in a 2013 NY Times article, “The numbers make it look like an epidemic. Well, it’s not. It’s preposterous. This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.” In the same article Roger Griggs, the pharmaceutical executive and entrepreneur who coined the term “Adderall” after his Orwellian idea of combining “A.D.D.” and “for all”, calls these drugs, “nuclear bombs that should be prescribed only in extreme circumstances.”

Teachers, as first responders, must begin to see that celebrating diversity in the classroom means more than creating an environment that respects those of all cultures and colors.   It means creating an equal opportunity classroom in which differences of all kinds are not labeled as deficits. Mastery of a subject often requires perseverance and repetition, but must it appear to the child as boring and without purpose? Most children, even those with diagnoses of ADHD, are able to concentrate with surprising tenacity if a subject interests them. Watch a child build a tower over and over in order to get it to balance, or fathom out a complicated puzzle. What motivates a child to work at these high levels of concentration? This is the subject that we should be exploring, and that all teachers should be striving to understand. How can we spark curiosity and create stimulating lessons that inspire creative and attentive students? Has our society gone so far wrong as to believe that a child not sitting quietly over schoolwork is a deviant who must be drugged into submission? It is time to stop ostracizing the atypical and eradicate the illusion that our childrens’ learning problems can be alleviated with meds. Instead, let parents and teachers unite to do the hard work of examining our current educational system and find solutions that do not label our children as the problem.