Affect of Grades on Learning

How Grades affect Students and Learning

Silliman University, Dumaguete City
A Requirement of BC 12
Section L

Ballesteros, Kathryn Ged L.
Egos, Abigail R.
S.Y. 2014-2015
Abigail R. Egos March 13, 2014
Kathryn Ged L. Ballesteros
BC 12 - T
How Grades affect Students and Learning As far as education is concerned, grades have always been our means of determining how much a student has improved in a given course of time. In fact, it has been such a vital ingredient of education that it affects even the behavior of students towards school and learning. One of the reasons we use grades is to motivate students to work towards the goal of either getting an A or avoiding an F (Bull, 2013.) While we agree that grades do persuade students to work hard, it doesn’t necessarily encourage them to learn. Rather, emphasizing the importance of grades reduces students’ interest in learning new concepts, their preference for challenging tasks, and even their quality of thinking. There are various methods of grading systems used in different schools all over the world. The two most common grading systems are the Norm-referenced and the Criterion-referenced systems. The Norm-referenced system evaluates students in relation to each other’s performance. For example, the top 10% of the class gets an A, the next 30% gets a B and so on. The Criterion-referenced system on the other hand, evaluates students in an absolute scale where A is only given to students with scores 95-100, and so on. There are many other alternative grading systems such as peer grading and self-evaluation (Orlin, 2013). Our arguments will only focus however on the first two mentioned systems since they are common to many and are used widely in populated schools and universities.
For some time now, society has led and influenced students to concentrate on getting high grades since this greatly affects their future endeavors and careers. How are they doing this? Well,

References: Bull, Bernard Dr., (2013). Etale- Life and learning in the Digital World Five Common Reasons for the Importance of Letter Grades. pp. 1, 4-5 Doi:http://etale.org/main/2013/04/10/5-common-reasons-for-the-importance-of-letter-grades/ Cenedella, Mark (2010).The Ladders: A white collar nation. pp. 4 Doi: http://www.businessinsider.com/great-news-weve-become-a-white-collar-nation-2010-1 Grayson, Patti  (2011)  Personal Learning Networks, The Compelling Need for Change, The Moral Imperative, Voices Grading – What Is It Good For? pp. 4 Doi:http://plpnetwork.com/2011/09/26/grading-%E2%80%93-what-is-it-good-for/ Orlin, Ben (2013) Center for Teaching and Learning: When Memorization Gets in the Way of Learning, Grading System pp. 1 and 3 Doi:http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/when-memorization-gets-in-the-way-of-learning/279425/ Doi:http://www1.umn.edu/ohr/teachlearn/resources/grading/ Lang, James (2013) Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty: How college classes enourage cheating