On Evaluating

My department recently opened a dialogue about grading. This reminded me of a classic Peter Elbow essay entitled “Ranking, Evaluating, Liking: Sorting Out Three forms of Judgment.”

In one key passage, Elbow argues that too much of an emphasis on evaluation disrupts learning:

Most important of all, evaluation harms the climate for learning and teaching—or rather too much evaluation has this effect. That is, if we evaluate everything students write, they tend to remain tangled up in the assumption that their whole job in school is to give teachers “what they want.” Constant evaluation makes students worry more about psyching out the teacher than about what they are really learning. Students fall into to a kind of defensive or on-guard stance toward the teacher: a desire to hide what they don’t understand and try to impress. This stance gets in the way of learning. (Think of the patient trying to hide symptoms from the doctor.) Most of all, constant evaluation by someone in authority makes students reluctant to take the risks that are needed for good learning—to try out hunches and trust their own judgment. Face it: if our goal is to get students to exercise their own judgment, that means exercising an immature and undeveloped judgment and making choices that are obviously wrong to us (9-10).

I take away two important insights here: 1) students need to fuck up a lot in order to learn and grow; 2) the thing that disrupts student growth is the authority of the teacher, who ranks and grades performances. If everything is evaluated for a grade then the messy, honest, vulnerable work of experimentation and exploration that is necessary for growth is replaced with a facade of competence and an unflattering dependence on the instructor.

Elbow offers an alternative vision of the writing classroom:

We see around us a widespread hunger to be evaluated that is often just as strong as the hunger to rank. Countless conditions make many of us walk around in the world wanting to ask others (especially those in authority), “How am I doing, did I do OK?” I don’t think the hunger to be evaluated is as harmful as the hunger to rank, but it can get in the way of learning. For I find that the greatest and most powerful breakthroughs in learning occur when I can get myself and others to put aside this nagging, self-doubting question (“How am I doing? How am I doing?”)—and instead to take some chances, trust our instincts or hungers. When everything is evaluated, everything counts. Often the most powerful arena for deep learning is a kind of “time out” zone from the pressures of normal evaluated reality: make-believe, play, dreams–in effect, the Shakespearian forest (10).

Elsewhere in the essay Elbow is very explicit that he doesn’t want to completely get rid of grading, although he offers no reasons why. So we might say that he offers something more akin to a day trip to the forest, where we are only temporarily free to do as we please without oversight or judgment. But I wonder, does knowing that we must soon return to the dominion of grading change how we behave in the wilds? Personally, I’m rather taken with the idea of the writing classroom being a zone of freedom dedicated to experimentation, play, and exploration. If the presence of an authority actually does disrupt learning, then it seems important to adopt a more thoroughly sylvan pedagogy. I stopped grading writing assignments a few years ago, mostly as an emergency response to the realities of teaching during the COVID pandemic. But I wish I had done this earlier: to my mind, the deficits associated with this practice are far outweighed by the benefits.

When I inform students that I won’t be grading their writing, they think I’m joking; when it becomes clear that I’m serious, they’re stunned. Some find the idea utterly repugnant: “How will I know how I’m doing?” they ask. Given the training they’ve received day after day, week after week, for 12 years of schooling, it is a totally rational response. But I’d like them to consider what this training and these expectations have cost them. I always respond to student objections to my grading policy with a set of rhetorical questions that I hope inspires a different way of looking at things:

If I told you what I thought your work was worth, would that be the right answer?

What does it say about you that you need me to tell you what your efforts amount to?

How hard did you work? Do you think you improved? What did you learn? What is the value of those things to you?

Has seeking a good grade ever made you compromise some belief that you held, however small?

Has seeking a good grade ever made your relationship with a teacher less honest or sincere?

How else can I make my classroom more like the forest where we played as children, where anything was possible and no one was there to make rules?