Rubrics, Assessment, and The Art of Original Thought

            If we’re talking about grades and rubrics and assessment, let’s make one thing clear: there is no perfect setup for all of this. One may never even come to exist in any of our lifetimes. Unless we had a device that allowed us to peer into our students’ brains and see, in clear and precise terms, just how much critical thinking and motivation went into their assignments, and how much effort they honestly put into their work, and their desire to engage the topic at hand and learn more about it, and their passion for all learning, and their drive to succeed in the world, etcetera, etcetera, then a “perfect” result simply won’t happen. Period.

            And that’s because we’re always going to run into problems with assessing accurately what students really know. Most hard-working students who normally receive excellent marks in school serve only to please the opinions (and therefore, the rubrics and grading systems) of their teachers, and of course therein lies a crucial dilemma: if students are just “saying what we want to hear,” then how on Earth can we ever know for sure what their OWN opinions on our assignment was? Think about it like this: we can create an “assignment” telling a student to write how sorry they were that they punched another student in the face, and then we create a nice little rubric explaining what a “4” is (Insightful ideas! Impeccable grammar! Compelling prose!) and what a “2” is (Slightly generic! Missed a bunch of commas! Formatting needs work!) which is all neat and good. And maybe the student turns in a terrific 3-pager that earns him a nice “4” as well. And we take that “4” and mark it down and after we go home that day, our conclusion is that our student truly learned the error of his ways and that he was very sorry for punching Ted in the face.

            Wait a minute – do we really know for sure that he was sorry, or did we base that assumption over an assignment? But he got a “4” on it, didn’t he? How could he have gotten a “4” if he didn’t really learn anything? But then we think on it for a second and realize why this is so… haven’t we, in the past, achieved good grades on assignments from middle school, or high school, or even undergrad, when we know deep down that we didn’t really get anything out of the lesson? Weren’t there times (and be honest with yourselves!) that we went ahead and “phoned in” an assignment once or twice? Now, it doesn’t mean we didn’t give a true and conscious effort – we did every time – but we all know when we learned something and when we didn’t. I used to get all A’s in high school chemistry assignments, and I aced the midterm, and the final exam, and today I don’t know one thing about chemistry. Not one thing!

            And maybe you can argue that I simply forgot what I had learned, but that I had learned it in the first place at some point, so it counts. But if that’s the case, how do I still have all 50 states memorized in alphabetical order from learning that song in 1^st grade? And how can I rattle off all 23 helping verbs flawlessly 15 years after I initially learned them? We all know the answer – some things we really, truly learned, and others we threw in our short term memory bank (just long enough to spew an assortment of facts and tidbits out on the final exam) just to delete them shortly afterwards. No rubric in the world can accurately say for sure things we learned and will keep, and things we put in a big box to junk later.

            So is that really a problem, though? A good teacher would think so. After all, our job is to teach so that students learn, and when students learn, they can use the knowledge they learned in their lives effectively. They can keep our lessons forever, to help them grow, to make them smarter, to allow them to pass on this knowledge to future generations after we’re all dust. Isn’t that what this whole thing is about in the first place? Teachers teach things to pass them on to future generations – if no one is really learning this stuff, but merely pretending, then our descendants can potentially lose out on a lot of information! Thousands of years’ worth!

            I guess that’s a slight problem with Alfie Kohn’s article, a lot of which I admittedly agreed with – there is a problem with traditional grading and rubrics, after all. But the author’s entire article was nothing more than an elaborate complaint. It was a lot of buildup with no endgame – obviously it was written primarily to spark more curiosity over the subject, but nonetheless, I believe there were a great number of people who expected a more definitive answer to the critiques than we were given.

            ”Neither we nor our assessment strategies can be simultaneously devoted to helping all students improve and to sorting them into winners and losers.  That’s why we have to do more than reconsider rubrics.  We have to reassess the whole enterprise of assessment, the goal being to make sure it’s consistent with the reason we decided to go into teaching in the first place.” - Alfie Kohn

            So what’s the solution, then? We need to do more than fix our rubric system, and I agree with that, but if one has the wherewithal to compose such an argument, he or she in the very least should propose some sort of amendment, right? Kohn dances around giving us an idea, but for some reason avoids doing so. If one sees a problem with something in the world (social injustice, for example) then typically we immediately begin to work out a counter in our heads (the old, “Well, if I were in charge, boy let me tell you, things would change around here!” routine.)

            But on the other hand, I suppose it’s okay that Kohn could not offer up any proposition to fix our assessment problem, considering a solution does not exist right now. The fact that the author is so harshly critical of the system did imply that there may be some idea cooking, but the bottom line is this: aspects like intelligence, critical thinking, willingness, effort, passion, motivation, and inspiration were not meant to have a numerical value. You can’t give someone a 6 out of 11 on their individual drive to succeed, or a 92% on proper utilization of knowledge outside the classroom under no surveillance. And I don’t know what kind of assessment models I’d use in my classroom, either, because there are no current models I’m even satisfied with at the moment, precisely due to the numerous reasons Kohn gave in his article. They simply aren’t accurate, and I’m not going to just pick one to satisfy all the requirements of the assignment, either – after all, that would be me telling somebody else what they want to hear, rather than giving my own, honest opinion on the matter (a problem we are actively trying to solve!) And when traditional grading and rubrics dominate the overall mindset of the classroom, that is exactly what we’ll lose – the real voices of our students.

Link to Alfie Kohn's article: http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/trouble-rubrics/