Jaschik, Scott. “Duke Prof Gives Controversial ‘No Grades’ Experiement an A+.” USA Today 3 May 2010: n. pag. News on Education. Web. 17 Mar. 2011
Above Image Taken From: http://www.theroguenews.com/2011/02/the-weighted-grades-issue/
Cathy Davidson, English professor at Duke University, turned the responsibility of grading to the students. After much observation and research on grading systems at other colleges as well as in elementary and secondary schools, she decided to announce the standards (for example, the students had to do all of the work and attend class to gain an A). After the students signed a contract to agree to the terms, she assigned two students per week to lead discussion in class on the week’s readings and to determine whether the other students met the standards.
Davidson received positive results. The students wrote more (even though the class was not designated as a “writing intensive” course, the students each wrote about 2,000 words per week, which is three times the requirement for a course to be considered writing intensive at Duke). Furthermore, Davidson asserts that her students exhibited more creativity in their assignments and that their written language contained less jargon and less “thesaurus-itis” than she was used to reading in the past. Davidson also clarifies that she still read and commented on student writing; all she did not do was assign a grade. She explains that she cannot imagine going back to “reducing the feedback to a letter grade.”
Personally, I cannot imagine allowing my students to grade each other. Maybe in college it would be different, but in tenth grade honors English, when my teacher had us grade another student’s essay, we all got in huge fights with the person grading our essay. It was chaos. I still remember that Jack Marti gave me a 92 when I felt I deserved at least a 96 percent. (I don’t hold onto grudges…ha!). However, perhaps this type of system would work in college. I suppose I am just not brave enough to try it. It seems very unreliable—if students are very competitive, would they be more likely to give their classmates lower grades in order to make their own grades seem more on par? Or if one student resents another student for giving her a lower grade, would she try to get revenge when it’s her turn to grade? Or vice versa, for a student who was awarded a superb grade, would he feel obligated to give a good grade to that peer later? I suppose the fact that the teacher read everything could keep this all in check, but at the start of my teaching career, I do not feel like this is something I am ready to try. I’ll stick to the traditional grading method.
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