By Mallory Dolorfino

Since I started undergrad, I have witnessed the harmful effects, the ineffectiveness, and the simultaneous overuse of the grading system in higher education. This year, as a first time graduate teaching assistant, the phrase “grades are violent” has become increasingly resonant. The following is a reflection, based on my own experience as a teaching assistant at the University of Washington (UW), on how grades are violent and a call-for-action on what we can do to ease the effects of this harmful system.

This fall, as my first ever teaching assignment, I ran recitations for the calculus I course at UW. The students in my section were mostly first years in their first quarter of college, so, not surprisingly, they came from a wide variety of mathematical backgrounds. What was surprising, however, was the number of students who had already taken and succeeded in courses like calculus III and linear algebra. These students knew all of the course material before it was taught, and consequently, were noticeably ahead of their peers who were taking the course for the first time. At UW, undergraduate students self-select their first math course, and at first, I could not fathom why a student would elect to retake a course that they had already mastered. It soon became apparent that this was largely due to grade pressure. At UW, getting into certain popular majors, such as computer science, is extremely competitive. And like many selection processes in higher education, grades are one of the main factors used for determining whether or not a student will succeed in such a major. Thus, because all of our grading is done on a curve, it is highly advantageous for a student who has already mastered calculus to retake the course. On the other hand, it is extremely detrimental to the students taking the course for the first time. During this teaching assignment, it became glaringly obvious that the grading system exacerbates pre-existing inequalities, such as the availability of higher level math courses during high school, as well the time and resources needed to access them.

The next quarter, I ran recitations for the precalculus course at UW, which boasted a much different demographic of students. The students in this course had not taken any calculus and often had bad experiences in their past math courses. The diversity in mathematical backgrounds was still present. It is important to note that at UW, precalculus is the lowest level math course a student can take without special permission, even though some students would best be  served in an algebra course. Again, this set up, along with extreme grade pressure, highlighted and intensified pre-existing inequalities. After a midterm with a particularly low grade average, many of my students expressed feeling like receiving a low score warranted changing their intended major. This caused immense psychological damage to my students, many of whom expressed the desire to drop out of the course, change their major, or drop out of college altogether. On the next midterm, this pressure pushed some students to use extreme measures to cheat. It was during this time that I saw a sticker with the phrase “grades are violence” posted near the math building at UW.

When I saw this sticker, I immediately resonated with it – grades are violent – I had seen this clearly in just two quarters of working as a teaching assistant. Often, the students who get the highest scores in “weeder” math classes are those who grew up with the most economic, social, and racial privilege. They are the students who do not have to work to put themselves through college, the students who can live on campus, and the students who do not have to worry about the danger of themselves or their loved ones during an intense political climate in the United States. Students without the same privilege, through no fault of their own, stand little chance to outperform their peers in a curved grading system. They stand little chance to succeed in this grade race without sacrificing things that they cannot afford to sacrifice: quitting a job to study more, paying more money to retake classes, or losing sleep to study while retaining a job. And though my experience is unique to UW, the impacts of the grading system are not – grades are not a holistic enough evaluation to reveal the complex lives and circumstances of students – they are not even holistic enough to evaluate student knowledge. Yet they are used as a method for determining which students get what majors, what careers, and what lifestyles. This is a form of violence. So how do we fix it?

As individual graduate students, we cannot change the systems’ reliance on grades as an indicator of success and competence. We can, however, change how we administer grades. This summer, in a course I am teaching, I have elected to use a form of “contract grading,” in which students know from the start of the course exactly what they need to do to earn a certain grade. Additionally, the lowest passing grade any of my students will receive is a B. They get several attempts to redo their work, and I have tried to choose a grading system that rewards hard work, not perfection. In addition to changing our individual practices, we can try to change how our departments think about grades. At UW, there are many wonderful faculty and grad students who are in conversation about the harmful effects of grade pressure, and there is a lot of momentum to change this. So even though changing the way grades work in our education system is a daunting task, even as graduate students, there are many concrete steps that we can take to decrease their harmful effects on our students and the many students to come.

Mallory just finished their second year as a PhD student at the University of Washington. They work in arithmetic geometry, and they are passionate about issues of equity and access in mathematics education.