The Meaning of Grades
In his critique of grade inflation, Prof. James B. Twitchell [op-ed, June 4] toils to account for the failure of teachers, parents and administrators to evaluate a studentÛªs work instead of just "measuringÛ it to determine a grade. All seem to have succumbed to the defect a character of Oscar Wilde once described as knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing.</br></br>Parents rejoice in their offspringÛªs straight A's but pay no attention to misspellings, punctuation and barbaric use of language. When they reward faculty, administrators often count items of published research rather than read and judge the contents. Teachers give multiple-choice tests that assess mastery of trivia rather than understanding. Administrators abet the process by making grading as crude as possible.</br></br>At the University of Maryland in College Park, where I taught English for 25 years, management regularly resisted the refinement of adding pluses and minuses to grades to distinguish among at least three levels of any letter: say, a B-, a B and a B+. Any good teacher knows that students who fall under any one letter are not identical with one another. For that matter, computer grading ought to allow the return to numerical evaluation, where a conscientious instructor could assign, say, a 90 to a minimally A student and a 97 to a superior one.</br></br>Prof. Twitchell also does not focus on the tendency of mechanical, simplified, high grading to favor the interests of everyone except students. I used to tell my students that their grades, good, bad or indifferent, could not justly reflect their capacity, that only a written evaluation might do that and that few responsible persons, including themselves, were likely to accept a 3.5 grade point average or 4.0	average at face value. I always offered to write a reference that would elaborate on their unique strengths and qualities.</br></br>Prof. TwitchellÛªs lament about the passing of the F is a vestigial symptom of the impulse to use grades as punishment. Students who fail to absorb anything in a course should receive no credit or grade for it. Why stigmatize them with a label of failure?