FEATURE: Grades - do they really matter?

by: Eric Paulin

After the recent 'Cards Viewing' last Saturday among Grade 11 students, mixed reactions are observed from both students of Lyceum of Alabang and their parents. Technically, grades are either high or low. However, two other types of grades have emerged from the said event: grades that a student deserves and grades that a student doesn't deserve.

Another question has likewise been elicited from seeing their grades and feeling disappointed with the marks they get from their subject teachers: do grades really matter? Do they really define the kind of person they are and the kind of life they will have in the future?

First of all, grades intend to numerically represent the following: how students perform in the classroom, the skills they have acquired from their subjects, the scope of their academic knowledge about the concepts introduced to them, and their current standing in class versus their classmates. All of these should be indicators of the two-digit numbers we see on our report cards.

There are also two important features of grading: that assessment of student learning should be both valid and reliable. Validity refers to how logical or reasonable the grounds for assessment are while reliability covers how accurate a given grade is in terms of the things it measures.

However, there are also certain factors that affect teachers' grading. On the part of the students, there are cheating, falsification of outputs, duplication of published works, or even the faking of trait exhibition. On the part of the teacher, there could be fallacies on the type of activities he gives, the rubric or other measurement tools, environmental factors like noise or events affecting student performance, difficulty in grading groups, and most commonly, biases in subjective forms of assessment like essays, poem writing, drawing, speech choir presentation, etc.

So, let's get back to the real question here: do grades really matter?

The answer would be both yes and no.

Yes, grades are important since, as mentioned, they represent the totality of student performances in each subject. That is "if" a grade given to a student is both valid and reliable, meaning it nullifies all unwanted factors affecting the process of assessment.

If these unwanted factors have modified a student grade for even a small portion, then that is the time we can say that a grade really does not matter... for the grade itself is not valid and reliable. This kind of grades are the ones that do not represent your academic performance correctly, and likewise lead to the saying that "grades do not define one as a person".

It is therefore a challenge to all teachers to grade their students accordingly and as accurately as possible. Otherwise, students will really have a ground to react differently. On the other hand, if the teacher is 100% sure that the marks he has given are true and are actual representation of learning, then these numbers would fall under the type of grades that students deserve... the type of grades that actually DO matter.