Incentives v. Grading

Academic grading is usually not questioned; it's the way we do things. When it is questioned, there are two common answers: grades as credentials for future work, and grades as incentives. A psychology professor (best known for self-experimentation) thinks about the way we depend on others in our groups to develop whatever expertise we lack, and asks What Happens If I Stop Grading?

My theory of human evolution says we changed in many ways to facilitate trading. ... The more diverse the expertise within a group, the more members of the group can benefit from trade. Following this logic, mechanisms evolved to increase diversity of expertise among people living in the same place with the same genes. ... The theory implies that there is something inside every student that pushes them toward expertise — they want to learn — but they are being pushed in many different directions — what they want to learn varies greatly. If you accommodate the latter (diversity in what students want to learn), you can take advantage of the former (an inner drive to learn).
... Human nature: People who are the same want to be different. Formal education: People who are different should be the same. At Berkeley, most professors appeared to have little idea of the diversity of their students. (At least I didn’t, until I gave assignments that revealed it.) Almost all classes treated all students in a class the same: same lectures, same assignments, same tests, same grading scheme. ... The more freedom I gave them, the more they learned. ...
The more freedom I gave my students, the more difficult it became to grade them.... I had an idea: no grading. Maybe other sources of motivation, would be enough.
... The students’s work was the highest quality I have ever seen...
I think several things caused students to learn a lot:

• 1. The material was interesting.
• 2. To some extent — far more than in other classes — they could choose what they wanted to learn, especially during the second half of the class.
• 3. Peer pressure. They wanted to look good in front of their peers. It would have been embarrassing to not be able to do a presentation when called upon.
• 4. The instinct of workmanship. Thorstein Veblen wrote a book called The Instinct of Workmanship. People inherently want to do a good job, said Veblen. I agree.
• 5. Doing is fun.

What did I learn? I learned that I can stop grading and things get much better, not worse. I learned that motivations other than grades are plenty powerful.

I'm inclined to focus on 3, peer pressure, but I'm not going to deny the value of the others. And my own experience tends to support his; I went to the Santa Fe campus of St. John's College (Annapolis/Santa Fe)

While traditional (A through F) grades are given, the culture of the school de-emphasizes their importance and grades are released only at the request of the student.

It seemed to me that we were working harder than any of the conventional classes I'd been in, or those I taught later, but I learned my grades when I needed them for graduate-school applications -- in effect, as credentials of my ability to do well with an academic workload. Incentives? We had plenty. I suspect that an online experience with student group structure, one which let peer pressure work (to a schedule), would also be fine in this particular regard.


Or then again, maybe not.

update: Of course K-12 is different in many ways, and some may think that younger-than-college kids are immune to peer pressure, don't feel any urge to please the teacher (or other adults), don't think "doing is fun", don't want to learn interesting stuff for its own sake... Hmm. Well, experiences vary.