Tests are often the principle academic sorting mechanism in a classroom. This is not some afterthought, but an intentional function of testing. I remember one particular science department meeting in which the design of good multiple choice questions was being discussed. In particular, we were exploring how to construct good “distractors”, the answers that are incorrect that will lure students who don’t understand the material covered by the question. If a distractor is too far afield from the correct answer, it is too obviously incorrect and won’t get chosen very often. On the other hand, the distinction between the correct answer and the distractors must be clear so that it will separate students who really understand the material from those who don’t.
In other meetings, we discussed how a well designed test should also have questions with a range of difficulty. There should be some easy ones, so that everyone would have at least that much success, some in the middle range, and some really difficult problems that only a few strong students would be able to get. The idea was to discriminate between students who had learned the material deeply and those whose understanding was superficial.
All of this makes sense; writing good tests is an art form that takes years to get good at, and discussions like these clarify the skill involved. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking can lead to using the test to sort students into a bell curve distribution, which is often the intent of the teacher. The question that is often not addressed is what happens once you have sorted them.
By definition, our use of grades requires some significant number of students to be unsuccessful academically. We profess that we want everyone to be successful, but what would really happen if everyone got “A’s”? Wouldn’t we have to “dumb down” the curriculum to accomplish this? How would colleges be able to select the “right” students? We can’t imagine not actually sorting students by academic success, so when we say we want all students to succeed, we probably mean having a lot fewer D’s and F’s. A bell curve makes it difficult to imagine a learning environment where everyone is truly successful.
Grades condemn teachers and students alike into becoming cogs in a sorting machine.
The question arises, what would happen if everyone in a classroom consistently aced tests? Would the teacher be considered too lenient? Must it imply that he is dumbing down the curriculum? And if everyone did this, how would colleges decide who could be accepted? In fact, the current structure of our educational system seems to require a bell curve.
The standards movement is a recent approach to school reform that was designed to determine what the baseline of curriculum that every student needs to master. In my high school, a great deal of time and effort went into the definition of those standards, and even more into the creation of “common assessments” in order to identify whether every student had mastered the same level of competency.
In a number of meetings, teachers asked “but what happens when students don’t meet those standards?”, and I have to say that in all those meetings, I never heard a satisfactory answer. The idea of grades being used as a sorting mechanism is deeply embedded in the structure of the educational system. The standards movement ran into the brick wall of the bell curve. In that battle, the structural imperative to sort students wins.