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Grades And Degree By Kevin Steves Summary

1028 Words5 Pages

The author, Kevin Steves claims in his article “Grades and degrees” that we should stop the sham of objective grading and return to the apprenticeship model of education and degree award, he also offers various reasons in support of this position. In my paper I shall summarize and evaluate the argument.
Kevin emphasizes in the first paragraph of his article that our present system of awarding degrees at college and university level relies mainly on grades and he believes this explains why the current system is not efficient and uniformly impossible to assess a student’s ability to succeed in his or her future chosen field. He mentions various reasons/evidence to support his claim; he talks about the main question teachers should ask themselves …show more content…

According to Kevin this style is inconsistent and he reaches the conclusion that if we continue to interpret the grades in relation to one’s peers then there will be students with poor or excellent performances regardless of how badly they perform or how well they understand the material. Apart from highlighting the problems of our current grading system Kevin also mention possible solutions to them. He mentions the possibility of judging the grades based on the aptitude/ understanding of the material but he also found some issues with the idea like the fact that professors have different ways of presenting the materials in the same course. Other issues including the style in which the examination will be presented for example essay/ theory questions, multiple choice, oral, charts or the use of computer graphics. He explains that the way the material is presented to the students or the way the examination is structured matters a great deal because all these procedures frustrate attempts to a uniform system of grading and interpretation all the grades and the important question he highlights is “what exactly the student good at?” is it the testing process, understanding of the material or the act of understanding the way the examination is structured i.e. graphs, multiple choice, oral or …show more content…

I found this premise not clear and very vague; I did not understand the correlation of the letter grades used to represent excellent-poor to the statement of the excellent or poor student not understanding the material or performing badly. I believe that argument is weak and could have been presented in another way for example some students might do bad on the exam not because they did not understand or relate to the material but because of the conditions surrounding examinations such as overconfidence, pain attacks, nervousness, etc.
I agreed totally with premise involving the same material being presented in two different ways by two different professors and this is true professors are different some believe in theory testing, others believe in oral testing or just participation in class so this makes it difficult to rely solely on grades. For example, hybrid classes are harder and require a lot more reading than the lecture classes so a B in the hybrid class can be an A in the lecture class. I believe this premise presented here by Kevin was reasonable and

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