Socrates would have laughed his head off if someone would have told him to give grades to his to his two students Plato and Xenophon. Socrates would ask a question to his students in order to start them thinking about a subject, then continue asking questions about portions of their answers until the two students had achieved clarity in their own minds about the subject. Socrates would have asked, "What's a grade?" And upon an explanation, he would have asked again, "What good does it do to grade something if the information graded is not connected to something real, live, or otherwise utilitarian?"
The popular and imperially endorsed Roman teacher Marcus Flaccus never used grading. He would allow students to present their work and correct them on the spot. One of his favorite methods was to have contests among students and reward the winner with a copy of a rare book. Romans pushed each other in real life, so grading, especially as an end in itself as it is practiced in modern times, would have been eschewed by Flaccus who would have thought that it lead to nothing but self-pity, self-importance, or neglect of doing something for society's good. A student needed to show his worth in relation to the group.
Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods, patrons were needed if someone wanted to pay a tutor or master to school him. Otherwise, guilds or entrepreneurship provided your training. A student had to keep his patron informed of his progress. Progress was determined by the tutor or master, who generally were hard to satisfy. Mastery of a subject would have to be shown by spewing back everything the master taught him plus having some original thoughts, particularly about philosophy. In higher education, students were recommended for their degrees by their masters, they didn't "pass" due to grades.
Grades were initiated to even the playing field among students, becoming especially popular in western schools because it seemed more democratic in nature. But, grading limits students on what they know since it presumes there is nothing more than to make a high grade to show mastery. Grading doesn't ask questions to extend an idea as in the Socratic method. Grading doesn't push people through competition or status or connectedness to society as Flaccus would have wanted. Some personalities are competitive and drive students to do well in relation to others, but for many students, grading is merely something to show them that they are mediocre or almost as good as someone else, and thus, adjust their goals accordingly. And, grading doesn't require the human touch between master and student, an environment in which a master helps to personally expand the dimensions of knowledge for his or her student.
Grading will give way to another method in the grand scheme of things. Who knows what the next method will be, but it will have to include much more of a connection to what happens in society than the current system. Dagget's quadrant system for charting what is learned is a step in the right direction. Imagine his system with a real world proficiency measured not by grades but by how well the learning extends to both the real world and the future expectation of the learning, and you might just be seeing the next method of learning.
The important idea is that the current grading system must give way. To me, whenever it does give way will not be soon enough.
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