It’s a Matter of Trust: Why Grades Are Persona non Grata in Assessment

David Eubanks’s “Grades and Learning” is a tale of two arguments, one explicit and one implicit. Eubanks owns the explicit argument. In “Grades and Learning” Eubanks presents a series of careful arguments and models to show that grades can help us better understand how students learn at our institutions. The unspoken assumption behind Eubanks’s argu-ment is that grades are excluded from our assessment toolkit because the assessment community has focused on their shortcomings as measures of student learning without considering their potential strengths. To this end, Eubanks provides evidence of the potential utility of grades and gen-tly reminds us that established assessment tools, like rubrics, also have problems. Stepping back from Eubanks’s article for the moment, we think there is an implicit reason that policymakers and accreditors have excluded grades from assessment, one that does not focus on the psychometric qualities of grades, but on the integrity of the people who grade and the institutions at which they work. In our view, thoughtful arguments of the kind that Eubanks makes will only have impact if we can have an honest conversation about one reason that grades were expelled from the assessment kingdom in the first place.