Grading

I'm on a blogger's roll today--I keep reading posts about education that I must reproduce here.

This next entry comes from Tall, Dark, and Mysterious, a college math professor in Canada. TD&M wrote a post about students who complain about her (I don't know why, but I think I recall TD&M being a her....) blog, and summarized certain students' views about grading thusly:

1. Grades are meaningless.
2. Therefore I should give higher grades.
3. You don’t really get educated in school, remember? Grades are meaningless.
4. Grades are a means of recognizing students for their ability.
5. Which was not acquired or honed in the classroom in which those grades were assigned.
6. Making grades kinda disconnected from the grader and the material being graded.
7. Still, because they determine employment prospects, grades are super important to students.
8. But still meaningless.

It's scary how many times I've heard similar sentiments from fellow teachers, or worse, from instructors in my credentialing program. And any teacher who reads this and says "Anyone who believes those things believes in crap!" I ask you, do you believe any of those things with regards to standardized testing?