Assessment vs. Grades

          The list below is not a set of opposites and it is not exhaustive. It is suggestive. Assessment and grades differ, but they can overlap (see especially Primary Trait Analysis, also available from the Classroom Assessment Technique main menu). Annotations for some terms appear below the table.

Assessment is non-judgmental in the sense that it focuses on learning, which is the outcome of many influences, including teaching style, student motivation, time on task, study intensity, and background knowledge. Therefore, no one element can be reasonably singled out for praise or blame for a particular learning outcome. In contrast, grades carry evaluative weight as to the worthiness of student achievement and are applied, for good or ill, directly to them.

Assessments tend to be used in private and become public only under the assessor's control. Grades, while not truly public, are part of the administrative record available throughout an educational institution.

Assessments are almost always collected in anonymous fashion and the results are released in the aggregate. Grades are identified with specific students.

To use a metaphor from the calculus, assessment more resembles a partial derivative whereas grades are more recognizable as an integrative process.

Assessment tends to look at specific parts of the learning environment. Grades are holistic in the sense that they record academic achievement for a whole project. Final grades, of course, can reduce academic achievement for an entire semester to a single mark.

The text of a course is its disciplinary content; grades tend to focus on that. The subtext of a course involves the transferrable baccalaureate skills, such as critical thinking, creative thinking, writing, and analysis. For example, the "text" of a course in anatomy and physiology includes the names bones and functions of muscles. The "subtext" of such a course might include scientific thinking, problem solving, and memory improvement. Grades tend to focus on text; assessment tends to emphasize subtext.

Assessment findings tend to be suggestive and have pedagogical significance. That is, assessment findings shift pedagogy for reasons that need not be justified statistically, but can be justified when even one student learns better. In contrast, grades are recorded in a rigorous manner that does have statistical significance.

As with text and subtext mentioned above, grades tend to reflect student control of disciplinary course content whereas assessment usually aims at the goals for all baccalaureate students, such as synthetic thinking and esthetic appreciation.