Ethan Hutt and Jack Schneider on Grades, Tests, and Transcripts

11/15/23 • 65 min

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Ethan Hutt and Jack Schneider about their new book, Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To). Nat, Ethan, and Jack discuss grades, tests, and transcripts; whether grades do a good job of motivating student learning; how our current grading system came into existence; grading abroad; short-haul and long-haul messages; AP exams; the difficulty of narrative grading; whether transcripts should be updated for the digital age; making grades overwritable; the GED; how teachers can improve their grading practices; and more.

Ethan Hutt is Associate Professor of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Jack Schneider is the Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Show Notes:

Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To)

The big problem(s) with grades

Making the grade: a history of the A–F marking scheme

A History of Achievement Testing in the United States, Or: Explaining the Persistence of Inadequacy

A Thin Line Between Love and Hate: Educational Assessment in the United States

Ethan Hutt is Associate Professor of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Jack Schneider is the Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Show Notes:

Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To)

The big problem(s) with grades

Making the grade: a history of the A–F marking scheme

A History of Achievement Testing in the United States, Or: Explaining the Persistence of Inadequacy

A Thin Line Between Love and Hate: Educational Assessment in the United States

Previous Episode

Melissa Kearney on the Two-Parent Privilege

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Melissa Kearney about her new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Nat and Melissa discuss the decline in marriage among non-college-educated parents, why having two parents in the home matters for student outcomes, the stock of marriageable men, whether studying family structure is taboo, what the fracking boom can teach us about the decline in marriage, how marriage became decoupled from raising children, universal basic income for parents, why Asian Americans seem immune from the broader decline in marriage, intergenerational households, the difficulty of parenting, the importance of culture, and more.

Melissa Kearney is the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and the Director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group.

Show Notes:

The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

A Driver of Inequality That Not Enough People Are Talking About

The Puzzle of Falling US Birth Rates since the Great Recession

Male Earnings, Marriageable Men, and Non-Marital Fertility: Evidence from the Fracking Boom

The Economics of Non-Marital Childbearing and The “Marriage Premium for Children”

Investigating Recent Trends in the U.S. Teen Birth Rate

Media Influences on Social Outcomes: The Impact of MTV's 16 and Pregnant on Teen Childbearing

Next Episode

Brooks Bowden on the Unintended Consequences of Academic Leniency

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Brooks Bowden about her recent paper The Unintended Consequences of Academic Leniency, co-authored by Viviana Rodriguez and Zach Weingarten. Nat and Brooks discuss how grading policies influence student effort and engagement, whether academic leniency helps low ability students, why North Carolina's changes to its grading policies led to increased absenteeism, whether making grading policies stricter can ameliorate student achievement, whether increases in academic leniency in the wake of the pandemic are good for students, and more.

Brooks Bowden is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and the Director of the Center for Benefit–Cost Studies of Education.

Show Notes:

The Unintended Consequences of Academic Leniency

Lenient Grading Won’t Help Struggling Students. Addressing Chronic Absenteeism Will.

Designing Field Experiments to Integrate Research on Costs