Graphic by Anjali Rao-Herel ‘22
By Shloka Gidwani ’22 and Lauren Leese ’23
Copy Editor and Staff Writer
This semester, Shloka Gidwani ’22 is taking a microeconomics class that uses the mastery-based grading system to evaluate students’ performances. According to the Connecticut Department of Education, a mastery-based learning system helps to “produce grades that more accurately reflect a student’s learning progress and achievement, including situations in which students struggled early on in a semester or school year, but then put in the effort and hard work needed to meet expected standards.” Rather than judging a student’s performance based on letter grades obtained after exams, the mastery-based grading system does not penalize students for getting the answer wrong the first time, but allows them to understand the gaps in their knowledge and aims to reinforce areas in which they might be struggling.
As the world grapples with a pandemic, we are noticing more and more glaring flaws in our educational systems, many of which are related to exam culture. Even beyond the fact that traditional timed closed-book exams are difficult to proctor over the internet, they also exacerbate inequalities in education.
“I tend to think that exams are not a very effective way to assess a student’s understanding, and especially not in a pandemic,” Mavis Murdock ’22 said. “I think that steady work and class participation is much more important than a single high-stress exam, which is more likely to promote cramming and introduces a lot of factors that have nothing to do with a student’s understanding of the material.”
Moreover, the exam-based system promotes unhealthy competition instead of collaborative learning. From an early age, students are pitted against each other in an attempt to get the highest grade. This defeats the primary purpose of education, which is to understand a concept rather than memorize material just to regurgitate it on an exam. Exam culture inculcates fear of failure rather than a love of learning, which makes students more likely to cheat. A Fordham University poll affirms the benefits of cheating, having found that students who cheat had GPAs an average of 0.56 points higher than their honest counterparts. The Open Education Database speculates that “many probably feel compelled to compromise their school's ethics policies in their own self-interest — especially considering the significant number of academic rewards hinging on one's GPA.”
Students’ incentives to cheat only increase while taking exams remotely, since there are limited ways to supervise test takers. While exams are showing loopholes in our educational system, they also prove ineffective when assessing a remote learner’s performance.
Sal Khan, founder of the online education platform Khan Academy, is an influential proponent of the mastery-based grading system. “Instead of artificially constraining, fixing when and how long you work on something, pretty much ensuring that variable outcome, the A, B, C, D, F — do it the other way around,” Khan said in a 2015 TED Talk. “What’s variable is when and how long a student actually has to work on something, and what’s fixed is that they actually master the material.” Khan went on to say that, today, the U.S. has achieved close to a 100 percent literacy rate, so why can’t we achieve a high rate of people who understand calculus or organic chemistry? The answer is that we do not teach people to master these subjects, instead relying on exam systems that penalize students for not understanding the material on their first try.
Khan’s philosophy is more pertinent now than ever, as students across the world are learning remotely. We are now limited in our face-to-face interactions with professors: Office hours have been reduced or are at inconvenient times because of time zones, making it difficult for professors to keep track of students’ progress. In the midst of all these problems, adding an exam to the mix makes for a stressful concoction.
It is important to note that as an elite private liberal arts institution, Mount Holyoke has the resources to foster a collaborative and mastery-focused learning environment more effectively than many other universities. While Mount Holyoke has a ways to go in terms of promoting mastery, its learning environment is much better than that of many state universities, which disproportionately serve low-income and marginalized students.
Lauren Leese ’23 has experience taking classes at large state schools where the teaching method is often based around reading a textbook, memorizing the study guide, regurgitating the information for a multiple choice exam, rinsing and repeating. Until mastery-based learning becomes a widespread educational philosophy, this method will be confined to privileged institutions with the right resources.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that our educational system needs radical reform — not only to adapt to online education, but to better serve students’ needs in general. The mastery-based grading system is a more equitable method that shifts the focus away from judging and often belittling students for their mistakes and toward instilling a passion for learning.
