Brent Little and Dr. A. LeGrand Richards, Educational Leadership and Foundations

We planned to make a phenomenological description of the personal process of giving grades. This study was designed to describe the experiences of faculty members at Brigham Young University (BYU) in the grading of their students. This study is not a survey of grading systems but rather a detailed description of the lived experience of faculty members giving grades.

The central role of grading in the day-to-day experience of faculty members and students is apparent. Grading, viewed as an institutional necessity, has been more universally adopted than almost any other practice in education. There are only a few articles that treat the subject of the effects of the practice of grading on teachers from an ethical perspective. The lack of phenomenological research on the giving of grades calls for a close examination of the lived experience of faculty members. We believe that a close scrutiny of grading will reveal important insights about this almost universally adopted practice.

This research was performed as part of a comprehensive study of the history and evolution of grading across the country. During the fall of 2003, Dr. A. LeGrand Richards and the author studied the changes in BYU’s participation in this national movement from the beginning of the Brigham Young Academy under Karl Maeser in 1876. This previous research has shown how BYU as an institution has gradually adopted the grading practices of the nation. Throughout the research, we found evidence of lengthy discussions and differing opinions by individual faculty members and administrators concerning grading. We believe that there is a need to describe the individual’s participation in giving grades in this unique environment at BYU.

We as researchers tried as much as possible to not impose our personal values upon the faculty members we interviewed. Fischer and Wertz write that “Phenomenology investigates the ways events appear when theories and constructs are for the moment put aside by the researcher. In doing so, phenomenology studies the ways a person’s world is inevitably formed in part by the person who lives it.”

Dr. Richards, a pre-doctoral student Darin Eckton, and the author interviewed over twenty faculty members and administrators. We interviewed faculty members from a variety of colleges across campus. Although we initially suspected that veteran as well as young faculty members would have equally valuable experiences to contribute, but we soon found that on average, the veteran professors and administrators had reflected on these issues more than younger faculty. The interviews were from thirty minutes to one hour in length and were tape recorded and later transcribed. The transcriptions of the interviews are being analyzed with the qualitative research analysis program NVivo.
At the beginning of our study, we identified at least four areas in which we suspected that faculty members may experience tensions in the giving of grades. First, a teacher’s primary duty is to nurture and help the students. We believed that the practice of judging a student is opposed to this fundamental responsibility. One professor noted that “there may be some discomfort in a Christian situation of putting a grade on somebody. Q: Why would there be discomfort in a Christian situation? A: I think it’s the old thing of judgment, judging unfairly.” Interestingly, we found that many faculty members felt some conflict in grading like this professor, but we did not anticipate that this conflict would result in such widely differing attitudes among the faculty members interviewed.

The professor quoted above acknowledged a potential conflict in judgment, but because grading, in his words, is “part of the educational fabric” and grades provide a necessary “passport” between institutions, the conflict seemed to be a moot point.

Another faculty member felt a similar conflict: “I really believe fundamentally that grading is not fair; and, I believe there is nothing I can do to make it fair.” Despite the futility this professor expressed concerning his ability to make grading fair, he struggles at length to make his exams as fair as possible, always acknowledging that that they still are not fair. He also stated, “One of the things that frankly makes it doable for me is that by the time students get to my classes, they are so beat up by the system, they don’t really complain too much anymore.”

Our analysis of the faculty members on many other issues were akin to this question of the teacher’s duty to nurture versus judgment: the professors usually recognized similar conflicts, but the way in which the faculty members dealt with those conflicts often differed drastically.

The potential conflicts with a faculty member’s personal religious convictions are another example of the observation explained above. One professor “emphasize[s] free agency, my view of what human being are. Human beings are agents; they can decide whether they are going to act in accordance with what they perceive to be right.” As such this professor believes that he “can’t decide what success is for any given student. I can’t decide whether they are doing their best. They are the only ones who can know that. I do have a responsibility to help them see that they have responsibility for their own learning and evaluation of themselves.” Conversely, another faculty member strongly felt that his duty is to set the standard for his students. This professor expressed that he views this setting of benchmarks as part of his job as a professor, and as such he feels that he has a moral obligation to fulfill this aspect of his job description.

We have found many other interesting aspects about the faculty members’ lived experiences that we had not anticipated. For example, over half of the professors interviewed mentioned in some way the student evaluations of the faculty as having an effect on grading.

We have not completed our analysis with NVivo, but it will be completed shortly. Because we have seen such diversity in the experiences of the faculty members we interviewed, we want to reevaluate our questions and conduct more interviews before making further conclusions about our findings. Our research team will also interview the rest of the faculty members in other departments who have been referred to us during the course of our interviews.