Practices of grading: an ethnographic study of educational assessment

Abstract

The school as an institution assumes that students' grades are constituted by their assessments. This paper examines the background of this presupposition and provides a micro-analytical perspective of the grading practice of teachers in German High Schools (Gymnasium). This paper conceptualises the theoretical framework of the research in educational measurement in discussion. It is shown that the measured assessment of students and the teacher's observations are linked. When grading, teachers construct their own assessments. This process is depicted in this paper by two forms of observations: self-observation within the context of written examinations and third-party observation within the context of final oral exams.

Keywords:

• grading
• human measurement
• school
• ethnography

Notes

1. The concept of cultural capital has been critically discussed in the sociology of education. These studies presented ambiguous and puzzling results. On the one hand they show ‘that cultural capital is positively related to high school grades’ (DiMaggio 1982, 194) and on the other that the concept has to be respecified or redefined (De Graf, De Graf, and Kraaykamp 2000) according to social class, gender and national school systems (e.g. De Graf et al. 2000; Kingston 2001).

2. Just one example: Weiss (1965, 148–151) states that 153 Austrian teachers evaluated the same math test with grades ranging from ‘very good’ (7%), ‘good’ (41%), ‘satisfactory’ (42%), ‘sufficient’ (9%) to ‘deficient’ (1%). Hartog and Rhodes (1936, 9) describe findings wherein 28 teachers graded the same Latin exam in very different ways.

3. The overall aim of the research project consisted in analysing elite education in Germany; this will not be explored in this article.

4. Not being able to give a ‘good student’ a bad grade is an especially extreme example for the thesis postulated here, namely that the teacher's evaluation constitutes the student's performance.

5. Of course, this can lead to surprising and disagreeable results for teachers. However, this topic will not be explored in more detail here.

6. The excerpts documented in this paper were reconstructed on the basis of notes I took while following these discussions.

7. The transcription symbols are as follows: E=Examiner; C=Chairperson; A=Assessor; M=Minute taker.