ABSTRACT
For most American students, the dominant educational fact for the first eighteen years of schooling—if they last that long—is the Grade. Even teachers, for whom grading is one of the principal activities of their professional life, frequently have very little idea why they give grades at all and what the conditions would be under which they could dispense with grading. Ranking is the grading activity which produces the greatest anxiety and provokes the most opposition. It is a relative comparison of the performances of a number of students, for the purpose of determining a linear ordering of comparative excellence. The evil inheres in the scarcity of desired places and the dependence of social rewards on educational accomplishment, not in any particular system of grading. Grading on a curve assures that the class will be sorted out along a scale of relative excellence, but of course it provides no clue to the level of performance signified by a particular grade.
