ABSTRACT
Many teachers are uncomfortable with grades, viewing them as inherently inaccurate devices that in attempting to measure people, only traumatize and dehumanize them. This concern, however, is a tangle of misconceptions. A grade represents an expert's judgment of the quality of a student's work in a specific course. In addition to the impracticality of a professor's writing hundreds of individual comments and evaluators reading thousands, the value of such letters be severely limited if they did not include specific indications of students' levels of performance, in other words, grades. What of the oft-repeated charge that grades are impersonal devices that reduce people to letters of the alphabet? That criticism is misguided. A grade is not a measure of a person but of a person's level of achievement in a particular course. Whether grades are fair, however, depends on a teacher's conscientiousness in assigning them. One potential misuse is to award grades on bases other than a student's level of achievement.
