To assess or to grade? Two processes that confuse and pervert the educational act

Abstract

In this article the author explores the concepts of assessing and grading, and specifically how grading has perverted the processes in the acquisition of learning in students, given the need to manage the work done by the school in a different way. As a result, these processes are reduced to mere quantifiable statistics and administrative procedures to make a difference between those who obtain good marks and those who do not. The author retraces the history of grading as from the emergence of didactics as a discipline in the sixteenth century and analyzes in three relevant works on this subject, the role given to the examination and how, over time, this examination was no longer considered as a space for reflection but as a means by which to determine how much one knows. The author develops a reflection on the assignation of a grade to the student and how this affects or favors his or her educational training. According to the author, the difference between assessing and grading is not a problem that can be solved by the didactics itself, but the analysis of this aspect opens many challenges for the transformation of education; consequently, the author suggests that didactics can help to reestablish working conditions in the classroom, so that the construction of training and learning processes, the substantive task of education, can be revalorized and potentiated. Administrative and managerial methods should not be confused with the purpose of education.