In my “Enlightenment to the Present” class, we discussed Marx’s theory of alienated labor over the past few classes. I assigned a “creative non-fiction” memoir assignment due this Friday, and I said that they will not be paid in some abstracted grade. If you do the assignment, you get an A. If you write poorly, you get an A. If you write excellently, you get an A. If you put an enormous amount of effort, you get an A. If you spend five minutes on it, you get an A. The paper is a reflection of yourself. You are your paper.
I wonder how this would work as model for an entire semester worth of grades. Imagine a syllabus that said, “If you show up, do your assignments, and don’t give me excuses when you don’t, you’ll get an A. If your attendance is mediocre or you miss a couple of assignments, you get a C. If you miss six classes or more than two assignments, you don’t pass. No exceptions. The quality of your work will not reflect on your grade. The quality of your work will reflect on your character.”
From our usual capitalist paradigm, the lack of a grade motivator will surely result in mediocre work. From the Marxist paradigm, the grade is a purely abstract and flat value that does not reflect even a fraction of the full value of a student’s creative products, and by fetishizing the grade, we are promoting a deadening of creativity and an obsession with grade achievement.
And to my excellent students who say, “But I want my grade to mean something!” I reply, “Get over it. There are more important things than a single letter on a transcript full of letters. Instead of making your grade mean something, why don’t you concentrate on making your essays mean something?”
Natural Causes 
I have a big problem with this approach, I am at work right now, and I have a take home final exam to work on, but eventually I will address this post. Hopefully in the near future.
I’m definitely looking forward to your argument.
If you do this for your class your overall attendance will probably improve, and you might get 100% compliance with all assignments turned in on time. However, wIth some remarkable exceptions, your brighter students will have no incentives to write better papers, their desire to be recognized for their better effort, deeper insight, meaningful essay, etc will be gone. People want some form of recognition in their lives, is about prestige and differentiation, I agree with you when you say that there is a problem with grade fetishizing, but the desire to be better is what drives individuals to innovate, grades are the only thing you have that you can use to reward them. I am very confident in my assertion that you will not get anyone to try hard in your class if this is what you end up doing.
Excellent thoughts. I’ll respond this weekend, if not before then.
I’ve had a graduate seminar that has worked similarly to the Marxist approach. At the start of the semester, one of my profs said: “Attendance is mandatory. You have to write a book review, an abstract, and a seminar paper, and you must be accepted to present this seminar paper at a conference by the end of the semester. If you do all these things, you get an A.” At first, there wasn’t a lot of incentive to do well, but to get a paper accepted to conference, we had to do a lot of work (or pick a shitty conference). I’m still not sure how I felt about this approach; also, it’s different since this was a graduate seminar. Thoughts?
I took your intro to philosophy course a few semesters ago and feel that although I did not do as great on my essays as I would have like, my effort definitely paid off. Great lectures and class discussions — now if only other professors were just as cool as you!
Ha, thank you. I’m glad you got something out of it.