on grades and grading

I suspect that many of you were a bit shocked when you saw your grade for Project 1. How can this be? 61? 48? 72? (The average was 69 and there were many grades lower than that.) I’d like to give you some perspective on grades and grading.

Part of the shock, I suspect, emerges from the educational system in which we’ve been raised. We live in a grade-oriented society. From the earliest days of elementary school, parents and teachers conditioned us to value grades—from gold stars to monetary rewards to special privileges. Even our speech is filled with phrases like “making the grade.” Entrance into college or graduate school is based on grades. “What’s your GPA?” is an often-asked question by a program recruiter. So we’ve come to see grades as important and to associate our self-worth with these letter symbols: A, B, C, D, and F!

And those of us who have “made it” to an advanced undergraduate course or a graduate course (or program) has certainly learned how to play the grading game. We know what it takes to get an A or B in a class, and I suspect that we’re all very good at this game—at least compared to most people in the population.

But then comes along this course called “Interactive Design Practice” and the rules of the game seem to change. It appears to be more of a critique culture where positives and negatives are provided through commentary. It sometimes is difficult to know the basis for the comments or even if they’re valid. And to receive them from people who are hardly more advanced than we, makes it that more difficult to accept. There’s a new kind of game that’s being played and it’s not clear how it’s played or even if it’s worth playing. These are anxious feelings and, if we’re honest with ourselves, they evoke a little fear.

Why the fear? Perhaps it’s because the new game is not synchronous with our image of self. Our academically successful self (image) may be at odds with current messages. “Something is wrong,” we think; “it’s either the system (the course, the instructor, the mentors) or it’s me.” And accepting the later is a somewhat scary proposition.

My answer may surprise you. It’s neither. What you’re feeling is genuine learning—intellectual and emotional growth. You don’t recognize it because it’s not felt very often; but there it is.

And you will experience more genuine learning if you just allow it to happen. The more you resist it, the more you delay the pleasures of learning. Your tool is not perfection but failure. Fail early and fail often so that you may learn. A “how to” manual only hinders the insights; rather, experience and reflection within realistic settings are the paths to insight.

You are learning a complex skill. Even the simplest of designs requires a great deal of expertise. No real problem is simple; they’re messy and ill-structured; they’re wicked problems. And it takes a great deal of skill to both understand the problem and then to address it. How long does it take to develop that expertise? A long time; it requires a lot of practice. (Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, Outliers, claims that it takes approximately 10,000 hours to get good at anything.)

Look at this segment of Stephen Sondheim leading a master’s class to this young and talented singer, teaching her to sing his famous song “Send in the Clowns.” [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-VXXZLh2a0] What did you learn from watching this master teacher/student interaction? Notice that she began as quite an accomplished singer; to our untrained ear we may not have noticed anything wrong in her phrasing or pronunciation. But to the expert perception of Sondheim, subtle problems are exposed.

* * *

So here’s what you need to do to get better. Keep trying. A low score is just an indication of where you are today. It is as honest an assessment as we can make it. And fortunately, it’s not a particularly good predictor of where you’ll be at the end of the semester (and why this score is worth only 60 points out of 1000). What separates you from excellence is hard work and more practice.

The post-it notes are a set of judgments. With some you may agree. With others you may reject outright. Still others you may not be sure about. Keep the post-it notes with which you agree. Remove the post-it notes that you reject (but make sure you have a very good reason for the rejection). And for the comments that confuse you, talk to a mentor or me about them; learn from these comments.

Yes, some of the comments may appear contradictory. But that’s no different than two movie reviewers providing conflicting reviews of the same movie. Both reviewers understand their craft, but each chooses to focus on different things. Oddly, both are correct.

It reminds me of an old joke I heard years ago (and told by Meyer Levin, http://www.meyerlevin.com/joke.html):

In a small town in Russia, people brought their complaints to the Rabbi to settle their differences. This day, two men were before the Rabbi.
He listened to one man and said, “You are right.”
He listened to the second man and said, “You are right.”
When they left, his wife, who was listening in the next room, said to him, “You’re supposed to be some kind of judge? How can they both be right?”
He listened to her and said, “You know? You’re right, too.”

In the end we must develop our own truths about what makes for good design. As we progress through the semester you will learn some big concepts about good design (I refer to these as the “seven themes”). And you will learn a framework for creating a design rationale or a design argument (Eli Blevis and I refer to this as the PRInCiPleS framework). These tools will help you. But only through experience, hard work, and exploring alternatives under varying contexts will you begin to create your internal criteria for good design. And when you’ve done that, you can say, “I am a designer.”

[Postscript. In all the years I have talked to recruiters and employers, not a single one has asked me about a student’s grades. Instead, they ask me how this person gets along with others; how this person leads a team; how this person collaborates; and how this person designs. But not once was I asked, “What grades did this person achieve?” Ironically, after many years of being taught the importance of grades, they don’t matter. Performance does. Being a good human being does.]