Blahgorrhea

In “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Robert Pirsig talks about the effect of grades on student behavior, attitude and performance. He tells a story of a college rhetoric professor who experimented with withholding grades for a semester. The experiment ended with great results, with all students eventually “scoring” where they normally would have but actually learning in the process. He gives a hypothetical example of a student in a normal system who works only for grades and becomes distracted by the “carrot” so that he does not learn at all, and a student in a gradeless system who drops out with a lack of motivation but then ends up returning to school later in life with an intense desire to learn, eventually “performing” better than he would have in the graded system. [Continue reading…]