Drawbacks Of Written Evaluation

The Drawbacks of Written Evaluations In today's education, giving grades is the most popular means to reflect students' masteries based on their academic performances. However, there are a number of questions asking if it does more harm than good. Some people say that grades remove intrinsic motivation and are poor communicators. Students might think that grades are the most important thing and forget the real goals of learning. Moreover, they may not know their true strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, the solution for those who support the idea is written evaluations since the evaluations tend to reflect students' abilities more clearly, and benefit both students and parents more. However, despite the seemingly good points, written evaluations

Realistically, they cannot be into every student equally, that is, some of the students are extrovert while the others are not. To be fair, teachers, therefore, must put a lot more effort to understand the latter category so that they can evaluate both groups equally, clearly, and fairly, which is, in fact, also hardly possible. In addition, to write a profound evaluation for each student takes a great deal of time, for they have to criticize and write as many sides as they can. And what makes it even worse is that one teacher doesn't give comments to only a few, but all of the students in every course/class he/she teaches. That means they may need months to complete the task. Besides, in fact, teachers have several more duties to do including not only evaluating students, but also teaching, preparing methodology, and so forth. Thus, increasing that extra substantial quantity of work will not be tolerable. Giving grades, therefore, is still a better solution for the case. Teachers don't have to scrutinize everything in every student, but examine them under the normal grading criteria. They only evaluate students by giving points pertaining to the students' competencies, which can reduce a considerable number of workloads and time

Of course, we cannot deny the fact that, many times, grades are misleading by making students try whatever gives them good grades, such as enrolling easier courses. However, when we get into details, we will see that diligent students will always be hardworking while lazy students will always be sluggish. However, lazy students would become more indifferent if written evaluations totally replaced grading systems. The point is that most people improve themselves because they need to be competitive, and grades are a simulation competition which creates a strong incentive to become better than others. As a result, with written evaluations, which have no fixed reference point, students with laziness will not try to compete, lying to themselves that they have good points and refuse the bad ones. Therefore, grades still create stronger inspiration than written evaluations do as they, at least, tell students what exactly they are weak or outstanding comparing to others under the same criteria, which causes he/she to struggle, be competitive, and then develop at