The anti grades crowd has some interesting points about how grades can be bad but realistically they haven't addressed the two main things grades do
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(1) motivate students to prioritize long term over short term self interest
(1a) in classes they are interested in but still need a bit of a push
(1b) frankly more importantly, in classes they hate but need to learn the material
(2) allow for an independent and fast evaluation of students by third parties
A lot of responses to (2) boil down to "evaluation is only relevant because of capitalism" or something and like no??? The idea that people should be qualified for jobs is not capitalism
A lot of responses to (1) boil down to "well students should simply be more motivated intrinsically" which is basically just saying "skill issue" but the skill is long term thinking
Imo this is mainly an issue with the way we do assignments in K12 where an F goes all the way up to 59, which means 59% of the assignment is useless filler questions everyone is expected to get.
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Todd 
@ToddTheOdd
Replying to @notkavi
One thing I fully believe though is that it's wild just how much one 0 grade can impact an average, and so at least for high school and below you should either not assign grades below a 50 or (better) just do a 1-4 scale on everything
We should just make assignments harder and change the bins to F= 0-19 D=20-39 etc or do the suggested and make the minimum score 50%
Maybe it varies by field but I don't think a single engineering or math class I took in one where you could get an A with negligible learning
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Dawson “a dad now” Vosburg
@DawsonVosburg
Replying to @DawsonVosburg
I do not think grades effectively do this. I’ve TA’d for plenty of graded courses and students who don’t really want to learn the material just…don’t. I think the bigger problem is that grades can be gotten without actually learning the material well at all. twitter.com/notkavi/status…
I simply disagree. I know a lot of information about electrical engineering and physics I absolutely would not have known had I been able to just not care about those classes
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Dawson “a dad now” Vosburg
@DawsonVosburg
Replying to @DawsonVosburg
Put a different way: the only way people are going to do real learning regardless of assessment technique is out of intrinsic desire to learn. Assessment design should be geared toward creating a good environment to actually learn.
Imo this is a fair point, though I think the pass bar should be a lot higher than it currently is (where it's basically trivial to pass most classes just by like showing up)
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Dawson “a dad now” Vosburg
@DawsonVosburg
Replying to @DawsonVosburg
Really the only meaningful distinction you can make looking at letter grades is whether someone passed or failed. Failing a class is a pretty clear case of either non-participation or very little learning progress. Pass/fail still gives you this information.
Imo this is really the heart of the matter. Grading is an unpleasant experience for instructors. But there's a lot of unpleasant things that provide value! And i think it's easy to lose sight of this
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Dawson “a dad now” Vosburg
@DawsonVosburg
Replying to @DawsonVosburg
I do say this as someone who really doesn’t love a lot of the experimental pedagogy stuff. I do bog-standard lecture based classes. I just want to spend my time talking about the material with my students, not manipulating grades. And it’s worked so far!
Perhaps some of this is people in different fields talking past each other. I think it's fairly clear that it's easier to provide meaningful grades in courses such as math and engineering than in courses where essays are the major deliverable. So maybe there's no one answer here
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