So when I was 15 years old,
I felt my first real life calling.
Thanks to a group of Olympic athletes
who were coaching kids for free right here in San Jose,
I fell in love
with one of the most obscure sports in the world:
the hammer throw.
Now, I imagine you're all familiar with the shot put, the discus,
maybe even the javelin.
So here's the moment you've all been waiting for:
Hammer Throwing 101.
Imagine you took a 16-pound bowling ball,
and you lodged a broomstick into it,
and then you spun it around so fast that the ball went 60 mph,
and it built up centrifugal force
up to 500 lbs.
And then you let go at just the right moment
so that it could fly higher than an eight-story building
and nearly the length of a football field.
And that gives you some sense
of the unique difficulty and appeal of hammer throwing.
But despite having the best teachers in the world,
the first day did not go well.
In fact, I fell down.
Couldn't have done worse.
But I got back up,
took thousands of throws,
and got better over time.
So while I started at zero,
by the time I was a senior,
I had the farthest throw for a high school student in the country;
earned a scholarship to Georgetown -
go, Hoyas! -
in 1996, I made my first Olympic team;
and eventually I threw 260 feet,
which is one of the farthest throws in American history.
(Applause)
Thank you.
But to be honest with you,
the real benefits of that activity ...
were that it paid for my education,
it allowed me to see the world,
and it allowed me to form lifelong relationships
with some very amazing people.
But as an educator these last 20 years,
I often wonder
what would have happened to my Olympic dream
if I had been graded
in the same way that we grade kids in the classroom.
Quick history of letter grading in the United States.
Letter grading actually started in 1897
out in Mount Holyoke College,
where they decided to grade their students' work from A through E.
Now, one year later,
they realized that E was being confused with excellent.
(Laughter)
And that's where we get the F that we all know and dread.
(Laughter)
So we're talking about a 120-year-old way of assessing students.
Now, assessment is great.
I spent probably more time watching video of hammer throwing
than I did actually throwing.
But letter grades present a number of serious problems.
Number one:
Letter grades are unreasonably permanent.
So let's go back to my Olympic story.
On day one, I would have gotten an F.
By the end of the semester, probably a D.
Now, as a senior, I was leading the country;
I'll take the A.
But all of this is going to be averaged.
And so I probably got about a 2.5 GPA in hammer throwing.
And with a 2.5, colleges would say I'm not ready for the next level,
and my Olympic dream would be over almost before it began.
Now, you might be thinking, "OK. Well, that's sports. Different from academia."
Well, let's check in with your typical high school freshman.
Let's call him Doug.
So Doug,
for whatever completely rational reason,
he bombs his first biology test his freshman year.
Maybe he has the flu.
Maybe something's going on at home.
But he starts off with an F.
He gets better over time.
By the end of the semester, Doug is the best biology student in the class.
But it's all going to be averaged,
so Doug gets a C+,
and that C+, it's forever.
So Doug as a senior
could go on to do research
worthy of a Nobel Prize in Biology
but cannot get a 4.0.
And I want you to think about Doug's situation.
How many of us, if we were in a footrace,
if you fell down at the start,
and you knew you had no chance of winning or even placing well,
would get back and run all out?
That's really hard to do.
Or consider the role reversal.
I know hundreds of teachers, and I don't think there's any one of them
who would want a grade on their first year of teaching
that stuck to them for the entirety of their career.
I know I wouldn't.
What we're missing out on is the do-over.
Everything that we do in life -
you know, our basic life skills -
we're terrible at them at the beginning.
From walking to talking to riding a bike,
we all get better by a process of do-overs.
Or take design.
This is a Ted event after all.
The logo that everybody knows
because of the cool arrow in the negative space,
the FedEx logo there,
famously went through 200 iterations before they got to this version.
This was not 199 failures and then a sudden success;
it was an evolution.
Or consider the paragons of success that we admire:
Thomas Edison,
famously finding out 1000 ways to not make a light bulb
before the light went on;
or Walt Disney,
whose first animation company went bankrupt;
or Maya Angelou,
who endured one of the most difficult childhoods you could possibly imagine
to come back and become one of the most influential voices of the 20th century.
What do these people have in common?
It's not education.
It's not money.
It's not privilege. It's not talent.
It's resilience.
And when we don't allow for a do-over, we don't build that trait
that is most in common for people who have achieved great success.
Grades are stressful by nature.
If we talk about student stress, we should listen to them
because what they tell us is absolutely shocking.
In 2015,
the California Healthy Kids Survey
revealed that one out of three students reported chronic sadness ...
depression.
And the year before,
the American Psychological Association
asked students: "What is the leading cause of stress in your life?"
and identified school as number one.
And one in four said it was causing them extreme stress.
And it's not just grade permanence that causes this.
There's something inherent about grades themselves.
I want you to imagine the world's worst video game.
We're going to call it Level Down.
And in Level Down, you start off with everything unlocked.
You've got all the super powers. You've got all the gear.
But you only get worse over time.
Two things would happen if you played Level Down:
you would lose interest very quickly,
and you would also focus only on the things that could go wrong.
There's nothing to strive for.
And this is very much the situation of high school students.
Even if our man Doug gets an A on that first biology test,
he can only hold on or do worse.
And so he's basically doing a tightrope walk,
and if he gets to the other end of the semester with the A,
the chief emotion he might experience is relief.
The chief emotion of learning and bettering yourself should not be relief;
it should be joy.
Now, you might say,
"Well, OK, education: serious stuff, it's not a game."
And I would beg to differ.
It's already a game.
It's just a really stressful and oftentimes boring game.
And all the students know the rules to this game.
Rule number one:
Find out what the teacher really wants me to know.
Number two:
Cram the night before or during lunch or in the car or during break.
Number three:
Spit out that answer that that teacher wanted to know.
And repeat.
This is not a fun game.
It's a very stressful game.
And we need to change the rules.
Grades are counter-motivational.
What I mean by that is
they literally motivate traits that we don't want to foster.
All right. We've got three paths here.
The one on the left takes three hours.
The one in the middle takes one hour.
The one on the right takes five hours.
If there's $100 at the end of this path,
which road are you going to take?
Students are not dumb.
They'll do the same thing.
This means taking the easiest classes,
the easiest teachers, the least complex projects,
because the pay-off's the same,
and as a result,
what are we actually encouraging?
A minimized work ethic.
A conformity of knowledge:
Don't question the teacher; it's only going to hurt your grade.
And most painfully of all, for me,
an actual avoidance of creativity.
Why would you come up with a solution
that's different than the A work that the teacher provided as a sample?
I would point out
that these are the traits
that we look to for innovators in society:
people who are incredibly hardworking,
people who think differently,
and people who are creative.
Now, some might say,
"Well, it's kids these days. They're just lazy."
But they're not.
Our man Doug, he'll work incredibly hard,
just after school,
whether it's doing a sport or leveling up in a video game
or figuring out a skateboard trick
or figuring out some new, you know, song on the guitar.
They will spend hours on this,
on learning.
What are we depriving them of in school
that they're getting after school?
Daniel Pink
wrote a groundbreaking book called Drive,
where he described that what we really are motivated by
are autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Essentially, we want the freedom to choose what we're doing.
We want to figure out things that are hard.
And we want to know that it matters,
either to our future or to the benefit of the world.
In short, students want the freedom to develop skills that actually matter.
Four:
Grades distract from the actual goal of learning.
All right. This is Ernie Sheldon.
Ernie wanted to break the seven-foot high jump record.
This was a big deal in the 1950s.
No one had ever done it.
It was kind of like the four-minute mile.
So Ernie was so fired up
that in his bedroom, he put a tape mark at seven feet.
Fixated on that number.
Ernie jumped 6'11" dozens of times
but never jumped seven feet,
because he was so focused on the end result
and not on the process on actually how to jump better
that would give him the end result.
So if we replace that tape with the grade,
you can see the problem.
And there's some research to back this up.
Ruth Butler took three groups of kids
and said we're going to do two academic tasks,
and, group number one, we're going to grade you.
Group number two, we're just going to give you comments.
Group number three, we're going to do both.
Guess which group outperformed all others
in both performance academically and in their interest in the projects.
Group number two.
In other words,
just knowing they were being graded
actually made them perform worse.
So knowing all this, why are we doing it?
Who do these grades actually serve?
The only answer I can come up with is colleges.
They need to differentiate students.
I get it.
But consider the fact that two teachers in the same department of the same school
might disagree on assessment.
Or the fact that schools use different grading scales.
At one school, the same student gets a 4.4, another one a 3.8.
Same student.
Or the fact that the letter grades don't mean anything anymore.
There was a time that a C literally meant a mathematical average.
I don't know a class in existence right now where that's the case.
So what do we do?
I give you some what-ifs.
What if more colleges subscribed to Freshman forgiveness?
So our state schools and our UC system and some private schools do this.
But it should be standard.
What if colleges focused more on portfolios:
what students designed,
what stories they told,
what research they've done,
and what have they written?
You're going to get a much more clear picture of who that person actually is.
All right. Who can figure out what these three students have in common?
They have the same GPA.
And that's crazy.
I propose that if there was a calculation of slope that followed the GPA ...
something that gave us a little bit of story,
a movement index
so we could understand:
Hey, student number two is excelling
and probably really ready for college.
He just had a rough start.
We should know that story, and it's not that hard.
What can educators do?
We can gamify our classes.
Students can level up instead of level down.
We can give them a sense of mastery.
So a student who's in calculus really has mastered algebra first.
We can flip our classrooms.
We can provide resources that students can access at home
so they're not so stressed.
We can have do-overs
so students' work can improve over time.
And lastly, we can link learning.
This is when you work with a professional
who's using the skills you're learning in class in their professional life,
which gives it purpose.
For the last five years,
I've tried all of these,
and I can tell you they work.
My students are less stressed,
more engaged,
and producing better work.
So make no mistake:
there are alternatives to traditional letter grading,
and in a world that is changing more quickly than ever before
and facing unprecedented challenges,
we're going to rely on education more than ever.
And after 120 years,
I hope you'll agree:
we're ready for an upgrade.
Thank you.
(Applause)