A miserable effect of grading is to limit the various uses of testing. Testing, for both student and teacher, is a means of structuring, and also finding out what is blank or wrong and what has been assimilated and can be taken for granted. Review—including high pressure review—is a means of bringing together the fragments, so that there are flashes of insight. There are several good reasons for testing, and kinds of tests. But if the aim is to discover weakness, what are the point of down-grading and punishing it, and thereby inviting the students to conceal his weakness by faking and bulling, if not cheating The natural conclusion of synthesis is the insight itself, not a grade for having had it. For the important purpose of placement, if one can establish in the student the belief that one is testing not to grade and make envious comparisons but for his own advantage, the student should normally seek his own level, where he is challenged and yet capable, rather than trying to get by. If the student dares to accept himself as he is, a teacher’s grade is a crude instrument compared with a student’s self-awareness. But it is rare in our universities that students are encouraged to notice objectively their vast confusion. Unlike Socrates, our teachers rely on power-drives rather than shame and inventive idealism.
Many students are lazy, so teachers try to urge or threaten them by grading. In the long run this must do more harm than good. Laziness is a character-defense. It may be a way of avoiding learning, in order to protect the conceit that one is already perfect( deeper, the despair that one never can). It may be a way of avoiding just the risk of failing and being down- graded. Sometimes it is a way of politely saying, "I won’t. " But since it is the authoritarian grown-up demands that have created such attitudes in the first place, why repeat the trauma(精神创伤) There comes a time when we must treat people as , laziness and all. It is one thing courageously to fire a do-nothing out of your class; it is quite another thing to evaluate him with a lordly F. The idealistic test is