>And yet they are incentive that every teacher knows warps learning; students become more concerned with maximizing a number than they do with the learning itself. Is the incentive really worth it, especially when we could be using other more powerful incentives for learning, such as students’ intrinsic interests and life goals? I don’t think so. When I design classes, I try to design assessements that are closely aligned with student interests and goals to avoid this warping of motivations, but the effect is still there.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" - Goodhart's Law

This seems to be a complaint about something but offers no alternatives that would help gain desired outcomes. By being a professor and writing this article the author seems to embody the principle of those who can, do, and those who can't, teach.

There's also what seems to be a false distinction of summative and formative grading. Every example that's given there is no difference in the testing and there is no difference in the evaluation of the test but it is simply the application of the outcomes from that test. So it's okay to administer a test evaluate what is correct and incorrect and then apply those outcomes to teaching someone their knowledge gaps. This is what the author indicates as a formative test.

Doing the exact same thing except applying those outcomes to make a decision on whether you want to admit them to your institution (work, school, etc) is a summative test and is bad. The reasons that are given can be summed up in the point that it makes someone feel bad when they get rejected. There seems to be no acknowledgment that many institutions are not institutions that are built to teach people, and that it's appropriate for institutions or other individuals to take subsets of information they gain through testing or questioning and then formulating a guess as to whether the person would be acceptable in their institution or not. Is this a perfect predictor of acceptability? Obviously not and no one thinks it is. Simply making the argument that it's not perfect therefore throw it away for a non-existent alternative is a useless argument.

If you're going to make argumentation that evaluations used to make decisions (which is what tests and grading are) are of no value because they make people feel bad, then this applies to both the authors summative and formative applications of outcomes and it's the height of ignorance to think that they are different in how they impact feelings. You additionally need to propose an alternative that provides a solution for what the institutions need and solves for what you indicate is the primary problem. This article made zero attempt to do that. So I'm back to, those who can, do, and those who cannot, teach. Because this person embodies that wholly useless principle that many people have of I can do something and it's totally fine as in they use grades every day when teaching their students, but if you use the exact same thing you are bad. Zero acknowledgment that their failure in teaching is what caused the failures of their students in evaluations. Perhaps teaching people to live in the world you say you're preparing them for should be your goal instead of saying that the world is wrong.

Why whine about things you can't impact anyway?