▶ Your Answer : It is often said that by testing and grading, teachers can enables students to study more. However, I firmly believe that the grades cannot encourage them to put more efforts in their study because student learning is not actually related to grade and rather, it can lower motivation of students. To begin with, assessed by grade, students will lose their motivation to study harder. This is attributed to the fact that when it comes to studying, the concept of self-control is important. What it means that with such self-control, students can study the most effectively. Contrary to it, mandatory study compelled by pressure of being graded contributes to depressing students' motivation to concentrate on their study. According to a study conducted by Seoul National University of Korea in 2009, there was a huge difference between two groups of students in academic achievement. Students in group A were allowed to study by themselves and those in group B were forced to spend 2 hours a day on studying. The researchers showed that the former group performed higher and spent more time on studying than the latter group. On the other hands, those in group B just sit on chair during study time without focusing on and even dozed off frequently. This implies that grading is not a good way to promote studying. In addition, there exists no close relationship between grading and studying more. This is attributed to the fact whether or not a student studies hard is dependent on an individual’s characteristics not grading. Besides, there was a actual test which found that grading has no correlation with student studying. According to a test conducted by Seoul National University of Korea in 2007, grading was not a deciding factor for students to study more. Person’s characteristic is more related with the amount of time and effort that is spent studying Rather, by grading, they tended to study less as I explained above. This is implies that if teachers used grading as a method to let students study more, it will be not useful contrary to their expectation. In brief, although grading seems to be helpful to studying, the truth is that it is never linked to studying more actually. It only manages to force students to sit on a chair for a long time, it is not considered authentic studying, killing time. |