Peer-grading: one of the easiest ways for teachers to free up their schedules by enlisting students to do their work. Many schools regularly engage in this rote practice, swapping homework and tests with their fellow classmates and grading them as the teacher recites the correct answers.
But as established as this practice has become, Kristja Falvo is challenging its validity. Falvo is suing the Owasso Independent School District in Oklahoma, not only for making her children engage in peer-grading, but also for forcing them to announce their scores in front of their classes. Falvo requested that the school refrain from making her son, a special-education student, reveal his quiz grades, arguing that the action is humiliating because his classmates teased him about his low scores.
Legally, Falvo charges that the actions violate the 1973 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), a federal law prohibiting the dissemination of a student's educational records. Although the school district charges that the educational records refer only to permanent material like transcripts, Falvo believes that FERPA is broad enough to encompass a student's individual assignments. The Tenth Circuit Court ruled in favor of Falvo's definition, and the case is currently under review by the Supreme Court.
If a student receives a low grade, the last thing he or she wants is for classmates to find out about it. American students are not legally obligated to reveal their grades to their peers. This means that forcing students to engage in peer-grading simply because it is convenient for the teacher is a violation of FERPA. Needless to say, students also should not have to shout out their grades before a crowded classroom.
Compelling students to reveal their scores against their wills creates only detrimental effects. Low-scoring students struggling to succeed in difficult subjects do not receive positive incentive to improve their grades if they must endure the humiliation of having their marks publicized and risk the ridicule of their peers. In fact, such embarrassment is only likely to damage already vulnerable students' self-esteem, injuring their emotional and academic well beings.
Educators worry that making student information confidential opens up all kinds of potential litigation. For instance, lawsuits charging FERPA violations may extend from the mere passing of graded assignments across a row of desks, or by singling out exceptional students by hanging their assignments on a wall. These educators don't put enough faith our educators and legal system to exercise common sense against frivolous lawsuits. Many schools regularly protect the dissemination of student test grades by posting grades using numbers instead of names.
A more pertinent criticism extends from the idea that broadening FERPA limits the school's ability to educate students as a whole. If schools are forced to exercise caution just to prevent students from becoming academically embarrassed, their abilities to engage in certain activities, such as peer-reviewing written assignments or group work, may be at risk.
But there is a distinction between protecting students' private information, and compromising their overall education. Unlike peer grading, a generally mindless activity that can negatively affect a student's performance, encouraging students to work together in a common academic activity positively impacts their educational development. A new, broader meaning of FERPA has the beneficial effect of returning grading to the domain of the teacher, while students actually do what they're supposed to be doing: learning.
