Over the last couple years, I have begun teaching. At first just a reading group or seminar with a handful of attendees. Last term I helped teach two large lecture classes.
I know that, compared to some of my colleagues, I spend an enormous amount of time assessing and evaluating students' assignments. I try very hard to give detailed, substantive, feedback on each piece of student work. At the end of the day, however -- at my school at least -- there's always a grade.
For someone who went well out of his way to go to a college with no grades, there's a tragic irony to the whole situation: I think grades mean little and are often worth much less. Today I am forced to to inflict them on people who, almost universally, do not.
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But to answer your question, there is no real way of addressing the tension. Grades are simply too "lossy" to be useful. For example, I can't figure out how to reflect progress. Some students do great work throughout a course. Other students start out much more roughly and then improve impressively through learning, feedback, and effort.
You certainly want to reward both students but, it feels unfair to reward a student who did uneven work but learned with a higher grade than a student who did high quality work throughout the course.
The written evaluations I provide describe, in detail, both situations. Every evaluation describes both strengths and areas for improvement. And each one is different. There's simply no way these can be collapsed into a single dimension relative to the work of every other student in the class.
As far as I'm concern, my written evaluations are my only valuable feedback. It's just sad that all the affordances are such that my students are likely to disagree with me.
The real learning experience for the student was the whole process of preparing the work for evaluation. Simply assigning a grade doesn't feedback to them and let them have an opportunity to build on their experience. Many professors offer a first round of constructive feedback but few students take them up on it. With larger #s it's almost impossible to make that offer though.
Think about how you've truly learned something - it probably involved first making a mistake and then being given some insight from either a person or machine that led you to greater understanding. Even if you got the right answer the first time, you may not have understood the underlying concepts until you had to explain them to someone else (Synthesis) or even moreso build an system to test others learning (Evaluation).
Assessing knowledge level is easy (Knowledge as in Bloom's taxonomy of learning). Assessing everything above that level(Comprehension, Assessment, Synthesis, Evaluation) is more difficult b/c of the effort on the part of the evaluator and evaluation system.
The most unintuitive thing about teaching is how much each person learns when they have to teach others.
Unless I've misinterpreted, you just said you grade on a curve? Ick.
I have no objection to grades in general, though not as a primary means of useful feedback, just as a mechanism for saying whether you passed a class and can move on or not. But in a sensible grade structure, the professor should have no problem giving the entire class As if they earned them, and conversely should give the entire class Cs or Fs if they earned them. How well a student learned from a given class does not depend on how well or how badly their classmates learned; an A should mean the same thing regardless of peers.
But you quoted the key issue. I explained that at my institution (for masters and undergraduate classes, at least), I cannot give over a certain class GPA. If I give half the class As, half the class must get Bs.
The point of grades is at least in part to showcase learning but to showcase relative performance. The variance required by that desire interferes with our ability to use grades for other things. This is one reasons that I think they are not very useful. Hence the point.
Grades are useful to those who view education as a means to an end. They help separate the winners from the losers and can be used to rank students. Grades are, supposedly, a form of "accountability".
Here's some food for thought from someone I admire a lot: http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
So at MIT, are those grades used somewhere else besides the class?