Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task.

Some who support [more] coercive strategies assume that children will run wild if they are not controlled. However, the children for whom this is true typically turn out to be those accustomed to being controlled— those who are not trusted, given explanations, encouraged to think for themselves, helped to develop and internalize good values, and so on. Control breeds the need for more control, which is used to justify the use of control.

If faculty would relax their emphasis on grades, this might serve not to lower standards but to encourage an orientation toward learning.

Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task.

The late W. Edwards Deming, guru of Quality management, once declared, 'The most important things we need to manage can't be measured.' If that’s true of what we need to manage, it should be even more obvious that it’s true of what we need to teach.

Trying to be number one and trying to do a task well are two different things.

Independence is useful, but caring attitudes and behaviors shrivel up in a culture where each person is responsible only for himself.