Mystical Ratios

“There are many cultural reasons why we fall into this confusion about grading, many of them having to do with the lust for scientific precision that came out of the Enlightenment. Now it makes sense, for example, if the children are taking a vocabulary test of 100 words, and one of the kids misses thirteen of them, to give him an 87 percent. But we go far beyond this. A student writes an essay on a sunset, let us say, and the teacher writes 87 percent at the top of that paper. What he is saying, in effect, is that there is a mathematical metaphor operative here. The figure of 87 is to 100 what this submitted essay is . . . to what? What on earth is this supposed to mean? Teachers have always evaluated students, and students have always wanted to know how they are doing. Our problem is that we have pretended that certain forms of evaluation have decimal points, and they do not. What does it mean actually to have three credits of sociology from a university? Can we imagine contacting John Calvin’s alma mater and getting a copy of his transcript? Did Gamaliel ever give Paul a B minus? (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 149).