Dive Brief:

• Banking giant Morgan Stanley recently announced it will do away with numerical performance rankings and shift instead to qualitative assessments, joining companies like Goldman Sachs and Microsoft in changing the way employee data is considered.

• The aim, Morgan Stanley global head of talent management Peg Sullivan told The New York Times, is to provide people with better feedback around “areas for development” and provide employees with information “they can do something with,” in terms of improving down the line.

• The announcement prompted some to ask: What if a similar shift occurred in the way we view student data and learning?

Dive Insight:

Two major criticisms of standardized tests are that they are culturally biased and may not accurately reflect student learning. What if instead of recording student progress in terms of test performance, narrative transcripts followed them to give teachers and community leaders a more comprehensive view of the holistic student? With an increased push towards personalized learning, this is certainly one way to gauge the social-emotional progress of the students and reflect academic progress and concept mastery.

But the difficulty with a narrative transcript becomes the idea that narrative assessments are immensely subjective, and teacher biases might still impact a student’s evaluation. Not only that, variances in the way students are evaluated might prove difficult to higher ed pursuits (though some small colleges have already begun shifting to narrative transcripts). Additionally, they would require even more time out of teachers’ already-packed days to formulate thoughtful adjectives and evaluate progress from one marking period or grade level to the next.

Recommended Reading

The New York Times: Morgan Stanley to rate employees with adjectives, not numbers