WHERE DID GRADES COME FROM?William Farish, a tutor at Cambridge University in England in 1792, came up with a method of teaching which would allow him to process more students in a shorter period of time. He invented grades (Hartmann, 2005). This grading system had originated earlier in the factories as a way of determining if the shoes made on the assembly line were “up to grade.” It was used as a benchmark to determine if the workers should be paid and if the shoes could be sold (Hartmann, 2005). This grading method increased the salary of William Farish, while at the same time, lessened his workload and reduced the hours he needed to spend in the classroom(Hartmann, 2005). He no longer needed to burrow into his students’ minds to know if they understood a topic, his grading system would do it for him. And, it would do it just as efficiently for twenty children as it would for two hundred. Farish brought grades to the classroom, and the transformation was both sudden and startling. Within a generation, the lecture-hall/classroom shifted from a place where one heard the occasional speech by a famous thinker to the place of ordinary daily instruction (Hartmann, 2005).
I meant to say orange. Mind’s going!