Marked: School Grades and the Quantified Life

There are few things left on earth that people have not attempted to measure. From temperature to time, from finances to football, numbers are a crucial mediator of how we perceive and understand the world we live in. Increasingly, however, it is humans themselves who are the subject of quantification. Our fitness and success, even our personality traits and attractiveness, are now the stuff of scales and scores. But what does it do to us to be on the receiving end of such measurement? One of the world’s most successful global metrics is the school grade. Long predating the digital age, educational marks can be traced back at least to sixteenth-century European schools and have since conquered the world, becoming the indicator of academic achievement. To understand what it means to be quantified, Noëlle Rohde undertook in-depth fieldwork in a German comprehensive school where students receive more than one hundred grades per year. By staying close to the pupils as they are continually examined and assessed, her ethnography illustrates how marks mould students’ self-images, how they enforce meritocratic thinking and serve as a potent disciplinary tool. Marked: School Grades and the Quantified Life not only offers a nuanced account of the effects of grades on students, but also tells a cautionary tale of the increasing quantification of human life. Click here to read early praise for Marked "Metrics are powerful instruments that shape people’s life chances. Noëlle Rohde examines how grading practices in schools produce categories of “good” and “bad” students while instilling particular notions of worth and performance. She invites us to reflect critically on the very idea of rendering everything measurable and objectifiable. Her book offers a rich and compellingly argued account of the problems and pitfalls associated with the megatrend of quantification." — Steffen Mau, Professor of Sociology, Humboldt University of Berlin, and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Science, Göttingen “Rohde’s careful anthropology of German grading practices reveals the impact of the grade currency by which young people are evaluated, sorted, and judged. While many societies are trying to make assessment more human and humane, Noëlle reveals the inhumane side of reducing learning to grades. Her expose makes clear we can choose something else if we care about young people.” — Gavin T. L. Brown, Professor of Educational Assessment, The University of Auckland “Rohde’s is a fascinating account of one of the world’s most prevalent and fateful quantitative practices: grading students. In rich ethnographic detail, and with a rare focus on grades as they are experienced by students, she examines how deeply grades mediate students’ sense of self, their futures, and the meanings of merit. In doing so, she makes an important contribution to the literature on quantification.” — Wendy Espeland, Professor Emerita of Sociology, Northwestern University "Quantification shapes our lives ever more deeply and dangerously. Noëlle Rohde brilliantly shows how through the eyes of some of the most quantified people in the world – school children. Exceptionally acute and warm-hearted, this book engages with a lived experience shared by us all and in so doing breaks new ground in urgent debates over the ethics of quantification today." — Morgan Clarke, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford "As we quantify ever more aspects of our lives, this richly ethnographic study of a German comprehensive school exposes how students internalise the social judgements and psychological harms produced through incessant grading. Humane, empathetic and theoretically ambitious, Marked makes an important contribution to our understanding of schools as powerful incubators of meritocratic subjectivities." — David Mills, Associate Professor in Pedagogy and the Social Sciences, University of Oxford "How to interpret the nearly universal experience of being quantified? In this meticulous ethnography of numerical measurement, Noëlle Rohde ventures into the most formative (and often trauma-inducing) site of quantification: a secondary school where students face constant assessments of their performance. The result is a wonderfully illuminating account of the social and psychological effects of a relentlessly graded life" — Javier Lezaun, Director of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS), University of Oxford