Reading Notes: Grading: to Each According to His or Her Needs? by Bill Zimmerman

Prerna: This article contains an expansive bibliography of radical science resources. 

"It didn’t take the students very long to spontaneously (and excitedly) come up with a property model for understanding grading, with me as middle management, themselves as workers laboring in a piecework fashion for a share of limited wealth (in the form of grades) that I was distributing, and the grades themselves as a very real form of wealth that determined their ability to survive now in the institution and later in the society."

"someone suggested that each student determine for himself and herself how much work they had done during the quarter relative to what they were capable of or relative to how much they had wished to do  and grade themselves accordingly. This met with some enthusiasm because they felt that in doing so they would be using the institution and its resources rather than allowing the reverse to take place."

"I then told them that I was suggesting that we grade on the basis of communist practice, to each according to his or her needs... Unlike abstract value discussions in which most elite university students tend to go along with innovative and iconoclastice norms, genuine self-interest, competitiveness, and fear emerged quite clearly and were very forcefully confronted. Eventually opinion shifted in  favor of the need system...