Marked : school grades and the quantified life / Noëlle Rohde.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rohde, Noëlle, author.

Series:

LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Students--Rating of.

Students.

Grading and marking (Students).

Educational evaluation--Social aspects.

Educational evaluation.

Educational anthropology.

Ethnology--Methodology.

Ethnology.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvii, 223 pages)

Edition:

1st edition.

Place of Publication:

London : LSE Press, 2026.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Introduction

1. The global triumph of grades

2 . Schooling and grading – the German way

3. Educational realities in a disadvantaged comprehensive school

4. ‘What did you get?’ Lateral and hierarchical visibility through grades

5. ‘It’s understandable if it destroys you, right?’ Students' graded identities

6. ‘To assign people their place in society’ – Marks and meritocracy

7. ‘Mostly in the heart’ – Discipline and the corporeality of being graded

8. ‘She can make you into a tramp’ – Testimonial injustice against the bearers of numbers

. On the ethics of quantification

Conclusion.

Other Format:

Print version

ISBN:

1911712683

9781911712688

9781911712695

9781911712701

Access Restriction:

Unrestricted online access