| Summary: | <p>This thesis is dedicated to exploring what it means to ‘be quantified’, by investigating the lived experience of pupils with being graded. The premise underpinning the project - that grades are at their heart a form of quantification - is one which has been largely overlooked in the scholarly discourses on both of the respective concepts.</p>
<p>My work is built on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in a German comprehensive school. This context is particularly salient for the question at hand, as quantification plays a pivotal role in it: German pupils receive between 100 and 120 grades per year, and as oral participation in class constitutes 50% or more of the final grade in each subject, every day of school ‘counts’.</p>
<p>I investigate several effects of quantification on those at its receiving end. In their capacity as numbers, grades firstly determine the (in)visibility of different groups of students. Secondly, they shape students’ self-perceptions and mediate how pupils think about merit and justice. Thirdly, grades enact institutionally supported discipline through their visceral effects on students’ bodies and their central role in the school’s repertoire of gratification and punishment. Grades fourthly govern the distribution of credibility and can thus cause testimonial injustice where numbers and narrative are in conflict with each other. Lastly, an ethnography of being graded offers important insights into increasingly vital ethical questions around quantification and the value of the invaluable.</p>
<p>By joining the forces of ethnography, epistemology, and ethics, the results of this interdisciplinary anthropological-philosophical doctoral project foster a deeper understanding of a phenomenon which has a long historical legacy but has also seen an unprecedented proliferation in the recent decades of the algorithmic age: the quantification of the social.</p>
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