Thoth distribution@thoth.pub Google 20260605T130103

urn:uuid:b55af2d6-4a37-472d-bd56-4f85d3df64aa 03 15 9781911712695 00 EB E101 10 10 02 29784115 01 02 LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology 01 01 Marked School Grades and the Quantified Life 1 A01 Noëlle Rohde Noëlle Rohde is a social anthropologist with a philosophy background and an interest in the social dimension of numbers. She earned her doctorate from the University of Oxford where her thesis on grading in Germany won the Professor David Parkin Prize for the use of ethnographic methods. Besides quantification, Noëlle Rohde’s academic interests are technology ethics, epistemology and critiques of meritocracy. She currently holds a postdoctoral scholarship at Paderborn University where she investigates quantification in sports. 01 eng 00 243 03 04 GN1-890 23 Quality education 10 SOC002000 23 School grades 10 SOC002010 10 1.3.2.0.0.0.0 23 Ethnography 23 Social anthropology 01 06 03 00 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. LSE Press 01 LSE Press 04 01 20260604 02 WORLD 06 15 9781911712671 06 15 9781911712688 06 15 9781911712695 06 15 9781911712701 WORLD 09 LSE Press 20 01