Throw Out Your Syllabus: the Grading Problem, Examined vs Taught

Every club has one. A list per grade: these stances, these kicks, this kata, this combination. It is handed to beginners as a map of the art, and it is not one.

What it is for

Examinations, and only examinations.

A grading syllabus is a specification of what a student will be asked to perform on a given day, so that everybody knows the standard in advance. That is a good and fair thing to have. Students are entitled to know what they are being judged on, and a club that grades against an unpublished standard is doing something worse.

The trouble is what happens next.

How it eats the curriculum

Gradually, and for reasons that are nobody’s fault individually.

An instructor with a class of mixed grades, limited hours, and students who want to pass has an obvious efficient move: teach the examinable material. Every week the syllabus explains itself a little more loudly as the curriculum, and the material that was never on it drifts out of the timetable.

Within a few years the club teaches a set of performances. Nobody decided that. It is what optimizing for a measurable target does to everything it touches, in karate as in schools.

What falls out first

Whatever is hardest to examine.

Distance, which cannot be assessed in the air. Timing against a partner who is not cooperating. Deciding between two responses under pressure. Recovering when the first thing failed. Sparring at varied contact levels rather than one safe register.

Every one of those is more important to whether a student can use their karate than any item on the grading sheet, and every one of them is a nightmare to score consistently, so it goes.

The suggestion

Not to abolish the thing. Beginners need visible structure, and a club with no published standard is worse than a club with a narrow one.

Try instead a simple audit: take a term’s training diary and mark each session’s content as examinable or not. If the non-examinable column is thin, the syllabus is running the club, and it is running it toward students who look excellent in a line and struggle the moment somebody moves.

The fix is boring and it works. Protect a fixed share of every session for material that will never be graded, and defend it hardest in the weeks before a grading, which is exactly when it will be the first thing offered up.

What a syllabus is good at, once it stops running the class

The argument is not that the document should be burned. It is that it belongs in a different place in the week.

A syllabus is an excellent examination specification and a poor curriculum. As a specification it does real work: it tells a student what will be assessed, it stops an instructor examining on a whim, and it makes a grade comparable between two students tested by different people. Those are worth having, and a club without any written standard tends to grade on how much it likes you.

The failure is structural rather than moral. Whatever appears on the list becomes what gets taught, because both parties are rewarded for it, and anything not on the list becomes optional at exactly the moment the next grading is announced. The fix is not a better list. It is a habit of teaching from the material and checking against the list, which sounds like a distinction without a difference until you watch two clubs do it.

Test your own: ask what was taught in the last month that will not be examined at anybody’s next grading. If the answer is nothing, the document is running the class.