Marking, is it any good?

Grades tend to reduce students’ interest in the learning itself.  One of the most well-researched findings in the field of motivational psychology is that the more people are rewarded for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward

Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking.  Given that students may lose interest in what they’re learning as a result of grades, it makes sense that they’re also apt to think less deeply.  One series of studies, for example, found that students given numerical grades were significantly less creative than those who received qualitative feedback but no grades.  The more the task required creative thinking, in fact, the worse the performance of students who knew they were going to be graded. Grades waste a lot of time that could be spent on learning

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Degrading to De-grading
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From Degrading to De-Grading

By Alfie Kohn