researcher, there are four essential questions to answer on the subject of grading. As previously emphasized, the elements of grading should be FAST—fair, accurate, specific, and timely.
• How can we make grading systems fair? What we describe as proficient performance truly must be a function of performance and not gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status.
• How can we make grading systems accurate? What we ascribe to students must be a matter of judgment as well as the consequence of evidence and reason.
• How can we make grading systems specific? Telling a student he or she is “average” or a “C” does little to help students, parents, and teachers collaborate for improved learning. Students must receive detailed information about their performance so they can use the feedback to improve.
• How can we make grading systems timely? Even if grades are fair, accurate, and specific, students cannot use feedback to improve performance unless the grades are provided in a timely manner.
In this book, we consider grading practices that meet all of these criteria and discuss practical ways for teachers to save time while providing effective feedback for students.
Fairness, accuracy, specificity, and timeliness—these elements are at the heart of any grading discussion. This book not only considers how to answer these four questions but also how to conduct constructive discussions about grading policies. Perfection is impossible in grading, and therefore, our quest is not for an ultimate answer. The goal is not perfect fairness but a system less subject to bias, both unintentional and deliberate; not perfect accuracy but a more accurate system; not absolute specificity but a system that provides feedback to help students know what they must do to improve. Finally, while it’s not essential for feedback to always be immediate, the prevailing practice in which grades are delivered to students far too late for them to respond is unproductive. Many teachers work very hard to give students detailed feedback, but when that feedback is provided several weeks after student performance or, worst of all, after the semester has ended, then teachers have wasted their time.
As a teacher, I hope that the ways in which I give feedback are better forty years after I taught my first class than it was after thirty, but experience has taught me that the only certainty is that I will fall short of perfection. Therefore, I do not offer a simple recipe that readers can adopt with the confidence of certain success. Instead, these pages offer information regarding:
• A collegial process for discussing some of the most contentious issues in grading
• A communicative process for bringing all stakeholders—parents, board members, the media, students, union leaders, and policymakers—into the discussion
The importance of good communication about grading policies cannot be overstated. It is not sufficient to be right—that is, to have research, logic, and moral certainty on our side of an argument. If our ultimate goal is to make grading systems more effective (improve their fairness, accuracy, specificity, and timeliness), then we must be right on the merits of an argument and successful in reasoning with people who have different points of view.
Understanding Why Grading Is So Important
For teachers and school administrators, the feedback on student performance that perhaps gains the most attention is the annual exam. In Australia, the United Kingdom, and China, national tests are the coin of the realm, the assessments that mark students, teachers, schools, and entire education systems as successes or failures. In Canada, provincial examination scores assess students, schools, administrators, and teachers. Similarly, in the United States, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 requires that each state tests students annually, although the nature and timing of those tests are decisions left to the states (Steinhauer & Rich, 2015).
Despite the political emphasis on annual tests, however, students and parents have a distinctly different focus than school personnel. Their attention is on classroom grades, report cards, and honor rolls. The question parents ask most often is not “What was your score on the exam?” but “How did you get that grade?” Moreover, grades determine academic honors and class rank, and they have a direct impact on college admissions and scholarship opportunities.
A 2008 Fairfax County Public Schools study indicates that 89 percent of colleges responding to a survey use grades to compare applicants, 39 percent require a minimum grade point average (GPA) for admissions into honors programs, and 33 percent require a minimum GPA for merit scholarships. More than half of the colleges do not recalculate grades based on the rigor or content of the course (Fairfax County Public Schools, Department of Accountability, 2008). Therefore, the grades that teachers assign can have a profound impact on students’ future opportunities. The grades that students earn in middle school often influence their eligibility for college-preparatory coursework in high school. Similarly, decisions about which students qualify for advanced courses in middle school are influenced by the grades elementary school teachers assign. Grades also are important for both emotional and financial reasons; therefore, it is completely understandable that the topic of grading is sometimes fraught with contention.
Thomas Guskey and Jane Bailey (2001) document the century-long history of grading controversies. In just one system—Fairfax County, Virginia—there have been more than half a dozen different grading policies since 1912, with a variety of descriptive, numerical, and letter grading schemes. If we take into account the different systems in use at different schools, then the variation is even greater. The “standard” one hundred–point scale with ten-point intervals (90–100 = A; 80–89 = B; 70–79 = C; 60–69 = D; lower than 60 = F) dates from the 1960s, and it is now the most widely used system in the United States, according to high schools and colleges responding to the Fairfax survey (Fairfax County Public Schools, Department of Accountability, 2008).
Identifying What Influences Grades
Most teachers, parents, and school administrators assume that the biggest influence on grades is the individual student’s performance. At first glance, such an assumption seems reasonable, but as you will learn in the following pages, a variety of other influences are involved, including the ways that electronic grading systems are programmed, ancient administrative policies, accidental errors, and teachers’ and administrators’ idiosyncratic judgments. If a school system aspires to implement a grading system that is fair, accurate, specific, and timely, then it must create grading mechanisms that focus more on students’ performance and less on subjective factors unrelated to student achievement.
Let us begin with the premise that people want to be successful. Students want to learn, teachers want their students to excel, and education leaders and policymakers make their decisions in pursuit of students’ best interests. Teachers also want their students to arrive in class ready to learn, finish their assigned work, respect teacher feedback, and leave at the end of the year ready to enter the next level of learning with confidence and success. When we assume goodwill by students, teachers, and leaders, we influence even the most difficult discussions in a positive way. Rather than presume that we must convert bad teachers into barely acceptable ones, let’s instead focus on how to help excellent teachers, administrators, board members, students, and parents make better decisions about one of the most important and emotional subjects in education—how to grade to promote improved student performance.
Of course, grading is only one form of feedback, but it is the form that gets the most attention. Guskey and Bailey (2001) argue that feedback other than grading is actually more influential on student learning. This contention makes sense. Consider, for example, how effective feedback from coaches and music teachers results in encouragement, corrections, and immediate improvement. If a school has an excellent system of feedback but ineffective grading practices, that school undermines many of its own efforts. However, if a school is able to implement effective grading practices, it reinforces all of its other educational endeavors.
