of them is the zone of irrelevance. The elements of this book act as four essential boundaries for grading—remember the useful acronym FAST.
1. Grades must be fair. Gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, political attitudes, or other factors unrelated to academic performance must not influence grades.
2. Grades must be accurate. Grades must reflect the student’s performance.
3. Grades must be specific. Grades not only are an evaluation but also feedback. Students, parents, and teachers must understand the grade and also have sufficiently specific information so they can use the teacher’s feedback to improve student performance.
4. Grades must be timely. While there is, inevitably, a final grade that appears on an official transcript, particularly in secondary school, that is but a postscript to a very long story. Much earlier than the final grade, students should receive a steady stream of feedback, similar to what athletes receive from coaches, designed not merely to evaluate their performance but to improve it.
Fairness, accuracy, specificity, and timeliness—these elements are the criteria for building effective grading polices, and these are the topics explored in the pages of this book.
What’s New in the Second Edition
Since the first edition of Elements of Grading, the controversies surrounding grading practices have not been resolved but rather have escalated. The development of Twitter and the active international participation in #SBLChat (for standards-based learning) has highlighted the difficulty in establishing systemwide reform. The common themes in these discussions are that teachers who are committed to standards-based grading are largely working in isolation in an environment actively hostile to grading reform. Therefore, in the second edition, I have not only added more about the grading debate but also who should be engaged in that debate. This not only includes teachers and administrators but also parents, skeptics, and the general public.
Moreover, we must be aware of grading reform ideas that have failed—the “minimum 50” is a good example of this. In an attempt to save students from the impact of a 0 on a one hundred–point scale, some schools have tried to implement a minimum grade of 50. However, this policy runs into almost universal opposition because, critics reason, “Why should a student earn fifty points for doing nothing? If I came to work half the time, I wouldn’t get half the pay!” The second edition provides more simple and palatable reforms that answer the most basic challenges of critics: students can continue to receive letter grades; they still have a transcript for admission to college; parents have clear and accurate information about the academic progress of their children; and teachers have the professional discretion to award grades based on student proficiency rather than a computerized conclusion that may be far from the teacher’s judgment.
The second edition also includes sections on the impact of technology on grading practices, grading in the context of the Common Core State Standards, student engagement, and grading for students with special needs. Finally, this edition offers an international perspective, as public and private educational systems around the globe are dealing with the issue of improving grading policies. I hope that this book provides a source of study and guidance for faculties and administrators as they seek the best grading solutions for their schools and education systems.
Chapter 1
EFFECTIVE GRADING IN A STANDARDS-BASED WORLD
This is the paradox of standards-based education: education systems around the world widely accept standards in theory. The official embrace of standards-based education has grown dramatically, from only a dozen states adopting standards to all fifty states, along with many education systems around the world, including Norway, Malaysia, Japan, Australia, the Philippines, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Chile, and Canada, to name a few (International Society for Technology in Education, 2015). While the standards certainly vary, including academic, technology, and teacher qualification standards, the principle of standards-based reform is global in scope.
There are surely differences regarding which standards to adopt, with much contention about the use of Common Core State Standards. Nevertheless, the central controversy involves which standards to adopt, not whether or not standards should be adopted. Despite the illusion of consensus about the value of academic standards, the reality is that standards in practice—particularly in the ways that teachers evaluate students—have been stubbornly indifferent to change. Education systems embracing 21st century standards with breathless enthusiasm continue to implement grading practices firmly rooted in the 19th century.
This chapter explores what standards mean for grading practices and policies, considers the advantages and criticisms of standards, and offers some practical advice about using standards to influence improved grading practices.
What Standards-Based Education Really Means
There are two common ways to evaluate students. We can compare their performance to other students, or we can compare their performance to an objective standard. The first method, comparing students to one another, makes sense when one must allocate a scarce resource, such as admission to highly selective colleges. However, this method makes no sense when the stakes are really high, such as landing an airliner or performing brain surgery. In these examples, it is not enough to merely be better than one’s peers. Rather, it is essential that the pilot and the surgeon meet a standard—our second way to evaluate students. The claim that an airline doesn’t crash as frequently as other airlines or that a hospital has fewer deaths than the hospital across town provides scant reassurance to passengers and patients. What the public cares about is not who beat whom but rather the degree of proficiency pilots and surgeons possess.
The essentials of standards are the same for students as for pilots and surgeons. When we compare students to one another, we have the worst of all possible worlds. This system regards students who have mastered standards as inadequate if it has assessed another student in the class as better. Worse yet, it labels students who have failed to master a standard as excellent, as long as they are superior to their peers.
Is the comparison of student performance to pilots and surgeons overwrought? Not if you consider the impact of student failure on health and social well-being. As Alliance for Excellent Education (2010) research indicates, students who fail in school have dramatically higher medical care costs, lower incomes, and disproportionate use of the criminal justice system. Failures in the cockpit and surgical suite not only affect the people directly involved but all of society. Similarly, failures in the classroom affect all of us.
Standards are a delusion if students are not evaluated on their proficiency. Despite the public embrace of standards since the 1990s, standards-based student evaluation has been slow to develop. While researching this book, I interviewed some of the most prominent international leaders in education reform. Most claim that although there are occasional exceptions, very few examples exist in classrooms or schools in which an entire education system backs up its rhetoric of standards with the reality of standards-based student evaluation.
What Makes Standards-Based Grading Different
Imagine that you are teaching your teenage son to drive. You have selected a deserted parking lot on a Sunday morning where very little could go wrong. You relinquish the driver’s seat and make sure that your seat belts are so tight that they almost constrict your breathing. As your teen driver lurches forward, you notice that most of the parking lot lampposts bear the scars of car paint. It appears that you are not the first person who thought that the parking lot would be a good training ground for new drivers.
There are two possible questions that you can consider. The first is, “Will my kid make fewer dents in the lampposts (and
