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Introduction

STARTING THE CONVERSATION

Whether you are a teacher or an administrator, parent or student, or policymaker or academic 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.

Reconciling Experience and Evidence

We are all victims of experience and context, often believing that personal experience is superior to evidence. While students have learned to scoff at medieval superstitions and to value the testing of hypotheses, prevailing discussions in education often remain stubbornly focused on experience rather than evidence.

Casual assertions have a way of becoming accepted with insufficient challenge. Some readers might recall futurists of the 1980s predicting that by the year 2000 schools would be paperless and student writing would give way to dictation into voice-recognition systems. As we know, neither prediction is close to reality. Educators still endure similar assertions about their profession and about grading policies. Rhetorical certitude, however, is not a substitute for evidence. When considering how to improve grading policies, one of the most important agreements that teachers, parents, students, and school leaders must reach is that evidence should guide their conclusions.

Try an experiment with your colleagues by asking them the following questions.

• What enduring principles have you learned in your career? What, in brief, do you know for sure about teaching, learning, and student achievement?

• What beliefs did you have ten years ago that you now know are no longer true?

Compare the quantity of responses to the first question to the quantity of responses to the second question. I rarely have difficulty eliciting a conclusion to the first question: “The primary causes of student achievement are …” or “The most important components of good teaching are …” However, the responses to the second question require some effort. Admitting that what we knew a decade ago in education was imprecise, uncertain, or downright wrong appears to require a rare degree of candor.

Now, pose the same questions to an ophthalmologist, climatologist, marine biologist, cardiologist, orthopedic surgeon, or international aid worker. These professionals have little difficulty acknowledging that what they know today surpasses what they knew in previous decades. They accept the fact that today’s evidence trumps yesterday’s experience. For example, a cardiac surgeon knows that twelve years spent in a surgical residency taught her very little about the powerful effects of behavioral modification on heart patients today. That doesn’t undermine the value of her surgical training but rather amplifies the value. Each time we know—as parents, professionals, craftsmen, musicians, or students—a little bit more about how our work improves and the results we expect, the better our results will be.

Thankfully, the use of evidence in medicine and many other fields has led to meaningful and life-saving reforms (McAfee, 2009). The elevation of personal preference over evidence is not unique to education but appears to be part of human nature. It seems people prefer the comfort of the familiar over the discomfort of the new, even if evidence supports the latter. That is why the most rational and reasonable people can do irrational and unreasonable things in resisting change (Deutschman, 2007). However clear the evidence, personal experience remains triumphant in too many discussions of education policy.

Education in particular—a profession that prides itself on progress—is rooted deeply in past convictions. We lay claim to 21st century learning by placing an electronic board at the front of the class, but we lecture as if electricity has not yet been invented. We praise collaboration yet often assess our students in a manner that punishes and berates peer assistance.

How can we distinguish experience from evidence? The most effective way I know is to use the following six levels of evidence.

1. Opinion: “This is what I believe, and I believe it sincerely.”

2. Experience: “This is what I have learned based on my personal observation.”

3. Local evidence: “This is what I have learned based on the evidence, which not only includes my own experience but also my friends’ and colleagues’ experiences.”

4. Systematic observation: “I have compared twelve schools that fully implemented my proposed intervention with twelve schools that did not implement it. Here are the results that show the difference between these twenty-four schools …”

5. Preponderance of evidence: “This is what we know as a profession based on many of our colleagues’ systematic observations in many different circumstances in varied locations and at many different times.”

6. Mathematical certainty: “Two plus two equals four, and we really don’t need to take a vote on whether that statement is agreeable to everyone.”

In a world subject to relativism in every sense—political, moral, and even scientific and mathematical—certainty seems elusive, particularly in regard to controversial topics like education practices. Nevertheless, there is an appropriate place for the definitive language of mathematics in our approach to grading. For example, when teachers use the mean, or average, to calculate a student’s grade, they reach a different mathematical result than when they focus on the student’s final scores. When teachers use a 0 on a one hundred–point scale, they reach a different mathematical result than when they use a 0 on a four-point scale. These are not matters of conjecture but simple calculation.

The first step toward reconciling debate in education, or any other matter of public policy, is for the rhetorical combatants to be intellectually honest about their claims and capable of distinguishing among what they believe, what they see, what they hear from colleagues, and what they have learned from the evidence.

Conversations About Change

There are two ways to begin a conversation with classroom teachers and building administrators about changing practices. The first is characterized by one-sided enthusiasm. Zealous advocates who adopt this method typically have goodwill, good research, and good intentions, but their audiences soon move from boredom to frustration to active opposition. What began as a collegial conversation focused on questions of practical application ultimately becomes entrenched opposition. Yesterday’s reasonable challenge becomes tomorrow’s grievances. Thoughtful dialogue and professional conversation are transformed into rancor. Colleagues become opponents, with each side wondering, “Haven’t we been down this road before?”

The second way to begin the conversation is with a question, not a statement. Rather than telling teachers and administrators what they need to do, we can ask, “What prevents you from being the very best teacher and administrator you can be?” The following are common responses to that question.

• “The kids don’t care.”

• “The parents don’t care.”

• “Many of the students don’t come to school.”

• “Students who do come to school are disengaged, inattentive, preoccupied, and angry.”

• “Administrators don’t support teachers who demand quality student work.”

• “Leaders at the system level tolerate poor teachers and administrators.”

• “Colleagues won’t cooperate and collaborate.”

The list could go on and on. Nevertheless, it is definitely a question worth asking.

This book is not a prescription. Rather, it poses a number of important questions and suggests the creation of boundaries. For example, in athletics, each contest has boundaries. No strategy, no matter how creative, is acceptable if it takes place outside of those boundaries. Officials, coaches, and athletes know the boundaries of their sport well. Within them are the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Outside 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.