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Assess Problems With Traditional Grading Practices

PART I

We have reason to implement standards-based grading because it assumes most students, given the right support, can master content. It is time to review grading practices and assessment issues, especially how we calculate and determine grades, and what they communicate to students, parents, and teachers about individual learning and personal effort. Grading issues are not limited to local school districts’, states’, or provinces’ policies and practices. In classrooms, individual teachers may calculate students’ grades based on many variables, such as averaging grades earned throughout the grading period, including or excluding homework grades, carrying over grades from the previous grading period, and so on. All these factors are a major source of different interpretations of grades. For example, is it professional and reasonable for one mathematics teacher to count a student’s homework as 40 percent of a grade while another mathematics teacher does not consider homework at all in calculating final grades? Should one teacher count a project as 50 percent of a student’s final grade while another teacher counts the same project as 20 percent of the final grade?

The variations in grades given by teachers who determine their own measures and values often reflect uneven treatment of students. Such variations in grading primarily affect low-achieving students whose work is inconsistent rather than the high-achieving students who can rely on strong support systems outside of school and, therefore, consistently perform well (Morsy & Rothstein, 2015; Van Horn et al., 2009). Therefore, inconsistent grading practices remain a troublesome issue, as 21st century schools are expected to educate a larger, more diverse student population. We’ll dive into these issues in the following chapters.