The Unfair Practice Called Grading

High school graduation season, for the most part, has come and gone. Graduates are getting ready to prepare for college or possibly the work force. Seniors have been recognized for their academic achievement by being named cum laude, magna cum laude, or summa cum laude. Valedictorians and salutatorians have given their speeches congratulating their fellow classmates for a myriad of accomplishments. Millions of dollars of scholarship money has been announced and disbursed.

What if I told you that everything above is predicated on a highly unfair system of deciding who is #1 and who isn’t, who wins the scholarship and who doesn’t, and who gets the acceptance letter and who is left wondering why? What I’m talking about here is grading – the practice of assigning a number or letter or worse to student work presented to a teacher for evaluation. If America knew what an inexact science grading really was, there would be a revolution inside public schools the likes no one has ever seen.

Let’s start by painting a picture of what quality grading should look like. When it comes to fair grading, what should happen inside public schools starts with adult learning leaders coming together to discuss assessment practices while trying to calibrate those practices as much as possible. Calibration begins with a discussion of what the adult learning leaders want their young leaders to learn. This discussion includes what big ideas the young learners need to understand. It also includes a conversation between the adult learning leaders about how the young learners will demonstrate understanding of those big ideas. This demonstration conversation answers the question, “How do we know our young learners have learned what they need to learn?” Finally, adult learning leaders need to agree upon a feedback script. This script provides the young learner with an evaluation of where they are, or aren’t, with meeting their desired learning goals. The feedback script should be designed to provide the most accurate information to the young person being evaluated.

What I just described above rarely happens in public schools – especially secondary. What I’ve described above takes time, and when you have 150 students on your class list, you just can’t commit to the intricacies learning definition, demonstration, and feedback employ.

Instead, what occurs in most public schools is a farce, if you believe grading should be about providing quality feedback to all students. It’s entirely likely that four teachers teaching the same subject will exhibit different grading practices. The first teacher grades on a 5-letter system – A, B, C, D, F. The second teacher grades on a 100-point scale. The third teacher grades on a 4-point scale. The fourth teacher grades using a check -, check, check + system. The five teachers assign the same work for five projects, and five students earn similar “grades.” A student in the first teacher’s class is assigned an A, B, C, D, and two F’s. A student in the second teacher’s class is assigned a 90, 80, 75, 70, and two 0’s. A student in the third teacher’s class is assigned a 4, 3, 2, 1, and two 0’s. A student in the fourth teacher’s class is assigned two check +’s, one check, and three check –‘s. The student average in the first teacher’s class is somewhere between a C- to a D+. The average in the second teacher’s class is a 52 – a failing grade. The average in the third teacher’s class is a 1.6, somewhere in the range of a C- to a D+. The average in the fourth teacher’s class is a check, or a passing grade. The four students perform relatively the same on the five projects, but three are assigned passing grades and one fails. I’m guessing the student who earned the “check,” ends up with a C (or 75) from his teacher, since most districts require a letter or numeric conversion for their report card.

And this example shows four teachers teaching the same subject. Imagine the wide range of grading error when additional subjects are added into an academic year, and multiple school years are added into the final student transcript.

What a mess!

But there’s more. When I was a high school principal, I could handpick teachers over a student’s four-year academic career that would allow that student to be assigned a 4.0. I could also assign another student of equal intelligence and work ethic another set of teachers over a four-year period and that student would be assigned a 3.2. Same content, same tests, but very different grading practices. And students knew how to play this game. If easy graders had seats available in their classrooms, kids would quickly ask counselors for a class change to get away from a hard grader.

What a mess! What a mess!

And still, there’s more. Add into the mix “grading on the curve,” “extra credit,” and a host of other tricks of the trade, a final grade’s significance was, well, not worth much. We even had teachers who offered extra credit for brining toilet paper and tissues to class.

What a mess! What a mess! What a mess!

I get a kick out of what traditional school leadership decides to take on as the crisis of the day. They focus on mask-wearing, critical race theory, and the latest budget cut, but they allow weak and probably unethical grading practices to go on year after year.

So the next time you go to your neighborhood high school graduation, and the valedictorian gets up to speak, think about what you just read and ask yourself, “Is the best we can do?”

Til tomorrow. SVB