Response: Several Kinds Of Grading Systems

Appetite for learning

Perseverance

Self-initiative

Academic risk-taking

Ability to learn from mistakes

1. Do you initiate working and learning most or all of the time in this class, or does Mr. Ferlazzo have to push you a lot?

2. Do you take risks and try challenging tasks in this class even if you make mistakes (and learn from them). Or do you “play it safe” most of the time?

3. Do you try to teach other students if you understand something more than they do? Do you just give them the answer, or do you help them learn? Or do you only focus on your own work and ignore students who need help?

4. When you don’t feel like doing the assignment, most of the time do you do your best anyway, or do you try to put it off and/or not do your best?

5. Think about the answers you made to the last four questions, and think about the quality of your school work this quarter -- tests, classwork, computer assignments, etc. What grade do you think you deserve and why?

If someone proposed combining measures of height, weight, diet, and exercise into a single number or mark to represent a person’s physical condition, we would consider it laughable. How could the combination of such diverse measures yield anything meaningful? Yet every day, teachers combine aspects of students’ achievement, attitude, responsibility, effort, and behavior into a single grade that’s recorded on a report card - and no one questions it.

Recognizing that merging these diverse sources of evidence distorts the meaning of any grade, educators in many parts of the world today assign multiple grades. In particular, educators distinguish product, process, and progress learning criteria.

Product criteria are favored by educators who believe that the primary purpose of grading is to communicate what students know and are able to do at a particular point in time. Teachers who use product criteria typically base grades exclusively on final products (reports, projects, or exhibits), summative assessments, and other culminating demonstrations of learning.

Process criteria are emphasized by educators who believe that grades should reflect not only the final results, but also how students got there. Teachers who consider responsibility, effort, formative assessments, homework, punctuality of assignments, or class participation when assigning grades use process criteria.

Progress criteria are used by educators who believe the most important aspect of grading is how much students gain from their learning experiences. Teachers using progress criteria look at how much improvement students have made over a particular period of time, rather than just where they are at a given moment.

Reporting multiple grades causes no increase in teachers’ grading workload. Teachers gather the same evidence on student learning that they did before, but no longer need worry about how to weigh or combine that evidence in calculating an overall grade.

More importantly, reporting separate grades for product, process, and progress criteria makes grading more meaningful. Grades for academic achievement reflect precisely that - academic achievement - and not some confusing amalgamation that’s impossible to interpret and rarely presents a true picture of students’ proficiency. Multiple grades provide for parents and others a more comprehensive profile of every student’s performance in school.

Should we continue to assign students grades in the traditional manner (percentages & letters), or should we move towards a system based on levels of mastery?

I support a grading system based on levels of mastery. The problem isn’t percentages or letters, really. Traditional grading practices, however, are so closely associated with the percentage and letter systems that it is great to be able to use the current interest in standards to start over with grading, as well. Grading reformers have been pressing for changes, with little result, for a century. Grades should be based on learning and achievement. Other recommended reforms--privileging recent evidence, using multiple measures, grading individuals and not groups--are ways of working out this primary purpose.

Grading students’ compliance, which happens when teachers emphasize following directions more than substance in their grading criteria, must go. Grading effort (e.g., raising a grade for trying hard) and behavior (e.g., docking a grade for mouthing off) must go. In theory we could do that with letters, too.

Not everyone agrees with this position. There is a bill pending in the Georgia legislature that would prohibit the use of standards based grading in grades four through 12. The first two arguments in the bill claim that standards-based grading fails “to differentiate among students who excel academically and those who merely meet minimal standards” and that “the assessment focus is on equal outcomes for all students, referred to as mastery of minimal standards, in which students can take as long as they need through the school year to meet standards without incurring grading penalties.”

Leaving aside a history lesson (the minimum competency movement was in the 1970s, and it’s over--most current standards are rigorous), and the fact that most schools that seriously attempt standards-based grading find they need to challenge their students who excel more so that they have evidence for advanced performance...am I the only one who hears in these words arguments that seem to be about perpetuating a system where the children of people of influence ‘win’? We have to move education away from being a zero-sum game. And we have to start turning out citizens who don’t think that if I win, you have to lose.

Some years ago, the middle school team in my school decided to study Rick Wormeli’s Fair Is Not Always Equal to help focus our discussions on assessment. Believing that letter grades were not developmentally appropriate for our students, we decided to convert to a standards-based system. One of the benefits was the deep level of thinking that infused our conversations about what skills we were going to focus on and the role of global grades on a specific assignment.

Our scale, developed with input from parents and students, is Mastered - Developing - Needs Attention - No Basis for Assessment. For individual assignments, we assess (and often ask students to self-assess) specific skills. For progress reports, we roll them together into areas such as Research Skills, Writing Skills, etc. We often take a mode rather than a mean, and we give extra weight to more recent assignments. We will probably replace “Mastered” next year with a broader term such as “Proficient” based on faculty and student input. The system helps students focus on specific progress but admittedly leaves them wanting a global judgment to know if they’re doing well enough; we try and handle that through narrative comments.

I use mastery levels, but old habits from students AND PARENTS die hard. Inevitably I must translate a ‘3' (on a scale of 1 to 4) to some letter grade or percentage, even though I describe explicitly what a ‘3' represents: “accurate solution, work shown consistent with solution, sequenced and clear.”

Teachers must be clear and explicit with their assessment approach, and a mastery assessment approach may be more subjective and tailored to each subject, and each teacher possibly.