Throughout my years as a teacher, principal, and district administrator, grading was like the old joke about the weather: Everyone complained, no one did anything. Students, families, and faculty knew that no teachers graded the same. Grading variability and idiosyncrasy seemed hard-wired into instruction, a necessary expression of teacher autonomy.
Two students in adjacent Algebra 1 rooms could have identical understanding yet receive different grades because of variation between teachers in late-work penalties, tardiness, extra credit, or participation points.
Even within the same classroom, one student could receive a B for strong assessment scores but habitual tardiness, while another student might earn an identical B for consistently following classroom rules despite struggling to understand the content.
Today, it’s clear that we can improve traditional grading to shift away from problematic mathematics, pedagogical weaknesses, subjectivity, and unreliability.
A growing body of classroom-based and teacher-driven research has identified practices that make grades more accurate and fairer while reducing students’ anxiety and improving their learning. These practices include using a proportional scale, reporting only a student’s most current understanding, and excluding nonacademic behaviors or circumstances outside a student’s control.
These improved grading practices—called standards-based, competency-based, or most recently, equitable grading—have been around for decades. They are built on a straightforward premise: A student’s grades should report only what they’ve learned of the course outcomes.
Such a common-sense idea should unite educators and parents, but these grading practices have generated surprising debate, even hostility. Why do we still hear claims that equitable grading lowers standards, demotivates students, or even undermines public schools? In my research and partnering with schools and districts for over a decade, I have found three common sources of the pushback.
Understanding them will help educators not only to respond to and anticipate critiques but also to recognize them for what they are—predictable reactions to change—and remain resolute in improving grading.
1. Educators and noneducators can tend to oversimplify and misunderstand changes to grading.
Because traditional grading has been nearly unchanged since the Industrial Revolution, changes to familiar practices are vulnerable to misinterpretation and knee-jerk rejection, even when those changes ultimately improve learning.
For example, equitable grading gives students multiple opportunities to demonstrate what they know. But because the one-and-done model of assessment and grading is so entrenched, it’s easy for skeptics to provocatively distort reassessments as “unlimited retakes.” Aside from the pedagogical value of giving students multiple attempts to show understanding, the practice also reflects the professional world: When we must demonstrate competency—on medical boards, driver’s tests, bar exams, teacher credentialing—we get a reasonable number of chances.
Traditional grading also encourages teachers to use points to reward students’ desired behaviors, such as for speaking during a class discussion. It’s easy for uninformed critics to oversimplify a break with this approach as allowing students to be lazy and “unprepared for the real world,” but students won’t learn agency and responsibility through grading that rewards compliant classroom behavior.
Equitable grading practices reject awarding points for behaviors that incentivize students to merely perform the appearance of learning. By removing external rewards for compliant behavior, equitable grading is not only less subjective but also challenges students to build their intrinsic motivation to be engaged.
To be crystal clear: Standards-based and equitable grading do not endorse limitless retakes, excuse late work and ignore homework, or adopt a percentage scale that “gives credit for free.” Because these ideas are so different from traditional grading and more complex than people realize, any changes to grading require clear and complete communication that explicitly addresses potential misconceptions.
2. District leaders often try to fix grading too quickly through top-down policy.
District leaders never simply announce, “Every teacher must use close reading” and expect positive results. Instead, they design multiyear initiatives to equip teachers to implement the full battery of research-based literacy practices. Yet, grading reform is often attempted by administrative fiat—“All teachers must use a 50% minimum,” for example—without engaging or educating teachers, students, and families.
When leaders treat grading reform as a technical fix, it produces inflammatory sound bites and backlash, not just from teachers but from parents and students. When leaders support comprehensive training and support, teachers learn to effectively use and champion equitable grading practices, and schools build a body of persuasive evidence from their own classrooms that can counter skeptics’ concerns.
3. Defenders of traditional grading allow students and teachers to avoid accountability for real learning.
Traditional grading obscures students’ true academic performance, allowing schools to promote unprepared students and construct a type of institutional self-deception.
Picture the student who hasn’t mastered the course content but earned points for submitting assignments, following directions, and participating in class. Because traditional grading combines academic and nonacademic information, their “good” grade masks their gaps in understanding. This built-in grade inflation lets schools quietly promote students who look successful on paper but actually aren’t prepared academically—robbing them of seeing where they need to grow and absolving educators of helping them get there.
More equitable, standards-based grading makes student-achievement data reported by teachers more reliable. At a time of rising grade inflation in secondary schools and increasing numbers of college freshmen needing remedial coursework, equitable grading gives truthful information about student learning, obligating us to address students’ needs and giving parents and college-admissions officers information they can trust.
Of course, improving how we grade can’t solve every problem in schools, but the problems in schools cannot be solved without improving grading. Equitable grading aligns with effective teaching and learning and strengthens the accuracy, fairness, and trust in how teachers report student learning.
Whether critiques of improved grading are based on misunderstandings, rushed implementation, or reluctance to confront truths about student needs, we should respond to pushback with clarity, patience, and empathy. The stakes are too high to shy away from grading reform.
