When Laura Link works with districts to review their grading policies, she starts by asking a simple question: What are grades for?
Are grades meant to motivate students? To help teachers determine who needs more support? To inform parents of their children’s progress?
Link, an associate professor of education at the University of North Dakota, studies how K-12 schools formulate grades and how those decisions affect student learning. She also consults with school systems about their practices, starting with surveys and focus groups with families, caregivers, teachers, students, and administrators.
Those findings often expose misalignments in expectations about what grades and homework are supposed to accomplish.
Those differing priorities—and the tensions between them—cut to the heart of the grading debate. Grades can’t be all things to all people, assessment experts say. Districts must weigh tradeoffs and communicate clearly when revising grading policies.
Grades “can affect students’ trajectories—not just academic trajectories but life trajectories,” Link said. “We use that symbol to make day-to-day decisions, as teachers and as families, that affect students’ futures.”
Here’s what research says about four commonly cited uses of grades.
1. Gauging students’ mastery of concepts
Do grades accurately measure students’ mastery of academic concepts? Or do they measure their cumulative effort over time?
Survey results from one medium-sized Midwestern district revealed families are far more likely to believe grades reflect mastery than teachers and administrators.
“This may reflect an apparent mismatch between what parents/families believe grades represent and what teachers and school principals know about how grades are determined,” Link writs in a study in the March edition of the journal Improving Schools.
That’s why Link recommends districts create and share a clear statement about the purpose of grades—to get everyone on the same page. For example, the Bethlehem, Pa., district posts a statement on its website and on report cards themselves, explaining that grades “communicate with students and parents/guardians about students’ achievement towards specific goals.”
2. Motivating students to develop good habits
Families in Link’s study also place more emphasis on grades reflecting personal responsibility compared to principals in the same district.
Under common A-F grading systems, teachers factor both academic achievement and noncognitive factors, such as extra credit opportunities or late-work penalties.
Advocates for standards-based grading say academic grades should focus exclusively on students’ mastery of academic content, even if they have to redo assignments to prove it.
Critics of those approaches say traditional, cumulative grades motivate students to build study skills and discipline and reflect the realities they will face in college and careers.
Bethlehem schools piloted a “dashboard” approach: One part of the academic report card measures students’ academic progress used to tabulate GPAs, while a separate scoring rubric measures factors related to responsibility and engagement.
In the first year of that pilot in 2022, academic grade distributions were largely similar to the previous year’s under a traditional grading system, Link said. But the two-part report card gave families a more nuanced view of their students’ progress.
3. Communicating student progress with families
As districts increasingly stress the importance of engaging parents and caregivers in their children’s learning, grades are meant to serve as a clear, consistent way to communicate academic progress.
But families must understand what grades represent and how they are calculated, grading experts say. Districts should clearly communicate any changes in grading policies, giving families time to digest the changes.
Parents use grades to determine what supports their children need, whether to enroll them in optional tutoring and out-of-school programs, and how to prepare them for possible future career paths.
Yet, researchers have grown concerned that grade inflation is sending the wrong message, especially in the wake of disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a November 2023 analysis by Learning Heroes, EdNavigator, and TNTP, researchers dissected data from two school districts from the 2018-19 and 2021-22 school years to explore how students’ grades differed before and after the pandemic.
Four times as many students were chronically absent and tested below grade level after the pandemic. Of those students, 40 percent still got a B average or better in core subjects in 2021-22—nearly double the proportion of similarly situated students who got high grades in 2018-19.
A 2023 survey of 2,000 public school parents, conducted by Gallup on behalf of Learning Heroes, found that 79 percent of respondents said they believed their children were getting B grades or better, 88 percent said their child was performing at or above grade level in reading, and 89 percent said their child was at or above grade level in math. That contrasted sharply with student-test scores, which showed only about half of students scored at grade level in those subjects.
“Access to different measures of achievement can provide additional nuance for parents who want to know how their child is doing and when to step in,” the authors wrote.
To highlight the disconnect, Learning Heroes posted billboards in six major cities—Boston, Chicago, Houston, New York City, Sacramento County in California, and Washington, D.C.—with displays of side-by-side data showing the percentage of students proficient in math or English in that city and the percentage of parents who think their child is at or above grade level in that subject.
4. Measuring college readiness
For high school students, college ambitions can serve as a key motivator for earning good grades—and keeping grade point averages as high as possible.
For parents, changes to grading policies can spark anxiety about how their children will perform under new metrics and how resulting marks will affect their ability to secure merit-based financial aid and admissions to competitive schools.
And GPAs hold greater weight for many students as a growing number of colleges and universities make admissions tests, like the SAT and ACT, optional.
While standardized tests are typically viewed as a more objective and consistent measure of achievement, a 2020 study found that students’ high school GPAs were more predictive of college completion than their ACT scores.
Researchers at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research studied data from 55,084 Chicago public school students who immediately enrolled in a four-year college after graduating from 2006 to 2009.
Across varying types of high schools, students with GPAs under 1.5 had around a 20 percent chance of graduating from college within six years and students with GPAs of 3.75 or higher had around an 80 percent chance. By contrast, the likelihood that students with the same 11th grade ACT score would graduate from college varied more significantly depending on what high school they attended, researchers found. More recent studies have found similar patterns.
High school grades are shaped by many factors, including study skills and teachers’ varying approaches to assessment, the researchers wrote. But navigating that system may help students prepare for similar inconsistencies in college, they speculated.
“The fact that [high school grades] are based on a large number of raters (teachers) across a wide range of relevant tasks could actually make them very reliable as indicators of academic readiness for college, where students will also be asked to do a range of tasks with different expectations assessed by many different instructors,” the study said.
