It’s the least wonderful time of the year, with phones jingle-belling and everyone yelling.
Grades are coming out, and there is widespread misery and consternation. As kids await decisions from colleges reporting record applications and independent schools reportedly doing pretty darn well, application-wise, every grade short of a high A+ (preferably in an honors class where the grades get weighted even beyond the 4.3 on a 4-point scale) is regarded as tantamount to a C (a grade that is now, when it actually appears, tantamount to what an F was not all that terribly long ago). Students and their families are unhappy and often angry, and so everyone on up the phone tree is hearing about it, from teachers to academic leaders to heads of school and probably board chairs.
And the listserv has been blowing up—everyone wants to know how to do it better. At least they have a place to ask.
The problem is, what is this IT that people want to do better? What’s wrong with IT now?
A handful of schools started answering this question in their own way decades ago. Places with the confidence and (I would argue) the moral courage to pass on the typical A–B–C system or some arbitrary number or percentage scale have been presenting their own evaluations of student performance, usually in narrative form, and their students have not only earned admission to “top” colleges (oh, forgive me for using that awful phrase) but even gone on to live lives of usefulness and purpose. The Mastery Transcript has brought order, some consistency of thought, and a powerful tool to this approach, though Consortium schools must still wrestle with the question of defining for themselves their own Mastery competencies and standards.
We’ve also known that the way traditional grades have been used is inherently biased; to parse a popular Rick Wormeli title, what seems most fair isn’t always absolutely equal—that people and circumstances exist in a kaleidoscope world, where things and perspectives are always in flux. But we must, as Joe Feldman has forcefully reminded us, grade for equity, interrogating both our systems and their application, class by class and student by student, to scrub prejudice and pernicious assumptions from the whole business.
Back in the Stone Age, when I was in college, some campuses were buzzing about systems of evaluation that stripped out tiers of performance to create systems more or less characterizable as “Pass/Not Passing” or, better still—at least at the university level, where mulligans are more possible than in high school or earlier—“Pass/No Credit.” At my own university the system then was “Not Passing–Pass–High Pass–Honors,” which seemed a great psychological improvement over my high school’s figured-to-the-second-decimal-place 0-to-100 system. (The Honor Roll required “an 80 average and no mark below 75,” and it was generally a short list. Over 4 years—12 trimesters and 24 marking periods—as I recollect, only four students in my class of 70-some ever earned even a single spot on the High Honor Roll, with “three grades of 90 or above and no mark below 80.”)
That reforming instinct seems mostly to have petered out, sadly, There were just too many people who expected and missed a clear system that would, in the words of several parents trying (successfully) to persuade the middle school director at one school where I worked to end our practice of not computing or awarding report card grades, “let the kids know where they stand.” The fixed point relative to which the students would know where they stood didn’t seem to matter: Was it relative to peers? To some fixed and articulated academic standard? To the second planet of Alpha Centauri C? As a measure of their own growth?
Which does raise the question, Why do we do grades? If it really is about letting students know where they stand, don’t we owe them an explanation of what that relative standing means? Are we using grades to reward (or punish) diligence and engagement (or a lack thereof)? Are they a kind of coded feedback that often lacks the cipher key that would make it truly meaningful and effective? Or do we award grades because we’ve always done it (well, at least since the nineteenth century’s mythical Golden Age of Education)? Or because just about everyone else does?
Alas, for most students the “where they stand” thing was probably simply relative to the letter in the alphabet on either side of the grade they received: “If you got a B you did better than a C but needed to do better to earn an A.” Pluses and minuses serve teachers as fudge factors and students as little bridges over the chasms between letters: level up by studying harder for Friday’s quiz! An A+ (though some schools don’t give this grade; it was once explained to me by a department chair at one such school that “A+ would be perfect, and no student is perfect”—true story, I swear it) is thus like standing atop an Everest of others’ lesser-ness.
It would be glib to say that grading systems are unexamined, because students and educators have been dissecting them for a century or more. Students seek hidden keyholes to which they might find keys. Educators from myriad contexts seek perfect systems, in whatever frames they define perfection: most simple to read, most rigorous, most bias-free, most data-derived, most clear to college and next-school admission offices, most clear to students, easiest to award and explain, shortest. I dunno. But examine as we have and as we might, universal perfection continues to elude us.
Recent interrogations of grading and major innovations in evaluating and recording student performance have been important, and they may yet lead to better—more equitable, more comprehensible, more informative, perhaps more universally useful—systems. We may be seeing some of these taking form already. Let us hope—and keep working at it.
In the meanwhile, mostly we lie in the bed we have made or that has been made for us, having to explain, defend, and otherwise turn ourselves inside out to clarify and often justify for ourselves, our students, our colleagues, and our communities what each grade actually means. It does make end-of-term time a whole lot less fun for many.
And since that many includes the learners for whose putative benefit schools do this thing, isn’t that an imperative to figure out what “grading”‘s purposes truly are and then make a thoughtful and concerted effort to achieve them in ways that promote learning and not more angst and anger?