How do grading systems work




















Both imply a set of symbols, words, or numbers that are used to designate different levels of achievement or performance.

Reporting is the process by which these judgments are communicated to parents, students, or others. Grading and reporting are relatively recent phenomena in education. In fact, prior to , grading and reporting were virtually unknown in schools in the United States. Throughout much of the nineteenth century most schools grouped students of all ages and backgrounds together with one teacher in one-room schoolhouses, and few students went beyond elementary studies.

The teacher reported students' learning progress orally to parents, usually during visits to students' homes. As the number of students increased in the late s, schools began to group students in grade levels according to their age, and new ideas about curriculum and teaching methods were tried. One of these new ideas was the use of formal progress evaluations of students' work, in which teachers wrote down the skills each student had mastered and those on which additional work was needed.

This was done primarily for the students' benefit, since they were not permitted to move on to the next level until they demonstrated their mastery of the current one. It was also the earliest example of a narrative report card. With the passage of compulsory attendance laws at the elementary level during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the number of students entering high schools increased rapidly. Between and the number of public high schools in the United States increased from to 10, As a result, subject area instruction in high schools became increasingly specific and student populations became more diverse.

While elementary teachers continued to use written descriptions and narrative reports to document student learning, high school teachers began using percentages and other similar markings to certify students' accomplishments in different subject areas. This was the beginning of the grading and reporting systems that exist today. The shift to percentage grading was gradual, and few American educators questioned it.

The practice seemed a natural by-product of the increased demands on high school teachers, who now faced classrooms with growing numbers of students. But in a study by two Wisconsin researchers seriously challenged the reliability of percentage grades as accurate indicators of students' achievement.

In their study, Daniel Starch and Edward Charles Elliott showed that high school English teachers in different schools assigned widely varied percentage grades to two identical papers from students.

For the first paper the scores ranged from 64 to 98, and the second from 50 to Some teachers focused on elements of grammar and style, neatness, spelling, and punctuation, while others considered only how well the message of the paper was communicated. The following year Starch and Elliot repeated their study using geometry papers submitted to math teachers and found even greater variation in math grades.

Scores on one of the math papers ranged from 28 to 95—a point difference. While some teachers deducted points only for a wrong answer, many others took neatness, form, and spelling into consideration. These demonstrations of wide variation in grading practices led to a gradual move away from percentage scores to scales that had fewer and larger categories. One was a three-point scale that employed the categories of Excellent, Average, and Poor.

This reduction in the number of score categories served to reduce the variation in grades, but it did not solve the problem of teacher subjectivity. To ensure a fairer distribution of grades among teachers and to bring into check the subjective nature of scoring, the idea of grading based on the normal probability, bell-shaped curve became increasingly popular.

By this method, students were simply rank-ordered according to some measure of their performance or proficiency. A top percentage was then assigned a grade of A, the next percentage a grade of B, and so on. Some advocates of this method even specified the precise percentages of students that should be assigned each grade, such as the system.

Grading on the curve was considered appropriate at that time because it was well known that the distribution of students' intelligence test scores approximated a normal probability curve. Since innate intelligence and school achievement were thought to be directly related, such a procedure seemed both fair and equitable.

Grading on the curve also relieved teachers of the difficult task of having to identify specific learning criteria. Fortunately, most educators of the early twenty-first century have a better understanding of the flawed premises behind this practice and of its many negative consequences.

In the years that followed, the debate over grading and reporting intensified. A number of schools abolished formal grades altogether, believing they were a distraction in teaching and learning.

Some schools returned to using only verbal descriptions and narrative reports of student achievement. Still others advocated a mastery approach, in which the only important factor was whether or not the student had mastered the content or skill being taught. Once mastered, that student would move on to other areas of study. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, lack of consensus about what works best has led to wide variation in teachers' grading and reporting practices, especially among those at the elementary level.

Many elementary teachers continue to use traditional letter grades and record a single grade on the reporting form for each subject area studied. Others use numbers or descriptive categories as proxies for letter grades. They might, for example, record a 1, 2, 3, or 4, or they might describe students' achievement as Beginning, Developing, Proficient, or Distinguished. Some elementary schools have developed standards-based reporting forms that record students' learning progress on specific skills or learning goals.

Most of these forms also include sections for teachers to evaluate students' work habits or behaviors, and many provide space for narrative comments. Grading practices are generally more consistent and much more traditional at the secondary level, where letter grades still dominate reporting systems.

Some schools attempt to enhance the discriminatory function of letter grades by adding plusses or minuses, or by pairing letter grades with percentage indicators.

Because most secondary reporting forms allow only a single grade to be assigned for each course or subject area, however, most teachers combine a variety of diverse factors into that single symbol. In some secondary schools, teachers have begun to assign multiple grades for each course in order to separate achievement grades from marks related to learning skills, work habits, or effort, but such practices are not widespread. Over the years, grading and reporting have remained favorite topics for researchers.

Most of these references are essays about problems in grading and what should be done about them. The research studies consist mainly of teacher surveys. Although this literature is inconsistent both in the quality of studies and in results, several points of agreement exist. These points include the following:. Grading and reporting are not essential to the instructional process. Teachers do not need grades or reporting forms to teach well, and students can and do learn many things well without them.

It must be recognized, therefore, that the primary purpose of grading and reporting is other than facilitation of teaching or learning. At the same time, significant evidence shows that regularly checking on students' learning progress is an essential aspect of successful teaching—but checking is different from grading. Checking implies finding out how students are doing, what they have learned well, what problems or difficulties they might be experiencing, and what corrective measures may be necessary.

The process is primarily a diagnostic and prescriptive interaction between teachers and students. Grading and reporting, however, typically involve judgment of the adequacy of students' performance at a particular point in time. As such, it is primarily evaluative and descriptive. When teachers do both checking and grading, they must serve dual roles as both advocate and judge for students—roles that are not necessarily compatible.

Ironically, this incompatibility is usually recognized when administrators are called on to evaluate teachers, but it is generally ignored when teachers are required to evaluate students.

Finding a meaningful compromise between these dual roles is discomforting to many teachers, especially those with a child-centered orientation. Grading and reporting serve a variety of purposes, but no one method serves all purposes well. Various grading and reporting methods are used to: 1 communicate the achievement status of students to their parents and other interested parties; 2 provide information to students for self-evaluation; 3 select, identify, or group students for certain educational paths or programs; 4 provide incentives for students to learn; and 5 document students' performance to evaluate the effectiveness of instructional programs.

Unfortunately, many schools try to use a single method of grading and reporting to achieve all of these purposes and end up achieving none of them very well. Letter grades, for example, offer parents and others a brief description of students' achievement and the adequacy of their performance. But using letter grades requires the abstraction of a great deal of information into a single symbol. In addition, the cut-offs between grades are always arbitrary and difficult to justify.

The grading system measures, reports, and documents academic progress and achievement separately from work habits, character traits, and behaviors, so that educators, counselors, advisors, and support specialists can accurately determine the difference between learning needs and behavioral or work-habit needs. The grading system ensures consistency and fairness in the assessment of learning, and in the assignment of scores and proficiency levels against the same leaning standards, across students, teachers, assessments, learning experiences, content areas, and time.

The grading system is not used as a form of punishment, control, or compliance. In proficiency-based leaning systems, what matters most is where students end up—not where they started out or how they behaved along the way. Meeting and exceeding challenging standards defines success, and the best grading systems motivate students to work harder, overcome failures, and excel academically.

Additional Reading on Effective Grading Practices Many educators, academics and grading experts have dedicated their career to untangling some of the thornier issues related to grading and determining how grades can facilitate, rather than impede, the learning process for students.

We have included a selected list of books below for those who want to learn more about the grading practices that support student learning. Each work outlines practical strategies that educators can use to build an effective proficiency-based grading and reporting system that values and supports the learning process. Susan M. Bailey, Tammy Heflebower, Jan K. Regards, Rick Reis reis stanford.

Imagining higher education without grades of any kind may sound like an exercise in fantasy, but, in fact, grades did not always exist. The roots of the university date back to 6th-century Europe, when monastic and cathedral-based schools first appeared.

In the high medieval period, some of them assumed university status, the first of which was the University of Bologna, founded in Something like grades was instituted just three centuries ago when European universities started fostering competitions among students for prizes and rank order. No competition was fiercer than the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos examination, begun in the early s and increasingly formalized during the 18th century.

It took the form of a tournament in which correct answers to questions moved students up the rungs and the ranking system. As they rose, students faced more challenging questions and more able opponents. The Tripos went on for days and offered compelling rewards. Criterial for Evaluating Grading Systems In so many ways our current grading system leaves much to be desired. But we have not yet formalized how to appraise a grading system or what we want to see in one.

What would a better system offer that we are not getting now? Of course, it should be feasible and fairly easy to implement.

Although some of us may be uncomfortable with the A-F scale, only institutions can change it — not faculty. Besides, final letter grades do not present the problems that our current way of judging student work does. We can identify some criteria for evaluating grading systems by sorting through the adverse unintended consequences of our current practices: 1.

Uphold high academic standards. We have seen that our current system incentivizes faculty to sacrifice rigor in order to enhance student satisfaction and avoid administrative censure for giving too many low grades. In turn, students fail to master much content, refine their skills, maximize their cognitive development, and adopt lifelong learning skills. Their employers also suffer by having to hire and manage graduates who are ill-prepared in communication, collaboration, analytical thinking, and problem solving.

A better system would establish and maintain high standards for student work, restoring integrity to grades and reflecting discriminating professional judgment. Also see criterion 4. Reflect student learning outcomes.

Unfortunately, grades as we know them today do not reflect the learning outcomes that the students have and have not achieved. In this context, what does a D, C, or B mean? Has a student achieved some of the outcomes? If so, which ones? Has he actually achieved any of them? Or does he merely fail at a higher level than he did at the beginning of the course? No wonder employers and accrediting agencies put little stock in grades.

As a result, students really do not know what they are capable of and probably assume they have mastered the outcomes well enough. Besides, the word outcome sounds like something that has already happened.

In a better grading system, grades would be tied to results — specifically, what outcomes of the course students have and have not achieved — and the relationship between grades and outcomes achievement could be easily explained in a syllabus.

This means the course grades could be related to program outcomes. Motivate students to learn. As elaborated earlier, our current system has turned higher education into a game that students win when they obtain the most coveted rewards — that is, high grades — for putting in the least amount of time and effort. Desirable grades are not only the coin of the realm but also, students believe, a key to a better occupational and economic future. Performance, then, is everything; learning does not even figure into the game.

Students would want to learn, and, given well-designed assessment instruments, grades would closely mirror learning.



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