Letter Grades are Silly and I can Prove It

The rationale was simple, give scholars a letter grade on a scale of A through F, A being excellent or near perfect and F is failing and in need of remediation. It worked well for a society transitioning into the Industrial Age where efficiency and a quick rating scale was necessary to evaluate performance quickly. However, like most of modern education, the letter grade is an archaic practice of days of education past.

Letter Grades Do not Tell One Much

The irony in a letter grading system is that it tells one very little about a scholars performance in class. In a time where humans have all the worlds information on their smartphones, how is it all one understands about a scholars strengths and weaknesses is a letter grade at the end of a quarter?

As a teacher one has to question what is being communicated with parents and scholars about their performance by giving them a simple letter grade? The number of skills that a scholar has to master in a given quarter should be broken down into daily bite-sized skills tracked for mastery. If one thinks about it this way then what sense does it make to pack all of those skills into a single letter grade at the end of six or nine weeks? An educator should be able to communicate right away with colleagues, scholars, and parents what a scholars strengths are and what their weaknesses are. Letter grades only give a snapshot of how a scholar performed through a certain length of time on every skill they worked on in class (assuming everything was broken down by skill). When you start to think about it, this is great for comparing how schools overall are doing with instructing all of their scholars but is not helpful at all when trying to determine how individual scholars are progressing through the content taught in a given year.

Letter Grades are Unnecessarily Final

What this means is that Grades are given at the end of the quarter or year and there is no incentive to go and improve those grades once they are handed out.

This is quite a travesty if one thinks about the first key point, "letter grades do not tell much". I remember when I was in school and I would ask at the end of the semester is there anything I could do for extra credit? Think about how silly that question was. I was not asking the more potent question of what do I need to work on and can I get more practice on it? I was asking for any old work that I could use to bring my grade up. As a scholar I was not trying to get better, I was trying to improve my grade.

From a teacher's perspective the finality of letter Grades is well documented. One has to get those grades in at a certain point before they are printed and there has to be a certain number of them before they can be sent to the printers. Again, what does that really incentivize a teacher to do?

As a parent that finality is a "hold your breath and wait for the reveal moment" that you take part in four to five times a school year. Imagine the first report card where a parent see's that their scholar made a "C" on his or her report card in math. What does one do? What does one say? Do you say "good job"? Do you say "you could do better"? Do you say "what can we do to bring this up for the next quarter"? If you are a parent who is asking the last question, you are ahead of the curb! Just remember that the answer you get might be a general response that may or may not target your scholars' strengths and weaknesses. I doubt you will hear a response like "your scholar needs practice on using a unit rate to convert between two units of measurements." It’s the kind of talk that teachers and administrators should be having with each other but we do not really think to have with parents, or scholars on a regular basis.

If your school is having these kinds of conversations with parents and scholars regularly, then you are ahead of the curve and should be commended. From my own experiences and my observation of even the best schools, this is not modus operandi.

What Should Grading Look Like?

Before you can talk about what grading should look like we have to talk about what grades should be used for, what the purpose of grading is. The most productive answer to what is grading for is that grading is a progress monitoring tool. Any other answer is insufficient for teaching and learning.

When grading is seen as a progress monitoring tool, you eliminate the two problems presented above. Grades will tell you more, and they will not be so final for everyone involved, especially scholars.

Imagine monitoring student progress by skills and progress towards mastery. It could look something like this;

With a data set like this a teacher, parent, and scholar can easily pinpoint what a scholar is struggling with and what they have mastered. Remember, the example above is for just one standard. With this example, one can see how many skills a scholar truly has to master in order to master a single standard. In a given quarter a scholar might have to master 3 or 4 different standards. With this perspective, one can see how little sense it makes to simply provide a letter grade for a whole quarter. Had this scholar simply been handed a typical report card at the end of this quarter their average grade would have been a 61%. That 61% does not tell you that this scholar has a strength in finding supporting details and providing details when a main idea is presented to them. The conversation would have started or ended with, "this scholar struggles with reading." 

Many things have been said about state standards but one of the benefits of state standards is that it allows us to monitor student progress throughout the year more effectively. When standards are broken down properly into skills and objectives teachers, scholars, parents, and schools can better assess mastery. This allows teachers to "work in the gaps" providing interventions for scholars based on their specific needs rather than wholesale teaching that targets no one. When one hears the word differentiation in teaching, this is what it should be, and this is where it should start. Otherwise, how does one know what to differentiate and whom to differentiate for if one does not know scholars strengths and weaknesses?

We all know that teaching needs to catch up with the 21st century and beyond. The problems that our scholars are going to have to deal with when they are of age, have not been imagined yet by those currently in charge. So we have to do a better job of understanding what they know and don’t know so that we can help them reach their goals and better understand where they are in meeting them. A simple letter grade does not give us much of any information about how a scholar is doing. At best it's a final measurement of students success or failure at worst its an archaic practice of days long past. As educators we have to do a better job of monitoring scholars progress if we are going to serve them better in the classroom.