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This is an article titled "Why Focusing on Grades Is a Barrier to Learning" from Harvard Business Impact written by Gerald E. Knesek in 2022. 

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This is an article titled "Why Focusing on Grades Is a Barrier to Learning" from Harvard Business Impact written by Gerald E. Knesek in 2022. 

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1. “Students often refer to themselves as “A” students, “B” students, or “C” students in conversations with each other and feel a sense of shame when they get failing grades.” I highlighted this sentence because it further dispels the current grading system as beneficial to students and rather that it creates harmful social perceptions.

2. “The result of this process is the development of competence, self-confidence, and mastery.” This sentence stuck out to me because it provides an explanation on the benefits of the Montessori structure and that it guides students in retaining the information rather than forgetting concepts once the class has ended.

3. “From my experience in the classroom, our current paradigm based on grades creates an environment in which students fear the possibility of failure rather than focusing on the possibility of learning.” This sentence grabbed my attention because it highlighted the role fear of failure plays in students' education and how harmful that system is to meaningful learning.

4. “I believe that if more educators used this grading structure, student cheating would be diminished, grade inflation would be eliminated, and students would be much more inclined to discuss what they are learning because the classroom would become more creative, self-directed, and meaningful to them.” This stuck out to me because it brought up a major point that learning can be meaningful and exciting to students when there’s no fear of failure and no risk of tanking their GPA’s.

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In his book Drive, Daniel Pink suggests that we operate today with a misguided understanding of what really motivates us. Often, we assume that the only way to get people to perform is to incentivize them through external rewards and punishments, or extrinsic motivation, rather than focusing people on a desired behavior, or intrinsic motivation.

As a seasoned educator who has taught in the classroom for nearly 40 years, I see this paradigm consistently. Students have become more focused on the rewards and punishments, namely grades (an extrinsic motivator), and less on the desired behavior, learning (an intrinsic motivator). Students often refer to themselves as "A" students, "B" students, or "C" students in conversations with each other and feel a sense of shame when they get failing grades. When they refer to their classes, they say things like, "That class is an easy A," or, "It's hard to get a good grade in that class," or, "Don't take that class because it will ruin your GPA." When students ask questions about assignments, quizzes, exams, or absences, it's almost always in reference to points and grades. A favorite question is, "Can I get any extra credit to raise my grade?"

What's apparent in all this focus on grades is that there's no real emphasis on learning-the true purpose of education. It is a rare occurrence that students come to talk with me about concepts or new material presented, and even in learning-focused discussions, the topic of grades almost always arises. When I encounter students after they have graduated, they almost always remember what grade they received in my class; yet when I ask about what concepts they learned, they hesitate before answering.

"What's apparent in all this focus on grades is that there's no real emphasis on learning-the true purpose of education."

What can we as educators do to refocus students on the learning and get away from this emphasis on grades? I've found Montessori educational principles can provide us with some useful ways to rethink our current grading system and get students interested in what matters most-the learning.

Emphasizing Learning Over Grades

Maria Montessori, who opened the first Montessori school in 1907, believed in fostering children's enthusiasm for learning. She felt students should love everything that they learn, and that this love of learning nurtures mental and emotional growth.

Let's imagine a fully engaged classroom where, instead of learning and education being viewed as a chore, our students follow their innate tendency to explore their environment, i.e., their intrinsic desire to grow and learn. A key ingredient in this vision is autonomy-which is a principle of Montessori education. It puts emphasis on students' freedom, within limits, to control their own educational process and goal setting, which links both success and failure with their actions and the consequences of their decisions. In other words, students are encouraged to be creative, imaginative, and free to make mistakes. Learning from those mistakes and failures is normalized as part of the process.

As such, Montessori teachers are viewed as guides, rather than people who impart knowledge. One important focus for these teachers is to design, organize, and prepare an appropriate learning environment for students, where they can freely take responsibility and self-direction for the ways they choose to learn.

Following the intrinsic motivation model, Montessori principles believe that students will be guided by their interests. They are led to those things that are valuable and meaningful to them personally. The result of this process is the development of competence, self-confidence, and mastery. Competence fosters confidence, which in turn inspires students to tackle subsequent challenges. This cycle builds on itself and leads to a lifelong quest for learning.

Rethinking the Grading Paradigm

From my experience in the classroom, our current paradigm based on grades creates an environment in which students fear the possibility of failure rather than focusing on the possibility of learning. Students are afraid to speak up, ask questions, and make mistakes for fear that it will impact their grade.

But when classes are structured as learning laboratories-like they are at Montessori schools-and students aren't penalized for exploring new methods, making mistakes, asking questions, or admitting failure, they become more creative and self-directed. They seem to open up and thrive when asked to write one-page reflections and implication papers about what the concepts or materials mean to them. In many such classes, students appear to be having fun while they are working on class exercises and engaging in active discussions related to the topic presented.

Since I have incorporated these Montessori-based intrinsic motivation principles into my current classes, I have begun to recognize that these principles are incongruent with a grade-based extrinsic motivation system, which takes away from students' natural desire to learn. Therefore, I would prefer to use a pass or fail (P/F) grading system, which allows me to focus on what an individual student is learning as opposed to an external standard of what a grade of A, B, C, D, or F represents.

I believe that if more educators used this grading structure, student cheating would be diminished, grade inflation would be eliminated, and students would be much more inclined to discuss what they are learning because the classroom would become more creative, self-directed, and meaningful to them. By becoming learning labs, these classrooms would nurture a love of learning. What's more, perhaps implementing these changes would make achieving excellence more attainable for all student groups.

Restoring Students' Love of Learning

Why do we educators hang on to the current extrinsically motivated grading paradigm? I think at a gut level many of us feel that it is not working well, yet the whole educational system is built around it. And trying to imagine how the whole educational system would function without grades can seem monumental.

Reimagining how this would change our roles as educators can be threatening to both individuals and their institutions. Yet, if there is one thing that we have all learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that both people and organizations can adapt to change very quickly and creatively when necessity dictates.

It is time for the entire educational system to start re-examining our current grading paradigm. With the help of other educators, students, parents, and interested groups, we can take steps to improve this grading system and restore students' love of learning. Change starts with conversation, and I hope that all of you will join me in this one.

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Why Focusing on Grades Is a Barrier to Learning

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Students have become so focused on grades that they are missing out on the true purpose of education-learning. Educators can reverse this trend by turning to Montessori educational principles and rethinking the current grading system.

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This is an article titled "Standards-Based Grading: History, Practices, Benefits, Challenges, and Next Steps" from the Center For Urban Education Success written by Valerie L. Marsh, PhD in 2023.

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This is an article titled "Standards-Based Grading: History, Practices, Benefits, Challenges, and Next Steps" from the Center For Urban Education Success written by Valerie L. Marsh, PhD in 2023.

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1. “There is so much trust in the messages conveyed by grades that they have gone without challenge and are resistant to change.” This stuck out to me because it highlights how the traditional grading system hasn’t truly been challenged and examined as an accurate way to assess academic success.

2. “This kind of system only allows those students who can learn at the expected pace to be successful, which leads to persistent inequities in the classroom.” I found this helpful because it brought up the point that the traditional grading and teaching system often leaves behind students who aren’t made to learn that way which can cause them to experience lower self confidence and to feel academically inadequate in comparison with their peers.

3. “This shift prioritizes learning, equity, and formative assessment to inform student improvements and teacher instruction (Guskey, 2011; Iamarino, 2014; Link & Guskey, 2022).” This stuck out to me because it explained the benefits of a non-traditional learning process and how it emphasizes true learning over the ability to memorize.

4. “In Lewis’s (2022) re-analysis of his findings about secondary students’ math anxiety, he found that students experienced lower test anxiety in their SBG course than in their other courses, which used a traditional grading approach.” This sentence highlights the pros of implementing a nontraditional grading and teaching system and proves that this alternative learning style reduces students' school anxiety.

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This an image is titled "Students' Perception of Their Teachers and Schools" from Semantic Scholar published by Kevin Rathunde in 2011.

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This an image is titled "Students' Perception of Their Teachers and Schools" from Semantic Scholar published by Kevin Rathunde in 2011.

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Figure 4 from A COMPARISON OF MONTESSORI AND TRADITIONAL MIDDLE SCHOOLS : MOTIVATION , QUALITY OF EXPERIENCE , AND SOCIAL CONTEXT | Semantic Scholar

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Figure 4. Students’ Perceptions of Their Teachers and Schools - “A COMPARISON OF MONTESSORI AND TRADITIONAL MIDDLE SCHOOLS : MOTIVATION , QUALITY OF EXPERIENCE , AND SOCIAL CONTEXT”

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This article is titled "Montessori education's impact on academic and nonacademic outcomes: A systematic review" from the National Library of Medicine written by Justus J Randolph et al in 2023. 

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This article is titled "Montessori education's impact on academic and nonacademic outcomes: A systematic review" from the National Library of Medicine written by Justus J Randolph et al in 2023. 

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1. “Montessori was very concerned with the training of the teacher, and Montessori teacher training (at least in its traditional form) is said to require a spiritual transformation, creating a disposition of flexibility, restraint, and love of humanity (Whitescarver, 2007).” I highlighted this sentence because it emphasizes the different mindset that Montessori teachers adopt and explains that it’s not only about education, but about “love of humanity.”

2. “The practices also include philosophical elements like keeping the classroom beautiful and orderly, allowing children to choose freely as long as they are constructive, older children going out to explore the world and giving formal reports about their research activities to the class, and nothing beyond those specific Montessori practices (no grades, tests, or worksheets, no special outside teachers, and so on).” This sentence stuck out to me because it delves into the key differences Montessori education offers and sheds light on the importance of independence and exploration in and out of the classroom.

3. “If conventional teachers could improve child outcomes by simply adapting certain elements of Montessori, that would be more practical than adopting the whole system, which requires retraining many thousands of teachers, purchasing vast amounts of new materials, and eliminating the textbook industry.” I appreciated how they brought up a practical approach to implementing Montessori practices into traditional education to allow students to reap the benefits this style of education has to offer.

4. “Montessori is considered sufficiently superior to warrant widespread adoption, is to convert one school or district at a time to the full Montessori system, beginning in lower‐income districts where the need for improvement is greatest.” I highlighted this sentence because it brings up an additional point that lower-income districts should be the first to transition to Montessori education to ensure those who are in need of the most improvement receive it first.

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Montessori education’s impact on academic and nonacademic outcomes: A systematic review

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Montessori education is the oldest and most widely implemented alternative education in the world, yet its effectiveness has not been clearly established. The primary objective of this review was to examine the effectiveness of Montessori education…

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I have not given, received, or used any unauthorized assistance.

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I have not given, received, or used any unauthorized assistance.

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This is an article titled "Montessori vs. Traditional Education in the Public Sector: Seeking Appropriate Comparisons of Academic Achievement" from Forum On Public Policy written by Jane Carol Manner in 2006.

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This is an article titled "Montessori vs. Traditional Education in the Public Sector: Seeking Appropriate Comparisons of Academic Achievement" from Forum On Public Policy written by Jane Carol Manner in 2006.

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1. “Its virtues with respect to peace education have been extolled on numerous fronts, and its focus on "the individual child might be compared with existential ideas regarding personal journeys in education and in life.” This sentence stuck out to me because it highlights how Montessori schooling is not just focused on academic education, it’s focused on the individual and their life journey, which is much different than traditional schooling.

2. “While many features of Montessori education seem attractive both to the educational community and to parents who are seeking the best school placement for their children, measurements of standardized achievement for Montessori have been in short supply.” This sentence highlights a key issue within the research regarding the comparison of Montessori and traditional education and explains that it's difficult to measure academic success in Montessori schooling because they don't offer grading or tests.

3. “The apparent disjoint between typical Montessori assessment, which relies most often on anecdotal and portfolio-type evidence, and that employed in the public sector creates a challenge in comparison.” This sentence highlights another barrier when researching the differences in performance for Montessori and traditional schooling and explains why it’s difficult to accurately compare the two when Montessori schooling strays away from traditional testing.

4. “These costs are high, and though many districts are willing to bear them, they want assurances that their investments will reap desired outcomes in the form of appropriate academic achievement for learners in those classrooms.” This sentence leaps off the idea that Montessori schooling is an expensive investment and there must be substantial evidence that this type of schooling provides long lasting and transformative benefits to students and faculty.

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This is a webpage titled "Why Choose Montessori?" located on the website The Montessori School of Pullman.

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This is a webpage titled "Why Choose Montessori?" located on the website The Montessori School of Pullman.

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1. “The classroom is organized into specific areas- Practical Life, Sensorial, Art, Math, Language, Cultural Studies, Science- from which the children can choose activities.” This stuck out to me because it examines the practical and soft skills students learn from a Montessori education and highlights how different that system is from traditional schooling where the focus is primarily on academic education.

2. “Throughout the process, teachers are taking careful observations of each child to discover what new lessons the child may be ready to learn.” I highlighted this sentence because it emphasizes how Montessori schooling focuses on the individual and strays away from the narrative of one size fits all that is prevalent in traditional schooling.

3. “Montessori classrooms are mixed-age, multi-sensory and maintain a sense of order and beauty.” This stuck out to me because I feel like the negative connotations surrounding Montessori schooling often implies a disorganized and chaotic environment, but in reality the classroom remains orderly while still allowing students to explore.

4. “Children learn responsibility, patience, and kindness as they explore friendships and materials.” This stuck out to me because it further pushes the narrative that Montessori learning is geared towards preparing students for the challenges of life rather than teaching them how to be academically acceptable.

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Why Montessori? | The Montessori School of Pullman

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Students learn to view themselves as contributing members of a diverse global community. We respect and value differences and welcome a rich classroom diversity of economic and social classes, racial and ethnic heritages, religious and spiritual beliefs, physical abilities, and family structures.

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This article is titled "Montessori and More Curriculum" from Northeast Stars Montessori Preschool.

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This article is titled "Montessori and More Curriculum" from Northeast Stars Montessori Preschool.

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1. “Emphasis on competition.” I chose to highlight this section because it identifies a prevalent flaw in traditional schooling that promotes competition amongst students rather than the collaboration that’s embedded into the Montessori system.

2. “Students have the opportunity to advance academically at their own pace, without limits.” This stuck out to me because it explains that Montessori education not only allows exceptional students to grow, it gives space to those students who may need more time understanding concepts.

3. “Adult-centered: teacher controls the classroom and enforces discipline.” I highlighted this section because it sheds light on the ongoing norm of traditional classrooms being focused on the teacher rather than allowing students to be involved in discussion and guide exploration of different topics.

4. “Uninterrupted work cycles, students choose when and for how long to work on each activity, many subjects are integrated.” I chose to highlight this section because it highlights how radically different Montessori classrooms are from traditional classrooms and how it allows students to learn and grow at their own pace which fosters curiosity at a young age.

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Click here to learn more about Kindergarten Readiness →

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Montessori and More — The Benefits of Montessori at Northeast Stars Montessori Preschool — Northeast Stars Montessori

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Presenting Our... Montessori and More Curriculum Schedule A Visit

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This article is titled "Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently)" from The National Library of Medicine written by Jeffrey Schinske and Kimberly Tanner in 2014.

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This article is titled "Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently)" from The National Library of Medicine written by Jeffrey Schinske and Kimberly Tanner in 2014.

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1. “Given that the time and stress associated with grading has the potential to distract instructors from other, more meaningful aspects of teaching and learning, it is perhaps time to begin scrutinizing our tacit assumptions surrounding grading.” I highlighted this because it demonstrates how grading can often take up valuable time that teachers could spend teaching and helping students better grasp foundational concepts.

2. “A number of colleges have abandoned numerical and categorical grading altogether, opting instead for creating contracts with students to define success or employing student self-reflection in combination with written evaluations by faculty.” This stuck out to me because it demonstrates that many schools are searching for new ways to measure student understanding and that they’re looking to opt out of the traditional A to F grading scale.

3. “In some cases, the demands of grading require so much instructor attention, little time remains for reflection on the structure of a course or for aspirations of pedagogical improvement.” I highlighted this because it speaks to the numerous hours spent grading that take away from teachers ability to be creative and employ meaningful assignments and learning opportunities.

4. “In fact, we have presented evidence that accuracy-based grading may, in fact, demotivate students and impede learning.” This stuck out to me because it contributes to the idea that traditional grading is not a motivator for many students and can oftentimes be a hindrance in the learning and retaining process.

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Abstract

The authors explore a history of grading and review the literature regarding the purposes and impacts of grading. They then suggest strategies for making grading more supportive of learning, including balancing accuracy-based and effort-based grading, using self/peer evaluation, curtailing curved grading, and exercising skepticism about the meaning of grades.

INTRODUCTION

When we consider the practically universal use in all educational institutions of a system of marks, whether numbers or letters, to indicate scholastic attainment of the pupils or students in these institutions, and when we remember how very great stress is laid by teachers and pupils alike upon these marks as real measures or indicators of attainment, we can but be astonished at the blind faith that has been felt in the reliability of the marking systems.

-I. E. Finkelstein (1913)

If your current professional position involves teaching in a formal classroom setting, you are likely familiar with the process of assigning final course grades. Last time you assigned grades, did you assign an "E," "E+," or "E−" to any of your students? Likely you assigned variations on "A's," "B's," "C's," "D's," and "F's." Have you wondered what happened to the "E's" or talked with colleagues about their mysterious absence from the grading lexicon? While we often commiserate about the process of assigning grades, which may be as stressful for instructors as for students, the lack of conversation among instructors about the mysterious omission of the "E" is but one indicator of the many tacit assumptions we all make about the processes of grading in higher education. Given that the time and stress associated with grading has the potential to distract instructors from other, more meaningful aspects of teaching and learning, it is perhaps time to begin scrutinizing our tacit assumptions surrounding grading. Below, we explore a brief history of grading in higher education in the United States. This is followed by considerations of the potential purposes of grading and insights from research literature that has explored the influence of grading on teaching and learning. In particular, does grading provide feedback for students that can promote learning? How might grades motivate struggling students? What are the origins of norm-referenced grading-also known as curving? And, finally, to what extent does grading provide reliable information about student learning and mastery of concepts? We end by offering four potential adjustments to our general approach to grading in undergraduate science courses for instructors to consider.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF GRADING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

It can be easy to perceive grades as both fixed and inevitable-without origin or evolution ... Yet grades have not always been a part of education in the United States.

- Schneider and Hutt (2013)

Surprisingly, the letter grades most of us take for granted did not gain widespread popularity until the 1940s. Even as late as 1971, only 67% of primary and secondary schools in the United States used letter grades ( National Education Association, 1971). It is therefore helpful to contextualize the subject to appreciate the relatively young and constantly changing nature of current systems of grading. While not an exhaustive history, the sections below describe some of the main developments leading to the current dominant grading system.

Early 19th Century and Before

The earliest forms of grading consisted of exit exams before awarding of a degree, as seen at Harvard as early as 1646 ( Smallwood, 1935). Some schools also awarded medals based on competitions among students or held regular competitions to assign seats in class ( Cureton, 1971). Given that universities like Yale and Harvard conducted examinations and elected valedictorians and salutatorians early in the 18th century, some scale of grading must have existed. However, the first official record of a grading system surfaces in 1785 at Yale, where seniors were graded into four categories: Optimi, second Optimi, Inferiores, and Perjores ( Stiles, 1901, cited by Smallwood, 1935). By 1837, Yale was also recording student credit for individual classes, not just at the completion of college studies, using a four-point scale. However, these "merit marks" were written in code and hidden from students ( Bagg, 1871).

Harvard and other schools soon experimented with public rankings and evaluations, noting that this resulted in "increasing [student] attention to the course of studies" and encouraged "good moral conduct" ( Harvard University, 1832). Concerned that such public notices would inspire competition among students, which would distract from learning, other schools used more frequent, lower-stakes "report cards" to provide feedback on achievement ( Schneider and Hutt, 2013). In 1837, at least some professors at Harvard were grading using a 100-point system ( Smallwood, 1935). During this same period, William and Mary placed students in categories based on attendance and conduct. The University of Michigan experimented with a variety of grading systems in the 1850s and 1860s, including various numeric and pass/fail systems ( Smallwood, 1935). Still, many schools at this time kept no formal records of grades ( Schneider and Hutt, 2013).

Late 19th Century and 20th Century

With schools growing rapidly in size and number and coordination between schools becoming more important, grades became one of the primary means of communication between institutions ( Schneider and Hutt, 2013). This meant grades needed to have meaning not just within an institution but also to distant third parties. A record from 1883 indicates a student at Harvard received a "B," and in 1884, Mount Holyoke was grading on a system including "A," "B," "C," "D," and "E." Each letter corresponded to a range of percentage scores, with lower than 75% equating to an "E" and indicating failure. Mount Holyoke added an "F" grade (for failing) to the scale in 1898 and adjusted the percentages relating to the other letters ( Smallwood, 1935). This appears to be the initial origin of the "A"-"F" system familiar to most faculty members today, albeit including an "E" grade. By 1890, the "A"-"E" system had spread to Harvard after faculty members expressed concerns regarding reliably grading students on a 100-point scale. Still, grading was not always done at schools and grading systems varied widely ( Schneider and Hutt, 2013).

By the early 1900s, 100-point or percentage-based grading systems were very common ( Cureton, 1971). This period also saw an increased desire for uniformity in grading, and many expressed concerns about what grades meant from one teacher or institution to the next ( Weld, 1917). Numerous studies of the period sought to understand and perfect grading systems ( Cureton, 1971). Grading on a 100-point scale was found to be highly unreliable, with different teachers unable to assign consistent grades on papers in English, math, and history ( Starch, 1913). Researchers felt that getting away from a 100-point scale and grading into only five categories (e.g., letter grades) could increase reliability ( Finkelstein, 1913, p. 18). While it is unclear exactly when and why "E" grades disappeared from the letter grade scale, it seems possible that this push to use fewer categories resulted in an "A"-"F" scale with no "E" ("F" being retained, since it so clearly stood for "fail"). Others have conjectured that "E" was removed so students would not assume "E" stood for "excellent," but whatever the reason, "E's" apparently disappeared by the 1930s ( Palmer, 2010).

As research on intellectual ability appeared to show that, like other continuous biological traits, levels of aptitude in a population conformed to a normal curve, some experts felt grades should similarly be distributed according to a curve in a classroom ( Finkelstein, 1913). Distributing grades according to a normal curve was therefore considered as a solution to the subjective nature of grading and a way to minimize interrater differences in grading ( Guskey, 1994). Others worried that measuring aptitude was different from measuring levels of classroom performance, which might not be normally distributed ( Schneider and Hutt, 2013).

Based on the above research and the pressure toward uniformity of grading systems, by the 1940s the "A"-"F" grading system was dominant, with the four-point scale and percentages still also in use ( Schneider and Hutt, 2013). However, many inconsistencies remained. As one example, Yale used no less than four different grading systems from the 1960s to 1980s ( Yale University, 2013).

Present Day

Grading systems remain controversial and hotly debated today ( Jaschik, 2009). Some argue grades are psychologically harmful ( Kohn, 1999). Others raise concerns about the integrity of the "A"-"F" system, given well-documented trends in grade inflation ( Rojstaczer and Healy, 2012). One professor summed it up by saying grades do no more than "create a facade of coherence" ( Jaschik, 2009). A number of colleges have abandoned numerical and categorical grading altogether, opting instead for creating contracts with students to define success or employing student self-reflection in combination with written evaluations by faculty ( Jaschik, 2009). Among the Ivy League schools, Brown University does not calculate grade point averages, does not use "D's" in its grading scale, and does not record failing grades ( Brown University, 2014). Even Yale, the institution that started this history of grading more than 200 yr ago, is today still considering changes to its grading system ( Yale University, 2013).

Though grades were initially meant to serve various pedagogical purposes, more recent reforms have focused on "grades as useful tools in an organizational rather than pedagogical enterprise-tools that would facilitate movement, communication, and coordination" ( Schneider and Hutt, 2013). So, what are the potential purposes of grading in educational settings?

PURPOSES OF GRADING-PAST AND PRESENT

Grades as Feedback on Performance-Does Grading Provide Feedback to Help Students Understand and Improve upon Their Deficiencies?

[This] work affirms an observation that many classroom teachers have made about their students: if a paper is returned with both a grade and a comment, many students will pay attention to the grade and ignore the comment.

- Brookhart (2008, p. 8)

For most faculty members, the concept of feedback has at least two applications to the concept of grading. On one hand, grading itself is a form of feedback that may be useful to students. In addition, in the process of grading student work, faculty members sometimes provide written comments as feedback that students could use to improve their work. Because college students express a desire for feedback ( Higgins et al., 2002), faculty members may feel pressured to grade more (rather than facilitating ungraded activities) and to provide more written feedback while grading. Especially in large classes, this can significantly increase workload on faculty ( Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick, 2006; Crisp, 2007). But are grades and written comments effective forms of feedback that assist students in achieving conceptual mastery of the subject?

Feedback is generally divided into two categories: evaluative feedback and descriptive feedback. Evaluative feedback, such as a letter grade or written praise or criticism, judges student work, while descriptive feedback provides information about how a student can become more competent ( Brookhart, 2008, p. 26). Butler and Nisan (1986) compared the impacts of evaluative feedback, descriptive feedback, and no feedback on student achievement in problem-solving tasks and in "quantitative" tasks (e.g., those requiring quick, timed work to produce a large number of answers). They found that students receiving descriptive feedback (but not grades) on an initial assignment performed significantly better on follow-up quantitative tasks and problem-solving tasks than did students receiving grades or students receiving no feedback. Students receiving grades performed better on follow-up quantitative tasks than students receiving no feedback, but did not outperform those students on problem-solving assignments. In other words, providing evaluative feedback (in this case, grades) after a task does not appear to enhance students' future performance in problem solving.

While descriptive, written feedback can enhance student performance on problem-solving tasks; reaping those benefits requires students to read, understand, and use the feedback. Anecdotal accounts, as well as some studies, indicate that many students do not read written feedback, much less use it to improve future work ( MacDonald, 1991; Crisp, 2007). In one study, less than half of undergraduate medical students even chose to collect the feedback provided on their essays ( Sinclair and Cleland, 2007). Other studies suggest that many students do read feedback and consider it carefully but the feedback is written in a way that students do not find useful in improving future work ( Higgins et al., 2002). Some studies have further investigated the relationships between grading and descriptive feedback by providing students with both written feedback and grades on assignments. In these cases, the addition of written comments consistently failed to enhance student performance on follow-up tasks ( Marble et al., 1978; Butler 1988; Pulfrey et al., 2011). Brookhart (2008, p. 8) concludes, "the grade 'trumps' the comment" and "comments have the best chance of being read as descriptive if they are not accompanied by a grade." Even when written feedback is read, there is widespread agreement that instructor feedback is very difficult for students to interpret and convert into improved future performance ( Weaver, 2006).

Grading does not appear to provide effective feedback that constructively informs students' future efforts. This is particularly true for tasks involving problem solving or creativity. Even when grading comes in the form of written comments, it is unclear whether students even read such comments, much less understand and act on them.

Grades as a Motivator of Student Effort-Does Grading Motivate Students to Learn?

Our results suggest...that the information routinely given in schools-that is, grades-may encourage an emphasis on quantitative aspects of learning, depress creativity, foster fear of failure, and undermine interest.

- Butler and Nisan (1986)

As described in the history of grading above, our current "A"-"F" grading system was not designed with the primary intent of motivating students. Rather, it stemmed from efforts to streamline communication between institutions and diminish the impacts of unreliable evaluation of students from teacher to teacher ( Grant and Green, 2013). That is not to say, however, that grades do not have an impact on student motivation and effort. At some point, every instructor has likely experienced desperate petitions from students seeking more points-a behavior that seems to speak to an underlying motivation stimulated by the grading process.

It would not be surprising to most faculty members that, rather than stimulating an interest in learning, grades primarily enhance students' motivation to avoid receiving bad grades ( Butler and Nisan, 1986; Butler, 1988; Crooks, 1988; Pulfrey et al., 2011). Grades appear to play on students' fears of punishment or shame, or their desires to outcompete peers, as opposed to stimulating interest and enjoyment in learning tasks ( Pulfrey et al., 2011). Grades can dampen existing intrinsic motivation, give rise to extrinsic motivation, enhance fear of failure, reduce interest, decrease enjoyment in class work, increase anxiety, hamper performance on follow-up tasks, stimulate avoidance of challenging tasks, and heighten competitiveness ( Harter, 1978; Butler and Nisan, 1986; Butler, 1988; Crooks, 1988; Pulfrey et al., 2011). Even providing encouraging, written notes on graded work does not appear to reduce the negative impacts grading exerts on motivation ( Butler, 1988). Rather than seeing low grades as an opportunity to improve themselves, students receiving low scores generally withdraw from class work ( Butler, 1988; Guskey, 1994). While students often express a desire to be graded, surveys indicate they would prefer descriptive comments to grades as a form of feedback ( Butler and Nisan, 1986).

High-achieving students on initial graded assignments appear somewhat sheltered from some of the negative impacts of grades, as they tend to maintain their interest in completing future assignments (presumably in anticipation of receiving additional good grades; Butler, 1988). Oettinger (2002) and Grant and Green (2013) looked specifically for positive impacts of grades as incentives for students on the threshold between grade categories in a class. They hypothesized that, for example, a student on the borderline between a "C" and a "D" in a class would be more motivated to study for a final exam than a student solidly in the middle of the "C" range. However, these studies found only minimal ( Oettinger, 2002) or no ( Grant and Green, 2013) evidence that grades motivated students to perform better on final exams under these conditions.

This is not to say that classroom evaluation is by definition harmful or a thing to avoid. Evaluation of students in the service of learning-generally including a mechanism for feedback without grade assignment-can serve to enhance learning and motivation ( Butler and Nisan, 1986; Crooks, 1988; Kitchen et al., 2006). Swinton (2010) additionally found that a grading system that explicitly rewarded effort in addition to rewarding knowledge stimulated student interest in improvement. This implies that balancing accuracy-based grading with providing meaningful feedback and awarding student effort could help avoid some of the negative consequences of grading.

Rather than motivating students to learn, grading appears to, in many ways, have quite the opposite effect. Perhaps at best, grading motivates high-achieving students to continue getting high grades-regardless of whether that goal also happens to overlap with learning. At worst, grading lowers interest in learning and enhances anxiety and extrinsic motivation, especially among those students who are struggling.

Grades as a Tool for Comparing Students-Is Grading on a Curve the Fairest Way to Grade?

You definitely compete for grades in engineering; whereas you earn grades in other disciplines ... I have to get one point higher on the test than the next guy so I can get the higher grade.

-Student quoted in Seymour and Hewitt (1997, p. 118)

The concept of grading on a curve arose from studies in the early 20th century suggesting that levels of aptitude, for example as measured by IQ, were distributed in the population according to a normal curve. Some then argued, if a classroom included a representative sample from the population, grades in the class should similarly be distributed according to a normal curve ( Finkelstein, 1913). Conforming grades to a curve held the promise of addressing some of the problems surrounding grading by making the process more scientific and consistent across classrooms ( Meyer, 1908). Immediately, even some proponents of curved grading recognized problems with comparing levels of aptitude in the population with levels of classroom achievement among a population of students. For a variety of reasons, a given classroom might not include a representative sample from the general population. In addition, teachers often grade based on a student's performance or accomplishment in the classroom-characteristics that differ in many ways from aptitude ( Finkelstein, 1913). However, despite the reservations of some teachers and researchers, curved grading steadily gained acceptance throughout much of the 20th century ( Schneider and Hutt, 2013).

Grading on a curve is by definition a type of "norm-referenced" grading, meaning student work is graded based on comparisons with other students' work ( Brookhart, 2004, p. 72). One issue surrounding norm-referenced grading is that it can dissociate grades from any meaning in terms of content knowledge and learning. Bloom (1968) pointed out that, in grading on a curve "it matters not that the failures of one year performed at about the same level as the C students of another year. Nor does it matter that the A students of one school do about as well as the F students of another school." As this example demonstrates, under curved grading, grades might not communicate any information whatsoever regarding a student's mastery of course knowledge or skills.

Of even more concern, however, is the impact norm-referenced grading has on competition between students. The quote at the start of this section describes how many students respond to curve-graded classes compared with classes that do not use a grading curve. Seymour and Hewitt (1997, p. 118) explain, "Curve-grading forces students to compete with each other, whether they want to or not, because it exaggerates very fine degrees of differences in performance. Where there is little or no difference in work standards, it encourages a struggle to create it." Studies have shown that science students in competitive class environments do not learn or retain information as well as students in cooperative class environments ( Humphreys et al., 1982). Students in cooperative environments are additionally more interested in learning and find learning more worthwhile than students in competitive environments ( Humphreys et al., 1982). Of particular concern is that the competitive environment fostered by norm-referenced grading represents one of the factors contributing to the loss of qualified, talented, and often underrepresented college students from science fields ( Seymour and Hewitt, 1997; Tobias, 1990). Disturbingly, even when a science instructor does not grade on a curve, students might, due to their past experiences, assume a curve is used and adopt a competitive stance anyway ( Tobias, 1990, p. 23).

Bloom (1968, 1976) presents evidence and a theoretical framework supporting an alternate view of grading whereby most students would be expected to excel and not fall into the middle grades. He states, "If the students are normally distributed with respect to aptitude, but the kind and quality of instruction and the amount of time available for learning are made appropriate to the characteristics and needs of each student, the majority of students may be expected to achieve mastery of the subject. And, the relationship between aptitude and achievement should approach zero" ( Bloom, 1968). In other words, even if we were to accept a concept of innate aptitude that is normally distributed in a classroom, that distribution should not predict classroom achievement, provided the class environment supports diverse learners in appropriate ways. This idea was a significant development, because it freed teachers from the stigma associated with awarding a larger number of high grades. Previously, an excess of higher grades was thought to arise only from either cheating by students or poor grading practices by teachers ( Meyer, 1908). Bloom's model argues that, when given the proper learning environment and compared against standards of mastery in a field (rather than against one another), large numbers of students could succeed. This type of grading-where instructional goals form the basis of comparison-is called "criterion-referenced" grading ( Brookhart, 2004, p. 72).

Of course, Bloom's work did not rule out the possibility that some teachers might still give high grades for undesirable reasons unrelated to standards of mastery (e.g., to be nice, to gain the admiration of students, etc.). Such practices would not be in line with Bloom's work and would lead to pernicious grade inflation. Indeed, many of those bemoaning recent trends in grade inflation in higher education (though less prevalent in the sciences) point to the abandonment of curved grading as a major factor ( Rojstaczer and Healy, 2012). Such studies often promote various forms of curving-at the level of individual courses or even at the institution as a whole-to combat inflation ( Johnson, 2003, chaps. 7-8). In light of the above, however, it seems strange to aspire to introduce grading systems that could further push students into competition and give rise to grades that indicate little about the mastery of knowledge or skills in a subject. The broader distribution of grades under curve-adjusted grading could simply create the illusion of legitimacy in the grading system without any direct connection between grades and achievement of learning goals. Perhaps the more productive route is to push for stronger, criterion-referenced grading systems in which instructional goals, assessments, and course work are more intimately aligned.

In brief, curved grading creates a competitive classroom environment, alienates certain groups of talented students, and often results in grades unrelated to content mastery. Curving is therefore not the fairest way to assign grades.

Grades as an Objective Evaluation of Student Knowledge-Do Grades Provide Reliable Information about Student Learning?

Study Critiques Schools over Subjective Grading: An Education Expert Calls for Greater Consistency in Evaluating Students' Work.

- Los Angeles Times (2009)

As evidenced by the above headline, some have criticized grading as subjective and inconsistent, meaning that the same student could receive drastically different grades for the same work, depending on who is grading the work and when it is graded. The literature indeed indicates that some forms of assessment lend themselves to greater levels of grading subjectivity than others.

Scoring multiple-choice assessments does not generally require the use of professional judgment from one paper to the next, so instructors should be able to score such assessments objectively ( Wainer and Thissen, 1993; Anderson, 2008, p. 451). However, despite their advantages in terms of objective grading, studies have raised concerns regarding the blanket use of multiple-choice assessments. Problems with such assessments range from their potential to falsely indicate student understanding to the possibilities that they hamper critical thinking and exhibit bias against certain groups of students ( Towns and Robinson, 1993; Scouller, 1998; Rogers and Harley, 1999; Paxton, 2000; Dufresne et al., 2002; Zimmerman and Williams, 2003; Stanger-Hall, 2012).

Grading student writing, whether in essays, reports, or constructed-response test items, opens up greater opportunities for subjectivity. Shortly after the rise in popularity of percentage-based grading systems in the early 1900s, researchers began examining teacher consistency in marking written work by students. Starch and Elliott (1912) asked 142 teachers to grade the same English paper and found that grades on the paper varied from 50 to 98% between teachers. Because different teachers awarded scores ranging from failing to exceptional, the researchers concluded "the promotion or retardation of a pupil depends to a considerable extent upon the subjective estimate of his teacher" rather than upon the actual work produced by the student ( Starch and Elliott, 1912). Even greater levels of inconsistency were found in teachers' scoring of a geometry paper showing the solution to a problem ( Starch and Elliott, 1913).

Eells (1930) investigated the consistency of individual teachers' grading by asking 61 teachers to grade the same history and geography papers twice-the second time 11 wk after the first. He concluded that "variability of grading is about as great in the same individual as in groups of different individuals" and that, after analysis of reliability coefficients, assignment of scores amounted to "little better than sheer guesses" ( Eells, 1930). Similar problems in marking reliability have been observed in higher education environments, although the degree of reliability varies dramatically, likely due to differences in instructor training, assessment type, grading system, and specific topic assessed ( Meadows and Billington, 2005, pp. 18-20). Factors that occasionally influence an instructor's scoring of written work include the penmanship of the author ( Bull and Stevens, 1979), sex of the author ( Spear, 1984), ethnicity of the author ( Fajardo, 1985), level of experience of the instructor ( Weigle, 1999), order in which the papers are reviewed ( Farrell and Gilbert, 1960; Spear, 1996), and even the attractiveness of the author ( Bull and Stevens, 1979).

Designing and using rubrics to grade assignments or tests can reduce inconsistencies and make grading written work more objective. Sharing the rubrics with students can have the added benefit of enhancing learning by allowing for feedback and self-assessment ( Jonsson and Svingby, 2007; Reddy and Andrade, 2010). Consistency in grading tests can also be improved by writing longer tests with more narrowly focused questions, but this would tend to limit the types of questions that could appear on an exam ( Meadows and Billington, 2005).

In summary, grades often fail to provide reliable information about student learning. Grades awarded can be inconsistent both for a single instructor and among different instructors for reasons that have little to do with a students' content knowledge or learning advances. Even multiple-choice tests, which can be graded with great consistency, have the potential to provide misleading information on student knowledge.

GRADING-STRATEGIES FOR CHANGE

In part, grading practices in higher education have been driven by educational goals such as providing feedback to students, motivating students, comparing students, and measuring learning. However, much of the research literature on grading reviewed above suggests that these goals are often not being achieved with our current grading practices. Additionally, the expectations, time, and stress associated with grading may be distracting instructors from integrating other pedagogical practices that could create a more positive and effective classroom environment for learning. Below we explore several changes in approaching grading that could assist instructors in minimizing its negative influences. Kitchen et al. (2006) additionally provide an example of a high-enrollment college biology class that was redesigned to "maximize feedback and minimize the impact of grades."

Balancing Accuracy-Based Grading with Effort-Based Grading

Multiple research studies described above suggest that the evaluative aspect of grading may distract students from a focus on learning. While evaluation will no doubt always be key in determining course grades, the entirety of students' grades need not be based primarily on work that rewards only correct answers, such as exams and quizzes. Importantly, constructing a grading system that rewards students for participation and effort has been shown to stimulate student interest in improvement ( Swinton, 2010). One strategy for focusing students on the importance of effort and practice in learning is to provide students opportunities to earn credit in a course for simply doing the work, completing assigned tasks, and engaging with the material. Assessing effort and participation can happen in a variety of ways ( Bean and Peterson, 1998; Rocca, 2010). In college biology courses, clicker questions graded on participation and not correctness of responses is one strategy. Additionally, instructors can have students turn in minute papers in response to a question posed in class and reward this effort based on submission and not scientific accuracy. Perhaps most importantly, biology instructors can assign out-of-class work-case studies, concept maps, and other written assignments-that can promote student practice and focus students' attention on key ideas, while not creating more grading work for the instructor. Those out-of-class assignments can be graded quickly (and not for accuracy) based on a simple rubric that checks whether students turned the work in on time, wrote the required minimum number of words, posed the required number of questions, and/or included a prescribed number of references. In summary, one strategy for changing grading is to balance accuracy-based grading with the awarding of some proportion of the grade based on student effort and participation. Changing grading in this way has the potential to promote student practice, incentivize in-class participation, and avoid some of the documented negative consequences of grading.

Providing Opportunities for Meaningful Feedback through Self and Peer Evaluation

Instructors often perceive grading to be a separate process from teaching and learning, yet well-crafted opportunities for evaluation can be effective tools for changing students' ideas about biology. Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick (2006) argue that, just as teaching strategies are shifting away from an instructor-centered, transmissionist approach to a more collaborative approach between instructor and students, so too should classroom feedback and grading. Because feedback traditionally has been given by the instructor and transmitted to students, Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick argue that students have been deprived of opportunities to become self-regulated learners who can detect their own errors in thinking. They advocate for incorporating techniques such as self-reflection and student dialogue into the assessment process. This, they hypothesize, would create feedback that is relevant to and understood by students and would release faculty members from some of the burden of writing descriptive feedback on student submissions. Additionally, peer review and grading practices can be the basis of in-class active-learning exercises, guided by an instructor-developed rubric. For example, students may be assigned out of class homework to construct a diagram of the flow of a carbon atom from a dead body to a coyote ( Ebert-May et al., 2003). With the development of a simple rubric, students can self- or peer-evaluate these diagrams during the next class activity to check for the inclusion of key processes, as determined by the instructor. The use of in-class peer evaluation thus allows students to see other examples of biological thinking beyond their own and that of the instructor. In addition, self-evaluation of one's own work using the instructor's rubric can build metacognitive skills in assessing one's own confusions and making self-corrections. Such evaluations need not take much time, and they have the potential to provide feedback that is meaningful and integrated into the learning process. In summary, both self- and peer-evaluation of work are avenues for providing meaningful feedback without formal grading on correctness that can positively influence students' learning ( Sadler and Good, 2006; Freeman et al., 2007; Freeman and Parks, 2010).

Making the Move Away from Curving

As documented in the research literature, the practice of grade curving has had unfortunate and often unintended consequences for the culture of undergraduate science classrooms, pitting students against one another as opposed to creating a collaborative learning community ( Tobias, 1990; Seymour and Hewitt, 1997). As such, one simple adjustment to grading would be to abandon grading on a curve. Because the practice of curving is often assumed by students to be practiced in science courses, a move away from curving would likely necessitate explicit and repeated communication with students to convey that they are competing only against themselves and not one another. Moving away from curving sets the expectation that all students have the opportunity to achieve the highest possible grade. Perhaps most importantly, a move away from curving practices in grading may remove a key remaining impediment to building a learning community in which students are expected to rely on and support one another in the learning process. In some instances, instructors may feel the need to use a curve when a large proportion of students perform poorly on a quiz or exam. However, an alternative approach would be to identify why students performed poorly and address this more specifically. For example, if the wording of an exam question was confusing for large numbers of students, then curving would not seem to be an appropriate response. Rather, excluding that question from analysis and in computing the exam grade would appear to be a more fair approach than curving. Additionally, if large numbers of students performed poorly on particular exam questions, providing opportunities for students to revisit, revise, and resubmit those answers for some credit would likely achieve the goal of not having large numbers of students fail. This would maintain the criterion-referenced grading system and additionally promote learning of the material that was not originally mastered. In summary, abandoning curving practices in undergraduate biology courses and explicitly conveying this to students could promote greater classroom community and student collaboration, while reducing well-documented negative consequences of this grading practice ( Humphreys et al., 1982).

Becoming Skeptical about What Grades Mean

The research literature raises significant questions about what grades really measure. However, it is likely that grades will continue to be the currency of formal teaching and learning in most higher education settings for the near future. As such, perhaps the most important consideration for instructors about grading is to simply be skeptical about what grades mean. Some instructors will refuse to write letters of recommendation for students who have not achieved grades in a particular range in their course. Yet, if grades are not a reliable reflection of learning and reflect other factors-including language proficiency, cultural background, or skills in test taking-this would seem a deeply biased practice. One practical strategy for making grading more equitable is to grade student work anonymously when possible, just as one would score assays in the laboratory blind to the treatment of the sample. The use of rubrics can also help remove bias from grading ( Allen and Tanner, 2006) by increasing grading consistency. Perhaps most importantly, sharing grading rubrics with students can support them in identifying where their thinking has gone wrong and promote learning ( Jonsson and Svingby, 2007; Reddy and Andrade, 2010). Much is yet to be understood about what influences students' performance in the context of formal education, and some have suggested grades may be more of a reflection of a students' ability to understand and play the game of school than anything to do with learning ( Towns and Robinson, 1993; Scouller, 1998; Stanger-Hall, 2012). In summary, using tools such as rubrics and blind scoring in grading can decrease the variability and bias in grading student work. Additionally, remembering that grades are likely an inaccurate reflection of student learning can decrease assumptions instructors make about students.

IN CONCLUSION-TEACHING MORE BY GRADING LESS (OR DIFFERENTLY)

A review of the history and research on grading practices may appear to present a bleak outlook on the process of grading and its impacts on learning. However, underlying the less encouraging news about grades are numerous opportunities for faculty members to make assessment and evaluation more productive, better aligned with student learning, and less burdensome for faculty and students. Notably, many of the practices advocated in the literature would appear to involve faculty members spending less time grading. The time and energy spent on grading has been often pinpointed as a key barrier to instructors becoming more innovative in their teaching. In some cases, the demands of grading require so much instructor attention, little time remains for reflection on the structure of a course or for aspirations of pedagogical improvement. Additionally, some instructors are hesitant to develop active-learning activities-as either in-class activities or homework assignments-for fear of the onslaught of grading resulting from these new activities. However, just because students generate work does not mean instructors need to grade that work for accuracy. In fact, we have presented evidence that accuracy-based grading may, in fact, demotivate students and impede learning. Additionally, the time-consuming process of instructors marking papers and leaving comments may achieve no gain, if comments are rarely read by students. One wonders how much more student learning might occur if instructors' time spent grading was used in different ways. What if instructors spent more time planning in-class discussions of homework and simply assigned a small number of earned points to students for completing the work? What if students themselves used rubrics to examine their peers' efforts and evaluate their own work, instead of instructors spending hours and hours commenting on papers? What if students viewed their peers as resources and collaborators, as opposed to competitors in courses that employ grade curving? Implementing small changes like those described above might allow instructors to promote more student learning by grading less or at least differently than they have before.

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Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently)

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The authors explore a history of grading and review the literature regarding the purposes and impacts of grading. They then suggest strategies for making grading more supportive of learning, including balancing accuracy-based and effort-based ...

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This article is titled "The Problem with Grading" from Harvard Graduate School of Education by Lory Hough in 2023.

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This article is titled "The Problem with Grading" from Harvard Graduate School of Education by Lory Hough in 2023.

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1. “In fact, Feldman says, grades have become “the main criteria in nearly every decision that schools make about students,” from whether they get promoted to the next class or held back, to which course level a student should be taking, such as college prep, honors, or AP.” This stuck out to me because it highlights how intertwined grades are with the traditional schooling system and how they are a deciding factor in much of a student's current and future academic success.

2. “A student who writes an A-quality essay but hands it in late gets her writing downgraded to a B, and the student who writes a B-quality essay turned in by the deadline receives a B.” I highlighted this because it shows the inconsistency in the traditional grading system and that often grading varies teacher to teacher depending on their grading philosophy.

3. “Students also learn at their own pace and the school’s standards are broken into kid friendly “I can” statements so parents and students know exactly what skills a student “can” do and which skills they are working on.” I highlighted this because it addresses an alternative option for measuring students' progress and it revolves around the student’s ability to retain and grasp information rather than an easy A or D for teachers to keep record of.

4. “Knowing that there’s a learning opportunity that can engage them more directly with why they went into teaching in the first place, and gets them more excited about teaching, I think is really important.” This stuck out to me because it demonstrates that alternative ways of measuring student understanding is not only beneficial for students, it’s valuable to the teachers as well.

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My son's binder was a mess. Loose papers were falling out, others looked like they had been balled up or stepped on, some more than once. The binder itself was bent in one corner. But he was a seventh-grader and to him, it looked just fine.

Unfortunately, his seventh-grade math teacher didn't agree and deducted points from his grade for being messy. This same teacher also took off points when homework was completed with something other than a pencil or if a student needed a second copy of an assignment. If a student was asked to move their seat during class, she slashed five points. Points were earned back if a parent signed the list of rules, and it was returned in a timely manner.

Being organized and not misbehaving in class are skills students need to figure out, for sure, and I certainly wanted my son to be neater, but factoring these behaviors into grades - especially for middle-schoolers just learning to come into their own - didn't make sense to me.

And so, when I learned, a few years later, that my son's high school was rethinking their grading practice, I decided it was time to dig deeper into what Grading for Equity author Joe Feldman, Ed.M.'93, calls "one of the most challenging and emotionally charged conversations in today's schools."

Grades Are What?

I started by asking a question that seems simple on the surface: What is a grade?

Feldman, a former teacher and principal, says that on a really basic level, grades are the way teachers calculate and report student performances. Typically, it's an accumulation of points (0 to 100) with corresponding letters (A through F, minus E). Earn an 89 on a test and your grade is a B+, for example. Believed to date back to 1785, when Yale President Ezra Stiles gave four grades to his seniors ( optimi, second optimi, inferiors, and pejores), grades have long been a part of our education system in the United States. In fact, Feldman says, grades have become "the main criteria in nearly every decision that schools make about students," from whether they get promoted to the next class or held back, to which course level a student should be taking, such as college prep, honors, or AP. It's how many high schools tally GPA and student rank, and one of the main ways that colleges decide who they'll even consider for admissions.

"Grading is evaluation, putting a value on something," says Denise Pope, Ed.M.'89, a senior lecturer at Stanford who runs a project called Challenge Success. Pope stresses, however, that grades are not the same as assessment, and to really talk about grading, we have to make the distinction between the two terms.

"Assessment is feedback so that students can learn," Pope says. "It's helping them see where they are and helping them move toward a point of greater understanding or mastery. Grading doesn't always do that, but assessment should."

When she hosts professional development workshops to help schools rethink their assessment practices, she likes to point out that the Latin root of assessment is sari, which means to sit beside. Assessment is seeing where a student is with their understanding - what they don't know, what they do know - and then using that to determine what they need. "Sometimes a grade does that," Pope says, "but a lot of times students have no idea what that grade means."

And that's what seems to be at the heart of the debate about grading, and what rubbed me the wrong way when my son was in that math class: Students, teachers, parents, and college admissions officers have no idea what a letter grade - this thing we are saying is really important in a student's school life - is really saying. Does an A mean a student has truly mastered that history lesson? Does the C+ mean the student was "sort of" getting the math they were learning, or did it mean they were an ace at math, but just couldn't keep a neat binder?

What's the Problem?

The confusion starts with consistency, as in, there is none. At most schools, there's no consistency about what's included in a grade or what's left out, even among teachers teaching the same subject in the same school to students in the same grade at the same level. This creates what is often called "grade fog" - we're not sure what the grade means because we're asking that A or that C+ to communicate too much disparate information.

"It's radically inconsistent from teacher to teacher," says A.J. Stitch, Ed.M.'12, the founding principal of the Greater Dayton School, a private school in Ohio for kids from low-income backgrounds that doesn't use traditional grades. At public schools where he has worked in the past, he says "most teachers had different approaches to weighting homework, classwork, quizzes, and tests."

For example, he says, "a student may demonstrate mastery of content on a test, quiz, and classwork, yet still fails a course because the teacher decides to weigh homework 40%, and the student, for one reason or another, struggles in that regard. Obviously, that's inequitable, and it illustrates the variation of weighted grade scales and how it impacts a student's success or failure, regardless of whether they mastered the standards taught in the course. Sadly, I made this mistake myself as a young teacher, and as a principal I've seen too many teachers make this mistake, too."

Jason Merrill, the principal of Melrose High School, where my son currently goes to school, says this is one of the biggest reasons they started looking at their teaching and learning practices, and why they applied to become one of five schools in the multi-year Rethinking Grading Pilot program sponsored by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

"Your son has eight teachers right now that all have their own way to grade. Completely their own," he says. "The average kid often gives up trying to figure it out. Some teachers count homework, some teachers don't. Some teachers grade homework, some teachers grade it as completion. Some teachers count large tests for a lot more than others. What we want to do is not have 85 different ways to respond to a fire alarm."

Feldman says we also don't want to include non-academics in grades - things like messy binders and not coming to class with a pencil, or the one that is commonly factored in: late work.

"A student who writes an A-quality essay but hands it in late gets her writing downgraded to a B, and the student who writes a B-quality essay turned in by the deadline receives a B. There's nothing to distinguish those two B grades, although those students have very different levels of content mastery," he says.

Traditional grading also invites biases, he says, especially around behavior. "When we include a student's behavior in a grade, we're imposing on all of our students a narrow idea of what a 'successful' student is," Feldman says, and "you start to misrepresent and warp the accuracy." For example, a student who participates in discussions and always brings their pencil to class earns five points, but they get a C on the test. Adding the five behavior points lifts that C test grade to something in the low B range. Although students and parents are happy the grade is a B and that the student's all-important GPA remains intact, this warping can create longer term problems.

"You're telling the student that they're at a B level in content, and they're actually at a C," Feldman says. "They don't think there's a problem, the counselors don't think there's a problem, and the student goes to the next grade level and gets crushed by the content. They had no idea that they weren't prepared for the rigor of that class because they kept getting the message that they were getting B's."

It can be especially confusing for parents, says Christopher Beaver, one of the assistant principals at Melrose High. "I knew what my own kids could do skill-based wise, but if I'm a parent and I don't know what my kids can do because the teachers haven't laid that out for me on a report card, then I can't look at a report card and say, 'See that. My kid is proficient at this skill or my kid is proficient at that skill,'" he says. "I'm going to focus on something like the GPA because that's all I have. And I'm going to assume, if my kid has a high GPA, that my kid's skillset is at a proficient level. But that is not always the case."

As a parent, I was confused earlier this year when my son's overall grade in a class was low, even though he seemed to get the content. We looked online at the grading portal the district uses and sure enough, he had Bs and As. But then there was that one grade: a 44 on a test he didn't have enough time to finish. That one low test score brought the whole grade down because of another impossible part of how we grade: averaging.

"We have this ridiculous system of averaging things out," Pope says, "which doesn't make any sense because the goal is to get students to learn material. Same with the case against zero, right? Why would you give a kid a zero? A zero is worse than an F."

The "case against zero" idea is that when using a 0-to-100-point scale in grading, a student should never receive a zero, even if they didn't turn in an assignment. Sounds odd, given that a zero for not turning in work is how we've long operated, but as author Doug Reeves wrote in 2004 in "The Case Against the Zero" in Phi Delta Kappan, "assigning a zero is disproportionate punishment."

Why? Because mathematically, with a 0-to-100 scale, failing a class is more likely than passing a class. Think about it. Each letter grade is 10 points - an A is 90-100, a B is 80- 89, a C is 70-79, and a D is 60-69 - but the scale's one failing grade, an F, spans not 10 points, but 60 (0 to 59). The result is that a zero disproportionally pulls down an average and makes it that much harder to pull a grade up significantly. A student with two 85s, for example, is averaging a B. If that student gets a 0 on one assignment, their average drops to 56, an F. Even if the student gets 85s on the next two assignments, their average still only jumps to a 68. So, four Bs and one zero means the student's averaged overall grade is a D+.

This averaging especially penalizes students who start out a semester slower with lower grades. Even if they figure out the material and fully master content later, averaging won't necessarily reflect what they truly know. In his book, Feldman gives an example of a student who, coming into ninth grade, had never learned to write a persuasive essay. The ninth-grade teacher gives an assignment early in September, revealing this student's writing inexperience.

"The essay gets a D-. But it's early in September, and you, as the teacher, provide instruction and guided practice with feedback," Feldman writes. The student's writing improves, and their grade goes up with each new assignment. The student eventually learns how to write an amazing persuasive essay. They are doing A work. However, when the grades are averaged, that early D- drags down the overall grade and though the student mastered persuasive writing, their A drops to a B-.

Add Stress to the Mix

Beyond the problems with how we grade or what a grade means, Robin Loewald, Ed.M.'19, an English teacher at Melrose High, also worries about the effect grades have on student mindset, especially for middle- and high-schoolers.

"Grading in general is tough because of the expectations for students with college applications," she says. "There tends to be a lot of stress around grades and the minute difference between a 93 and 94. In truth, it's hard to really delineate the difference between those two numbers in terms of student understanding and mastery of the subject."

Pope focuses her work extensively on the stress students take on trying to chase "good" grades and the extrinsic motivation - driven by external rewards - that takes over. In an op-ed she co-authored in February for The Hechinger Report about the furor over ChatGPT, she wrote that instead of asking how to stop students from cheating using bot programs, we should instead be asking "why" students are cheating in the first place. Chasing those good grades is part of that "why."

"We have this real system of you need to get the grades and the test scores in order to please your parents, go to college, get the merit scholarship, get a good job - whatever it is," she says. "There's this extrinsic motivation that's tied to grades, which adds to student stress, and in some cases can lead to really unhealthy practices like perfectionism or great anxiety, paralysis. And it could also really turn kids off. 'Well, I got a C so I'm bad at math. I'm not a math person so clearly, I shouldn't try anymore.'"

As Feldman said during an interview in 2019 with the Harvard EdCast, for students, even attempting to follow the range of grading practices each of their six or seven teachers follows can be stressful.

"For the student, it adds to my cognitive load," he says. "I not only have to understand the content and try and perform at high levels of the content, but now I also have to navigate a grading structure that may not be totally transparent, and may be different for every teacher, and particularly for students who are historically underserved and have less education background and fewer resources and understanding of how to navigate those really foreign systems. It places those additional burdens on them, which we shouldn't do."

Are There Alternatives?

If traditional grades say little about a student's mastery of the material, are often inequitable, and can add more stress, what are better ways for teachers and schools to capture a student's skills and understanding of the material? And given the long history of using numbers and letter grades, are schools even ready to change?

Back in 2005, Chester Finn Jr., M.A.T'67, Ed.D.'70, then president of the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, told The Washington Post that "high schools will keep using them if college admissions offices keep requiring them, which they likely will."

But nearly two decades since Finn made that observation, it's clear that some schools, like my son's, are ready for change and have ideas on how to do that.

At the Greater Dayton School, Stitch says their ability to work outside the structure and limitations of a public school gave them the liberty to design whatever grading scale they thought was best for kids. They chose not to use the A to F scale.

"The traditional grading system is not aligned to learning outcomes," he says. "Traditional grading is one-and-done in terms of you've learned the content, or you haven't, and the grade you get is the grade you get. A better grading system allows for multiple attempts of content mastery."

Which is why his school uses only two grades - "mastered" and "in progress," and students have unlimited chances to learn the material and become proficient, he says. Students also learn at their own pace and the school's standards are broken into kid friendly "I can" statements so parents and students know exactly what skills a student "can" do and which skills they are working on.

A few years ago, Melrose High started allowing students to redo their work if the grade was below a certain number. The idea was that learning shouldn't be punitive - it was about mastering content, even if that took more than one try.

As Merrill says, "At the end of the day, we want all kids to learn. We don't want to prove that they don't know something. We want to be like, you need to do some work to retake this again to show us that you do know it."

Loewald says the school's English department additionally has an extended revision policy around writing assignments, where students can meet with their teachers to edit, revise, and resubmit their writing work. She allows students to revise almost every assignment.

"I think that the process of learning through revision is really helpful and allows there to be less pressure on the initial submission of work," she says. "Students are graded on rubrics and can use those rubrics to guide their revisions of assignments. The only assignments that I do not allow students to revise are their reading checks since those are things we talk about and reference in the class in which they're due."

Merrill says the school's revision policy is a work in progress - it needs its own revision - because there is currently too much variation in what students can redo. "We are working to build a single, consistent retake policy. If we de-emphasize the weighting for formative assessment and practice materials, such as homework and classwork, then we can have a retake policy that addresses summative assessments only," he says.

Caitlin Reilly, Ed.M.'14, recently started as a deputy principal at Revere High School, located just north of Boston and part of the state's Rethinking Grading Pilot. She says the school is moving toward a full competency-based model. Although there's variation on how competency-based is defined, it generally means that instead of evaluating students as proficient based on the amount of time they spend on a subject - 58 minutes for factoring polynomials or three years taking a foreign language - time allotment is shifted to how well students can define what they actually know about a subject. And those competencies aren't vague - they're clearly spelled out by a school.

"For us, competency learning is a matter of equity for students because it makes apparent to all students, what are you working toward?" says Reilly. "Where do you not yet have the skills? What support do you need? And students should be seeing their progress to the standards of the course. Knowing that is incredibly important for all students, versus the hidden game of school when you have this letter grade, and you don't know where it's generated from, or you have a test that you got 10 points just for writing your name."

One of the areas Revere High is working on with the grant, she says, is rethinking report cards. Their current approach mimics, in some ways, what elementary schools typically do, which is to include comments about student strengths or areas that need improving in their habits-of-work, not just the letter grade. They are working on transitioning course grades from a single letter to a report of proficiency on course competencies.

"Our current report card is a one-pager that has letter grades ... but for every class students have, there's a habits-of-work box that includes the four habits-of-work that we assess: active learning, respect, collaboration, and ownership," she says. For each habit, there's a scale of proficient, some proficiency, or not yet proficient, with rubric-defined criteria that guides the understanding of what it is to be proficient in each category." In that way, it's not just a teacher's general "sense" of which category to pick or a parent's guess as to what each habit actually means.

As I talked to educators about other ways to rethink how we grade, some suggested dropping the lowest grade in a class or not grading assignments done early in a semester. Many mention not grading homework but instead allowing that work to be a place where students can figure things out and make mistakes, especially when new concepts are introduced. Others talk about doing away with the 0-to-100 scale. In Melrose, Loewald says the English Department has already shifted to a 1-to-4 scale.

"A four meaning the student is exceeding expectations, three is meeting, two is approaching, and one is developing," she says. "It's much more accurate in terms of assessing student learning to use a smaller scale."

Feldman says that with any change around such an entrenched topic like grading, "We are learning that you actually have to invest in teacher understanding along with policy development in order to change practice around grading."

It's something my son's school has already jumped on with a core group of administrators and teachers examining current practices and testing out some of the changes they want to make.

"They've all set goals for themselves and are participating in regular coaching," says Melanie Acevedo, the district's director of instructional technology and personalized learning. "They come to a meeting once a month and talk about what's working, what's not working. They are a group that's trying things out. They're being the people that are booted on the ground, really experimenting so that we can come back to the bigger faculty and say, here are some things that people have tried. Do you want to try that? We're building this idea from the staff and from the teachers because they're the ones that know best."

One of the things Melrose High isn't doing, at least not yet, is blowing up the entire grading system or even doing away with traditional A to F grades.

Instead, says Merrill, they've set a goal so that by next fall they have "a very clear, consistent, transparent grading practice and policy in place for all teachers," he says, and can answer questions like: How do we assess kids? How do we communicate that? How do kids know where they stand? How do they reflect and retake or do revisions? How do we count homework? Is that grading equitable? "There are so many pieces that go into it," he says, "but we're not looking to make any of our kids a trial."

Luckily, there's broader interest in "rethinking grading," as the Massachusetts pilot is called. Sales for Feldman's Grading for Equity book are robust enough that he's working on a second, updated edition, and, he says, "I am not any less confident that this is one of the most important levers that schools and districts can use to not only improve student achievement, but also reduce achievement and opportunity disparities."

Rethinking grading may even keep some teachers in the profession longer.

"We've heard, and we have some data, that this work actually increases the likelihood that some teachers would stay in their district," Feldman says. "We see a real crisis in the retention of the teaching force. Knowing that there's a learning opportunity that can engage them more directly with why they went into teaching in the first place, and gets them more excited about teaching, I think is really important." Teachers, he says, don't want to be the bean counters or police officers they often become when it comes to grading.

"The five participation points every day. The, you turned it in late one day, so you lose 10% or you turned it in two days late so 20%," he says. "None of us went into teaching to do that."

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When it comes to how we show what students know, do traditional grading practices deserve an F?