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Allowing teachers to try new grading procedures in a low-stakes setting and taking a whole-school approach are among the lessons highlighted in a new paper on efforts to change how teachers assess student work.

Focusing on the year-long implementation of a model that the researchers call Elevate, the study provides a window into teachers' beliefs about grading, as well as the lack of formal preparation they have in this area, the authors write.

"Many teacher educators expect that the schools that hire their students will teach the novices how to grade, or they say they do not have time to cover that topic," write Brad Olsen of the University of California Santa Cruz and Rebecca Buchanan of the University of Maine. "But public secondary schools rarely have standardized, articulable philosophies of grading or provide induction on the topic."

The paper also delves into teachers' reactions when someone challenges practices that have been firmly in place since they went to school - such as reducing a student's grade for cheating or copying someone else's work.

"I'm not willing to bend on that one," a teacher at one of the two high schools in the study said. "Academic dishonesty is worthy of punishment."

Elevate's overarching principle is that the sole purpose of grading is to communicate a student's mastery of academic skills. That meant giving up other traditional approaches, such as lowering a grade for late work, adding points for extra credit, and giving zeroes for missing assignments.

These principles reflect many of the policy shifts related to grading that schools and districts are already implementing. These changes, however, can be difficult adjustments for teachers and often don't make sense to parents.

In the Park City School District in Utah, for example, parents and school board members are both voicing frustration over a new standards-based grading policy, which assesses students' mastery of specific knowledge and skills, often using a one-to-four scale. And in a Florida district last year, a teacher said she was fired for not complying with a no-zeroes policy.

Back and forth over testing, grading

Based on interviews with a sample of 15 teachers, two principals and a professional development (PD) provider - Olsen's and Buchanan's study comes as other researchers are taking a closer look at the role of class assignments, homework and grading policies in creating more equitable learning experiences for students.

In addition, there are increasing calls among researchers to measure student success through much more than just test scores, but Olsen said in an email that "the back and forth among standardized testing, holistic classroom assessment and teachers' grading practices is nothing new."

Joe Feldman, an education consultant and former school and district administrator, added in an email that most teachers have not had opportunities to examine or improve their grading practices.

"However, when teachers can learn how to improve their grading to be more accurate and equitable, they have an opportunity to bolster the validity and reliability of their grades, and therefore to mount a more justifiable argument against the limitations of standardized testing," he said. "I think the more high-quality learning opportunities we can provide for teachers to improve grading, the better."

More attempts to be successful

The Oakdale Joint Unified School District, near Modesto, California, has been considering moving to a no-zero policy - an idea that is meeting some criticism from teachers in higher grades, Danesa Menge, a 7th-grade science teacher in the district, said in an email. While Menge is okay with not giving students zeroes, she does leave blank spaces as a clue to "both students and parents that the assignment hasn't been turned in at all," she said in an email.

She also accepts late work to replace the blank spaces, allows retakes on all tests and quizzes, and doesn't give students less than 50% on them. Because she teaches at a traditional junior high, she said her practices help ease students through that transition to having multiple teachers - all with different rules and expectations.

"Students don't come into 7th grade knowing what to do, how to do the work," she said. "Just like a driver's test, SATs, etc. - we don't only get one attempt. Why should I limit students' attempts at being successful?"

Some teachers, such as Daniel Brennick at Literacy Leadership Technology Academy in Tampa, Florida, are also trying out new grading practices on their own. While he doesn't routinely accept late work, he said in an email that he allows extensions for normally hard-working students who don't have a previous pattern of missing assignments. And allowing those who do have such a pattern to turn in late assignments might not raise their grade from a D to a C, but it "might increase their understanding of the content and more completely fulfill my role as the teacher," said Brennick, also a 7th-grade science teacher.

He added that an "effective tutoring practice" is revisiting missing assignments or repeating those that received a low score. "Often times reviewing and completing these assignments in a one-on-one or smaller group setting allows these students to gain a level of understanding a 55-minute period full of social distractions makes difficult," Brennick said. "That again helps better fulfill my duty as their teacher."

Teachers tentative about some grading practices

A disturbing realization for some of the teachers in the study on Elevate was that once they no longer considered effort or behavior in assigning grades - focusing just on the demonstration of knowledge - students' grades would often drop. The Elevate PD provider's position was that a reduction in D and F grades would show students were mastering the material, while a decrease in A's would indicate less grade inflation - which a recent study showed has grown more prevalent over time at schools serving students from higher-income families.

The teachers in the study also argued that Elevate's model of grading for mastery ignored students' academic growth as well as skills such as communication and creativity. The researchers concluded that while some teachers made changes in their grading practices, it was more of "two-steps-forward-one-step-back" scenario, and that most of the teachers only adopted some of the practices.

Because one of the two schools made the new practices voluntary, the work was "diluted," the researchers write. At the school where the practices were uniformly implemented, there was more "collegiality around grading and satisfaction" with the new model.

Newer teachers were more likely to try the strategies, while experienced teachers were more resistant. The researchers also found that while the one-year process gave teachers a chance to take an in-depth look at grading, those interviewed months later had "scaled back" many of the practices. "The two primary reasons given were that students were not buying into the new practices, and that the Elevate strategies required more time than the teachers had," the authors wrote.

For example, some teachers said waiting until a grading period was almost over to turn in late work wasn't helping students learn the material, and others found that facing "piles of work" in those final days was too much of a burden on their time.

The researchers also recommend that schools allow some flexibility if implementing new grading policies and that university teacher education programs "address grading as an essential topic."

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No zeroes, accepting late work among recent shifts in teachers' grading practices

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Allowing teachers to try new grading procedures in a low-stakes setting and taking a whole-school approach are among the lessons highlighted in a new paper on efforts to change how teachers assess student work.

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Grading for Learning: Tips from teachers

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Grading for Learning: Tips from teachers

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Grading for Learning: Tips from Teachers

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Many teachers have already started their journey toward grading for learning. Here, Heather Willman, shares some thoughts from teachers who are well on their way!

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If a student blows your final, but you KNOW they knew the material, what you have is an external threat to the validity of the measure. Don't use that piece of data. 

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If a student blows your final, but you KNOW they knew the material, what you have is an external threat to the validity of the measure. Don't use that piece of data. 

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A good, concise explanation of the distinction between 1-4 DOK levels and 1-4 proficiency scale/standards grading. @SolutionTree

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A good, concise explanation of the distinction between 1-4 DOK levels and 1-4 proficiency scale/standards grading. @SolutionTree

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Cassandra Erkens is a presenter, facilitator, coach, trainer of trainers, keynote speaker, author, and above all, a teacher. She presents nationally and internationally on assessment, instruction, school improvement, and professional learning communities.

When it comes to measurement, is a popular number; rather, a range of 1 to 4 is a common scheme. Two different powerful measurement systems use a range of 1 through 4 scores to clarify levels of quality. The Depth of Knowledge [DOK] framework by Webb, 2005, uses a 1 through 4 scale to rank the cognitive complexity of an assessment task. The Proficiency Scale framework by Marzano and Kendall (2008) uses a 1 through 4 scale to rank students' performance levels on individual standards.

Both assessment measurement systems have much in common:

Both systems range from 1 to 4

Each number in the range of both systems represents a degree of sophistication

The 1 represents the lowest degree of sophistication and the 4 represents the highest degree, or the "best" number

But that's where the similarities stop. The DOK scale is used to measure the rigor level of a task (the source), whereas a proficiency scale is used to measure the quality of student work (the result) on an academic standard. A side by side summary of both frameworks highlights the differences in each level:

(The measure of cognitive complexity in a task)

(The measure of proficiency found in student work)

Even though one system measures the input (task) and one measures the output (result), it's a very common and alluring misstep to equate the two systems as synonymous. The argument could be made, for example, that a student is (proficiency level 4) if he/she can engage in extended thinking (DOK level 4) regarding the standard(s).

However, it's important to remember that the two 4-point schemes are meant to serve very different purposes. All four levels of proficiency can apply to task that is not binary (there are no gradations of quality, so evaluation is solely based on right/wrong, yes/no, or present/absent responses); and, a single performance task can be assigned any one level of cognitive complexity. In other words, a task that requires strategic thinking (DOK level 3), can generate all 4 levels of proficiency in student responses.

The 3 Dangers

There are a few dangers in tying the two measures together.

Trapping Students at the Lower Levels

The first involves the limitations such a combination would place on students: Students who struggle to earn high levels of proficiency would become trapped in lower level tasks. Obviously, this is a significant concern. The and the big picture of learning often rest in DOK 3 and 4 level tasks which many struggling learners need, but if deemed a 1 or a 2 in proficiency would not be allowed to experience.

Forcing Students to Only Engage at Level 4

The second danger is the reverse of the first: Students wouldn't be able to earn a 4 level of proficiency unless they were always engaged in extended thinking tasks.

Oversimplification

The third danger is the oversimplification of two different sophisticated measurement systems. Turning complex evaluation processes into streamlined, simple algorithms compromises the accuracy of teacher decision making and exempts educators from needing to think carefully about what constitutes deep learning .

So, what's in a 4? It turns out there is a lot of important information behind any assigned score ... but the information will vary based on the specific measurement system being employed and the items being measured. Let's use each system as it was intended and avoid the temptation to merge and simplify them.
"I wouldn't give a nickel for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity." -Einstein References:
Marzano R. and Kendall J. (2008) Designing and assessing educational objectives: Applying the new taxonomy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press

Webb, N. L., Alt, M., Ely, R., and Vesperman, B. (2005). Web alignment tool (WAT) training manual. Washinton, DC: Council of Chief State School Officers

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What's in a 4? DOK and Proficiency Scales

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Cassandra Erkens is a presenter, facilitator, coach, trainer of trainers, keynote speaker, author, and above all, a teacher. She presents nationally and internationally on assessment, instruction, school improvement, and professional learning communities. When it comes to measurement, is a popular number; rather, a range of 1 to 4 is a common scheme.

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The plan includes targeted communication of our grading policies to five major stakeholder groups: students, parents, administrators, counselors, & teacher

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The plan includes targeted communication of our grading policies to five major stakeholder groups: students, parents, administrators, counselors, & teacher

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The University of Chicago made headlines last June when it announced it was going test-optional to encourage more first-generation and low-income students to apply. It became the most competitive university to allow U.S. applicants to forgo submitting SAT or ACT scores.

But the news wasn't just U of Chicago's announcement. It was what happened next.

A year later, the school declared the shift a success, along with a range of other changes designed to increase access. It admitted its most diverse freshman class yet, with more low-income, first-generation, veteran and rural students coming to its 217-acre campus.

While U of Chicago didn't start the trend, it has contributed to its growth, with more than 30 schools following suit in the past year to push the number of test-optional four-year institutions across the country to more than 1,000.

That accounts for the fastest growth in the history of the test-optional movement, said Bob Schaeffer, public education director for the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest). As many as four dozen more schools are considering the change, he added. The trend is geographic in nature, with the majority of institutions in New England, and more than half of schools in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, currently test-optional, according to FairTest.

But questions remain about how this change impacts admissions: Does it demand more time to consider each applicant? Does it automatically diversify the applicant pool? And, perhaps most critical to its success, does it require hiring more staff?

Answers from college administrators and experts alike are: "definitely maybe." That is, just as there are a wide range of institutions, so too are there many ways to go test-optional.

Multiple approaches

Consider Hampshire College, a private liberal arts school in Amherst, Mass., where students create their own majors. Hampshire has been test-optional since it opened in 1970,and since the fall of 2014 it hasn't considered test scores even if applicants submit them. By going test-blind, officials hoped to better identify students who were a good fit for the college.

"There's no way to pass a class [here] just by cramming for an exam," said Kristina Moss Gunnarsdóttir, Hampshire's interim dean of admissions and financial aid. "We just wanted to admit more students who are likely to thrive academically."

The shift to test-blind applications resulted in more time spent with each application, leading the school of 1,200 students to add one to two more staff members, she said.

Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, was the first test-optional school in the U.S. Although the private liberal arts college's policy has been in place for 50 years, the admissions process has changed dramatically since, as its applicant pool grew from 3,500 in the 1980s to 9,300 today, said E. Whitney Soule, dean of admissions and financial aid. The college enrolls 1,800 undergraduates and this year accepted about 9% of applicants to add roughly 500 new students, she said.

While Bowdoin made the change explicitly to increase access, Soule said its holistic review of each application hasn't increased time demands on the admissions office.

"It really doesn't take longer to consider a student without a test score," she said. Even for students who submit test scores, she added, "testing doesn't hold enough weight to undo the more thorough evaluation we just completed."

Questioning the tests

The SAT and ACT tests were created to help colleges predict how a prospective student would fare in their first year at school no matter their location or high school's rigor. But concerns about the tests' fairness are driving the test-optional trend.

Critics say the SAT and ACT are culturally biased, with questions that discriminate against minority students, and that students who can hire a private tutor and take the test multiple times have an advantage over those who can't. A recent redesign of the SAT, meanwhile, caught flak for how some of its questions were designed.

This year, the College Board, which administers the SAT, announced it will add an "adversity score" for each test taker. The composite figure measures students' socioeconomic status across metrics such as their family's income, their neighborhood's crime rates and housing values, and their high school's rigor. In 2014, the College Board began giving income-eligible students fee waivers to apply to college and offering free online test prep.

"Even the testing agencies acknowledge aspects of testing that don't work well for every part of the population," Soule said. "We're not anti-test, we're just not relying on the test to do the work we're doing."

FairTest's Schaeffer doesn't call standardized test scores "totally irrelevant." But, he added, the difference between an SAT score of 1400 and 1200 "isn't as significant as what a high school record captures."

Colleges considering going test-optional should think beyond admissions, said Annie Reznik, executive director of the Coalition for College, a group that aims to expand access to higher education by offering an alternative to the Common Application and more preparatory resources.

"Be clear about why you are going test-optional and build in support for those other goals," she said, noting that after dropping its standardized test requirement, U of Chicago increased support for students once they arrived on campus.

The university, which is a member of the Coalition, promised free tuition for students with family incomes under $125,000 and financial aid to cover all costs for those earning less than $60,000 a year. It also added a $20,000 scholarship for first-generation students.

U of Chicago's initiative included several changes to its application process as well. The school now allows students to submit a two-minute video in place of the optional alumni or on-campus interview and it accepts nontraditional materials as supplements to students' applications.

Those changes appear to be paying off. Although the university didn't release specific figures, it reported that the number of first-generation and low-income students jumped by 20% year-over-year for its current incoming class, while rural student enrollment grew 56%.

Across all colleges, exactly how many students withhold test scores is uncertain. FairTest's Schaeffer said the figure could range from 15% of students at a school that recently made the change to 50% at a school where such a policy has been in place for years.

One in three applicants to Bowdoin don't include test scores, Soule said, a percentage that hasn't changed over the years. First-generation students are more likely to withhold test scores, she added.

Even if low-income or first-generation students are already qualified to attend a school, Reznik said, dropping the test requirement might encourage them to apply. It lets students "take more control over the application process" and not worry peers will gain an advantage by taking a standardized test multiple times or using a private tutor, she said.

One way colleges can ensure the decision to go test-optional pays off is to audit the admissions process beforehand, said Hampshire'sGunnarsdóttir.

Hampshire wanted to look beyond applicants' potential first-year success rates, which standardized tests are geared to predict, to examine the attributes of students who thrived for all four years. The school found that students who maintained good grades throughout high school were more likely to succeed.

Regardless of a school's policy, its admissions process is a "living, breathing thing," Bowdoin's Soule said. "It does change and grow."

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Is time up on standardized tests for college admissions?

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The University of Chicago made headlines last June when it announced it was going test-optional to encourage more first-generation and low-income students to apply. It became the most competitive university to allow U.S. applicants to forgo submitting SAT or ACT scores. But the news wasn't just U of Chicago's announcement.

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Opinion

It's time to make grading bias-resistant and fairer

Grades are used to make a number of significant decisions about students, including promotion, retention, college admissions, and scholarships. But parents, teachers, and school administrators concerned about providing equitable opportunities for every child are frequently stunned to learn that many common grading practices are outdated, inaccurate, and harmful to student success. In fact, grading policies-which appear to be an objective, fair, and accurate method to describe a student's academic performance-often increase achievement gaps by infusing grades with teachers' implicit biases or by rewarding or punishing students based on their families' resources.

Because grading is often not addressed in teacher preparation or in ongoing professional development, most teachers choose their own way to grade, guided by their best sense but uninformed by either research or best practices.

As a result, traditional grading practices result in grades that provide unclear and often misleading information to parents, students, and postsecondary institutions. Teachers often combine a range of unrelated student information into a grade, compressing a bucket of information into a thimble-sized container. When teachers collapse academic proficiency, soft skills, behavior, attendance, and effort into a single letter, it is impossible for anyone to discern the student's particular strengths and weaknesses in each of these aspects, rendering the grade vague, confusing, and even invalid.

Traditional grading practices are often also corrupted by implicit racial, class, and gender biases. It is well documented that schools' disciplinary actions often disproportionately punish African-American, Latino, low-income, and special education students. These same biases affect grading. When teachers grade students on subjectively interpreted behaviors in categories of participation or effort, their perceptions and judgments of those behaviors are influenced by that teacher's race, class, and gender. For example, in classrooms taught by white teachers, African-American students are typically rated as poorer "classroom citizens" than their white peers, and thereby are more likely to have a lower grade for those behaviors because of the teacher's biased perceptions.

Grades based on performance outside the classroom can also reproduce cycles of disparities, by rewarding or punishing students based on their income and resources. Students are more likely to complete homework if they have more resources (such as higher educated and English-speaking parents, internet access, and a safe, quiet space at home). Yet teachers often award points to students for their homework performance, which rewards or punishes students based on environmental factors outside of the student's control.

Finally, most teachers use grading practices based on calculations that depress student achievement and progress. Current practices conflict with contemporary understandings of growth mindset and how to encourage students to learn through practice and experimentation. An F early in a student's learning and an A at the end average out to a C, regardless of progress over time and final achievement. This mathematically unsound approach punishes students with early struggles, often those who enter the class with fewer resources and less prior academic success and have the most potential growth ahead of them.

Many teachers entered the profession to provide every student an opportunity to succeed, to minimize the achievement and opportunity gaps. Yet when we continue to use traditional grading practices, we inadvertently reproduce those gaps.

In partnering with urban, rural, and suburban public schools and districts, as well as elite private academies, we at the Equitable Grading Project-a research initiative of the equity-focused education consulting group I lead-have found that once teachers learn about the harms caused by our century-old grading practices, they are motivated to try alternative, more equitable grading practices.

In our review of academic research and observations of teachers' implementation, we have identified key aspects of what we call equitable grading, which is accurate, bias-resistant, and motivational:

* Reflect growth and learning.

Teachers should use a more proportionately structured 0-4 scale instead of a 0-100 point scale that is mathematically oriented toward failure, stop assigning a zero for missing work, and weight recent performance and growth instead of averaging performance over time. By allowing students to retake tests and projects (with the chance to replace previous scores), teachers can reward learning, support a growth mindset, and not disadvantage students who enter classrooms with weaker academic backgrounds.

* Value knowledge, not environment or behavior.

Instead of grading subjectively interpreted behaviors such as a student's "effort" or "participation," teachers should focus grades on required content or standards. Grades should not be used to reward compliance or homework completion, both of which invite implicit and institutional biases.

* Lift the veil on how to succeed.

Standards-aligned rubrics, simplified grade calculations, and standards-based scales and gradebooks make teacher's expectations explicit and facilitate students' understanding, ownership, and power over their grades.

* Build soft skills-without including them in the grade.

Teachers should employ a more expansive range of feedback strategies to incorporate peer and self-evaluation and build self-regulation instead of relying solely on grades as feedback.

These grading practices have a proven record of success. Last year, the Equitable Grading Project partnered with two independent evaluators to study what happens when teachers adopt these practices. In an analysis of 60 teachers in seven high schools in northern California, we found that the rate of students receiving D's and F's frequently decreases with these practices-and decreases more dramatically for vulnerable and underserved student populations. For example, among the teachers who worked with the Equitable Grading Project to implement equitable grading, the rate at which students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch received D's and F's decreased a statistically significant greater amount than students who were not eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

Our analysis also found that equitable grading practices don't just reduce D and F rates, they are also more accurate. When teachers use equitable grading practices, they assign final grades that are more strongly correlated with students' standardized assessment scores on that content, and the effect is stronger for students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunch.

Finally, we found that equitable grading improves the learning environment for teachers. In surveys and independent case studies, teachers and students reported that classrooms are less stressful, teacher-student relationships are stronger and more trusting, and students are more motivated to learn after these interventions.

When we talk about equity, grading is rarely mentioned. By overlooking it, we unwittingly perpetuate the very disparities we dedicate ourselves as educators to correct. It is incumbent upon educators at every level-teachers, principals, district administrators, school boards, and state policymakers-to improve grading policies to ensure that they reinforce, not work against, our commitment to equity.

Published in Print: January 23, 2019, as It Is Time to End Inaccurate, Inequitable Grading Policies

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What Traditional Classroom Grading Gets Wrong

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Opinion Grades are used to make a number of significant decisions about students, including promotion, retention, college admissions, and scholarships. But parents, teachers, and school administrators concerned about providing equitable opportunities for every child are frequently stunned to learn that many common grading practices are outdated, inaccurate, and harmful to student success.

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Independent schools are committed to creating diverse, equitable, and inclusive (DEI) communities. They educate themselves about culturally responsive teaching, incorporate curriculum that reflects a broad spectrum of voices, celebrate different backgrounds, and prioritize hiring faculty and staff that bring diverse perspectives and experiences. Yet, grading-how teachers evaluate, describe, and report student achievement-is rarely considered part of DEI work. As a result, schools may be inadvertently undermining equity and inclusion efforts by continuing to use many common grading practices.

Of all teachers' responsibilities, perhaps none is more consequential, with more implications, than assigning grades. Grades determine important decisions that are made about students-decisions that can even affect students' life trajectories including course placement, athletic eligibility, college admission, scholarships, and employment possibilities. For schools, grades provide valuable feedback: evidence of achievement gaps, weaknesses in instruction, and staffing and professional development needs. The ways teachers grade influence how stressful schools and classrooms feel, and affect how families evaluate their school. Perhaps most profoundly, grades shape how our students think about themselves-who they are, what they're good at, and whether school is a place they can succeed.

But, as many parents, teachers, and school administrators are frequently stunned to learn, many common grading practices are outdated, inaccurate, and undermine student success. In fact, many grading policies-which appear to be an objective, fair, and accurate method to describe a student's academic performance-often increase achievement gaps by infusing grades with teachers' implicit biases or by rewarding or punishing students based on their families' resources.

Ironically, despite the enormous importance of grades, teachers receive almost no training in graduate school or by way of professional development about how to grade. As a result, teachers choose their own individual way to grade, guided by their best sense but uninformed by either research or best practices. Most school administrators know that teachers could benefit from improvements in how to grade-teachers know it as well-but they often are reluctant to broach the topic for fear of encroaching on teachers' professional autonomy. Neither school leaders nor teachers have had a framework or vocabulary to examine grading and understand its inequities, to recognize the harms of century-old grading practices, and to identify and implement more inclusive and accurate grading.

Under these conditions, it should come as no surprise that grading has been called "the third rail" of schools: It provides power to schools, but no one dares touch it. But we must-and now is the time. We may bring new curriculum and instructional strategies to our classrooms, engage in courageous conversations about identity, and collectively dedicate our schools to equity, but we undermine it all when we continue to use many common grading practices.
What We're Doing and How We Got Here
For nearly two decades of working in schools-as a high school teacher, principal, and later as a district administrator responsible for K-12 instruction-I never had the resources, support, or confidence to help teachers address our grading challenges. After I left my school district, I began to investigate the existing research on grading and its intersection with equity. What I found was eye-opening.

Our current grading practices were created during the Industrial Revolution, shaped by our country's early 20th-century cultural dynamics and demographics, and founded on beliefs about teaching, learning, and human potential that have since been thoroughly debunked and disproven. For example, a century ago we believed that humans were effectively motivated by extrinsic rewards and punishments-think rats taught to pull a lever by offering pellets or electrifying the cage floor-a belief that underlies teachers' constant use of "points" to incentivize (and some might say control) student behaviors, such as coming on time to class or completing homework. Over the past few decades, however, we've learned that intrinsic motivation-the kind of motivation that generates creative thinking and fuels effective learning-is undermined by extrinsic rewards and punishments. In other words, our continued use of points to motivate students is demotivating them from learning.

Traditional grading practices also contradict our messages about the learning process. We tell our students that mistakes are OK, even desired, for successful learning. We encourage them to have a growth mindset-reinforcing the idea that everyone has the potential for ultimate success despite struggles. Yet at the same time, we include in grades students' errors on homework and classwork-the stages of the learning process when they are supposed to practice new skills and make their mistakes.

Teachers also frequently use mathematical calculations that hide student growth and handicap students who struggle. One common calculation in traditional grading is the averaging of student performance over time, but this warps the accuracy of grades and disproportionately disadvantages struggling students. For example, here are the scores for the five essays assigned during a unit to teach persuasive essay writing:

Maria Sam

1st Essay

A

B+

2nd Essay

A

A-

3rd Essay

A-

C-

4th Essay

A-

+

5th Essay

A

A

Overall Grade
(Averaged Performance)

A

C+

Maria performed consistently at a high level, from beginning to end. Her average is an A. That seems accurate-she has earned As on every essay and has a final grade of an A. Her classmate Sam's performance was more uneven. He did well on his first two essays, slipped on essay No. 3, but did much better on his fourth and fifth essays. His grades average to a C+ for the unit. But this C+ average to describe his performance, although correctly calculated, is not accurate. None of his essays were at the C+ level, rendering a C+ inaccurate and misleading.

Not only does averaging performance over time give us inaccurate descriptions of student performance, but it hides student growth. Let's take a third student, Ellis. Here are his scores:

Ellis

1st Essay

D-

2nd Essay

D+

3rd Essay

C

4th Essay

B-

5th Essay

A

Overall Grade (Averaged Performance)

C

In the persuasive essay unit, Ellis started out as unprepared, with writing that was an organizational mess, earning him a D-. But over the course of the unit, he steadily improved, ultimately able to write an A-quality persuasive essay. He has learned everything expected of him, but his averaged final grade is a C. Averaging his performance doesn't accurately describe his skills, and it hides all his growth and improvement. What's more, averaging penalizes Ellis. Because he came to the class with a weaker educational background than Maria, even though he learned to write just as well by the end of the unit, his grade is significantly lower than hers. A more equitable grade for Ellis is an A; it reflects his skills at the end of his learning and doesn't deflate his grade because of early struggles.
Supporting DEI Work
While the previous examples emphasize the inaccuracies of our common grading calculation of averaging and have relevance for equity, other traditional grading practices implicate inequity more directly. Teachers often use grades not just to indicate how well students master course content but also to evaluate student behaviors. Categories such as "effort" or "participation" are highly subjective and heavily influenced by a teacher's own experiences and habits. The student who is penalized for not asking questions or contributing to discussions may be learning just as much as other students, and the student who is taking copious notes may not be learning at all. Similarly, teachers judge student behaviors through culturally specific lenses and assumptions that they might not even be aware of, which can result in student actions being misinterpreted and misjudged.

Even beyond implicit biases, students are more likely to complete homework if they have greater resources, such as a quiet space, nearby grownups with advanced education levels, and computer and internet access, while students who have fewer supports are less likely to complete homework. Homework can be an important element of learning, but when teachers include students' performance on that homework in the grade, they incorporate an institutional bias that rewards students with resources and impedes students without resources, effectively replicating intergenerational disparities of race and income. Equitable grading, instead, excludes entirely subjective categories such as "effort" and "participation" and excludes homework performance from students' grades.
Grading and Trust
We know that if we want to create inclusive, welcoming, and supportive schools for all children-and particularly for groups of students who historically have not been as welcomed or supported in schools-we have to build deep, trusting relationships. Yet traditional grading encourages us to do the opposite. Teachers use points to evaluate every action or assignment in a class, which creates pressure-cooker classrooms where no accomplishment goes unrewarded and no mistake goes unpenalized. A student gains points for contributing to a discussion, or for completing the classwork before the bell, or for collaborating in a pair-share, and loses points for coming late, or not having the syllabus signed on time, or for talking out of turn. Effective teacher-student relationships require the opposite: a space to take risks without penalty, to disclose weaknesses without being judged, to feel safe simply knowing that you don't have to perform perfectly every moment.

Our traditional practice of grading everything students do inadvertently sows distrust, shame, and deceit-which leads to students copying homework to earn points, not suggesting an answer if it might be wrong, rote note-taking only for the notebook check-thereby weakening the teacher-student relationship qualities that support learning. Instead, we need to allow students to engage in meaningful tasks for which their performance is not included in their grade.

For example, if homework is indeed an opportunity for students to practice and to make mistakes, then we can't include their performance on that homework in their grade. We should still assign homework and class activities when appropriate, and provide constructive and timely feedback that prepares students for success on summative assessments, but the message should be unambiguous: I expect you to take risks and make mistakes and to share with me your academic confusion and weaknesses without fear that your grade will be lowered because of those mistakes. Students' behavioral mistakes must have consequences-such as additional time for being late to class, for example-but tracking each earned or forfeited point for every activity or behavior reduces teachers to point-tabulators and accountants rather than supportive mentors and guides for students' paths to success.
Example in Action
Once I started digging more deeply into the research and the history of traditional grading, I found classrooms and practitioners who wanted to grade differently. I spent time with these teachers and realized that as intractable as these traditional grading systems and practices can feel, they can be improved. For the past six years, I have worked with schools to help educators recognize the damaging and inequitable impact of many traditional grading practices and to facilitate a process in which teachers and leaders explore more mathematically sound, less biased and subjective, and more intrinsically motivating grading.

Georgetown Day School (DC) is one such school doing the work of examining and rethinking its grading practices. Debby Previna is middle school principal at Georgetown Day School (GDS), which serves a diverse PK-12 student body with 1,075 students and with approximately 25 percent of families receiving some financial assistance. After a few years as an administrator at the school, Previna realized that the way teachers graded often contradicted the school's commitment to academic excellence as well as equity. But she also knew from experience that she couldn't simply create policies; in her experience, teachers often respond to "top-down" grading policies with confusion, resistance, and resentment. Instead, she needed the teachers to see what she saw: how their current approaches contradicted their school's ideals.

In the winter of 2017, she reached out to me, and I suggested she "plant some seeds" by sharing a few articles about the weaknesses-both in terms of accuracy and equity-of common grading practices with the entire middle school faculty. She then sent an open invitation to any teacher who wanted to dig deeper into grading-to research, examine, and imagine ways to align grading to the school's vision for progressive and equitable education. To her surprise, nearly half the faculty was interested. With this momentum, Previna and I developed a strategy that would honor her teachers as learners and leverage the school's collaborative culture.

Beginning that spring, a subset of the faculty participated in a series of workshops where they learned more about the history of current grading practices, their impact on teaching and learning, and what I believe are the three pillars that define equitable grading: grades must beaccurate, validly reflecting a student's academic performance; bias-resistant, preventing our implicit biases and subjectivity from infecting grades; and motivational, helping students strive for academic success, persevere, accept struggles and setbacks, and gain critical life skills. This pilot group was also trained to use more equitable grading practices, which include employing a 0-4 point scale rather than a 0-100 percentage, incorporating retakes and redos, and ensuring that grades indicate how well students actually master subject matter than whether students' behavior or work habits gain their subjective approval.

Through a series of workshops, tailored coaching, and facilitated conversations, the faculty found that these more equitable grading practices were so beneficial that they asked Previna, even demanded of her, that the entire school learn and begin to use these practices. One year later, the middle school has generated a body of evidence across teachers, disciplines, and grade levels that shows the results of these improved approaches to grading, some of which the teachers never anticipated: Students were less anxious and classroom environments felt more relaxed and supportive of learning, and grade inflation decreased because teachers no longer padded grades with points for participation or homework completion. The teachers continue to track students' participation and homework, but have expanded how they give feedback on those nonacademic skills: for example, with student conferences or separate reports and calls to parents. The school's grades give more accurate information about where students are in their learning, and Previna and some teachers are beginning to imagine how their report card could communicate student achievement more accurately and equitably as well. (For a more in-depth look at GDS' experience, read "One School's Approach to Equitable Grading.")
Where Do We Go From Here?
If we can improve how we grade, we will leverage significant improvements in every aspect of teaching and learning as well as our school cultures. The impact of using more equitable grading practices, with data collected and analyzed both by schools and by external evaluators, has been similar across schools-whether charter schools in East Los Angeles to district schools in Northern California to independent schools like Phillips Academy Andover (MA):

The rate of students receiving As decreases, and it decreases more dramatically for students from more resourced families. Grades are no longer rewarding students for just "doing school," which disproportionately benefits students with more privilege, but grades instead reflect students' actual academic performance.

At the same time, the rate of students receiving Ds and Fs decreases, and does so more dramatically for vulnerable and historically underserved students (African-Americans, Hispanics, and students from low-income families). Grades are less susceptible to teachers' biases and no longer filter students for privilege.

There is a statistically significant increase in the correlation between students' teacher-assigned grades and standardized assessment scores, suggesting that teachers' grades more accurately describe their students' performance. This correlation is particularly strengthened for students from lower-income families, suggesting that those students were more likely to have their performance misrepresented by traditional grading practices.

Teachers and students report less stressful classrooms and stronger student-teacher relationships.

Teachers find that learning and implementing these grading practices improves their work as educators and has led to improved student learning.

Now is the ideal moment to examine and address a century-old pillar of our American schooling that for too long has been thought of as a necessary evil. The critical examination of how teachers grade students might seem incidental to DEI work, and examining the inequities in our grading practices can challenge our deepest beliefs about what we know or think we know about our teaching, our students, and ourselves. And yet, we can no longer avoid the issue. By not correcting grading practices, schools risk undermining other initiatives aimed at improving equity and make our schools less inclusive and supportive of every student. If educators, policymakers, parents, and the public are truly committed to equitable educational opportunities and equitable teaching, and deeply respect the professionalism and dedication of teachers, they must support efforts to address the weaknesses in grading. The integrity of our schools and the future of our children are at stake.

Conversation Starters

1. What confidence or uncertainty do you have that two teachers in your school who teach the same course would assign the same grade to a student?

2. In what ways do schools send a message that academic success is a competition? How does your school's treatment of awards, ranking, and honors promote or undermine a growth or fixed mindset? How does it promote or undermine equity?

3. How much of the vision for equitable grading described in this article align with your own personal vision for grading? What concerns do you have about this vision? How much does this vision match with your school's overall vision? How likely is it that your school community could agree on that vision?

4. What would it take for your school to have an authentic and critical conversation about teachers' approaches to grading and how those approaches support or conflict with your school's mission? How might a shared reading of this article help to start the conversation?

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Building More Inclusive Communities with Grading for Equity

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Independent schools are committed to creating diverse, equitable, and inclusive (DEI) communities. They educate themselves about culturally responsive teaching, incorporate curriculum that reflects a broad spectrum of voices, celebrate different backgrounds, and prioritize hiring faculty and staff that bring diverse perspectives and experiences.

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If you're a high school student in San Diego County, it may appear your chances of getting a good grade are better or worse depending on which teacher you have.

Some teachers will give you an A grade if you score a 90 percent for a course, while others will give you an A for 88 percent or 85 percent, a Union-Tribune review of more than 60 course syllabi from high schools around the county shows.

There are teachers who will give an F for 67 percent or below, some for 64 percent or below, others for 59 percent or below, 54 percent or below and even 19 percent or below.

Some teachers choose not to give any D grades at all. Morse High math teacher Alex Powell was one of a handful who indicated on their syllabi that they give no D's.

He said D grades don't help students graduate. D grades also don't qualify a student for admission to California's public universities.

"My goal was to kind of push away the idea that D's were something that they should be getting," Powell said.

There's a wide variation in grading scales that highlights how inconsistent grading systems are from teacher to teacher. Experts say it points to deeper issues - issues of equity and privilege - plaguing age-old grading practices in U.S schools.

A few points difference

Several experts say middle and high school grades are frequently unreliable, arbitrary, subjective and widely varied in terms of what they actually measure. Research studies dating as far back as 1912 show that a single sample of student work can draw scores all over the map from different teachers.

Experts point to the 100-percentage point grading system as a prime culprit.

Percentage ranges for letter grades are often arbitrary, and one number out of a 100-point point scale doesn't communicate much about what or how much a student has learned, said Ken O'Connor, a Toronto-based education consultant who helps schools and teachers change their grading practices.

"Realistically, nobody can tell the difference between 90 percent and 93 in any meaningful way," O'Connor said.

Some common grading practices, such as giving extra credit and averaging grades over time, can perpetuate inequities for disadvantaged students, said Joe Feldman, an Oakland-based consultant who works with schools and teachers on equitable grading practices.

For example, giving extra credit to students who complete extra projects or attend outside events ends up rewarding students whose families have resources for those tasks, Feldman said, while it disadvantages students whose families don't.

Also, the practice of producing one cumulative course grade by averaging a student's performance from beginning to end can discredit improvements that a student made over time and can penalize students who started class behind grade level, Feldman said.

Despite these flaws, grades are used to determine vital parts of students' futures.

Grades determine who gets to take honors courses, who gets to receive scholarships, who gets to graduate, who gets into a desired college and more.

Besides academics, people use grades to label a student's worth, Feldman said.

"A big part of adolescence is identity construction," Feldman said. "And there's no more formalized way that adults tell children who they are than by the grades that students get. And so students will actually define themselves by their grades. They'll say, 'I'm a B student', or 'I'm a C student'."

Despite how much grades impact students' lives, teachers are typically given zero training on grading, teachers and experts say. That's largely why teachers often default to how they were graded when they were students years before, experts say.

Grading is one of the few aspects of a teacher's job over which teachers have virtual autonomy. California law protects the right of teachers to be the final authority in determining a student's grade.

"Teachers are weirdly protective and private about their grades," said Kimberly Lepre, an English teacher at Rancho Del Rey Middle School and a 2017 County Teacher of the Year nominee. "They don't want anyone to judge them based on their grades."

Yet some teachers say they feel conflicted about grading.

"I am constantly unsatisfied with grades and grading policies," said Gina Vattuone, an English teacher at Bonita Vista High School. "I want my grades to be fair and accurate, but I don't know within the confines and constraints of this system what that means."

Vattuone and other teachers say they believe current grading systems and the value society places on grades cause some parents and students to care more about grades than about what they're learning. Lepre said parents will press her with questions about how to raise their child's grade from an A minus to an A.

"I think about the lengths students will go to secure an A grade," Vattuone said. "It doesn't become about the learning or the content. It becomes about these external rewards."

What's in a grade

There are two main reasons why grading practices are widely inconsistent, said Thomas Guskey, a University of Louisville senior research scholar who has written books and research about grading and assessment.

The first, Guskey said, is that educators don't agree on the purpose of grades.

Is the grade to inform students about their performance or their parents? Is it to incentivize students to do schoolwork, or to document their behavior? Is it to sort students into groups in school based on skill level?

When Guskey has asked teachers to rank reasons why they give grades, their responses were "all over the place," he said.

"We just don't agree on why we're doing it," he said.

The second reason, Guskey says, is that teachers don't agree on what should be counted in a grade.

Teachers grade students on much more than just how well they know course content.

Students can also be graded on actions that enable learning, such as homework completion and class participation, and how much they improved over time - distinct considerations often lumped into the same overall grade with content mastery, Guskey said.

Teachers also end up grading students on their behaviors, not just academics.

"Very often grading has been as much about compliance as it has been about achievement," O'Connor said.

For example, it's common for teachers to dock students' grades for turning in work late, even though that doesn't necessarily relate to how well the student knows the content.

The result is that, theoretically, a student who follows class rules but doesn't know the content and a student who knows the content but doesn't follow class rules can get the same grade.

Because teachers include so many other factors into grades besides content knowledge, students' in-school grades can be inconsistent with scores they get on outside standardized tests, such as Advanced Placement tests or the state's annual tests, Feldman said.

"When teachers use traditional grading practices, it's actually making the grades inaccurate, where they're not accurately describing a student's level of knowledge mastery," Feldman said. "Instead it's this hodgepodge of all this disparate data that makes the grade almost meaningless."

Different ways of grading

Some teachers have been experimenting with ways some experts recommend to make grading more equitable.

Several schools in San Diego County give separate "citizenship grades" that are solely about students' behavior, such as tardiness and class participation.

Vattuone and Lepre both allow students to revise their assignments after they have turned them in, to try for a better grade, a practice recommended by Feldman.

They say revisions give students a chance to improve their work and learn from feedback, rather than just getting a grade and moving on from the assignment.

Both teachers say they also don't give zeroes.

Vattuone gives her students a 50 percent on an assignment instead, which she says is still failing but gives students a better chance to improve their grade.

"If you get a zero on a 100-point scale, it's like an anchor. It takes you forever to dig yourself out ... and there's no evidence that it motivates students to do better," Feldman said.

Lepre doesn't penalize her middle school students for turning in late work because doing so can end up punishing students who didn't have adults available at home at the time who could help them, she said.

"I actually don't have that much of a problem with late work," Lepre said.

In her classroom, Lepre currently uses a 1, 2, 3, 4 grading system, where 4 means mastery of the content and 1 means no mastery. Such grading systems outline specific definitions of what mastery looks like at each of the four levels.

Experts recommend this "standards-based grading" because they say it more clearly tells students and their parents how well their students know the content.

Guskey also says having a smaller number of grades - say, four, versus the 101 possible grades in a percentage system - reduces subjectivity and increases reliability.

"I found that when I grade that way, it also gives students a sense of their progress and they can take ownership of their learning," Lepre said.

Guskey, Feldman and O'Connor all said they want teachers to avoid the 100-percentage point system.

"Teachers complain that students only talk about learning in terms of points, but that's how we've taught it to them. And we can un-teach them, by the way," Feldman said. "The amount of stress and anxiety that students feel is a big problem in schools, and our traditional grading contributes to that."

The vast majority of syllabi reviewed showed that most San Diego County teachers use the 100-point system to score students and arrive at letter grades.

Some teachers said that while they might like to experiment with different grading systems, at the end of the day, they still have to input a letter grade into their school grade books.

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Teachers, experts question traditional ways of grading

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If you're a high school student in San Diego County, it may appear your chances of getting a good grade are better or worse depending on which teacher you have.

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Norma Salcido

9:39 AM

Thank you for all the materials you are sharing with us Milly :)

Carly Jones

9:39 AM

Where can I find the padlet link again?

Elisabeth Harrell

9:40 AM

https://padlet.com/milly_madonna1/bookclub

Carly Jones

9:40 AM

Thank you!

Mujde Pidduck

9:40 AM

https://padlet.com/milly_madonna1/bookclub

Norma Salcido

9:43 AM

Carly if you like it, it will show up in your padlet homepage

Elisabeth Harrell

9:44 AM

yes, Jay Sorensen sent it our

Elisabeth Harrell

9:49 AM

They are amazing!

Mujde Pidduck

9:51 AM

I don't see a Google Meet link for the meetings Milly is talking about. Am I missing something?

Elisabeth Harrell

9:52 AM

I think I shared this last week but here is Emily's blog if you want more information on how she uses Mastery Tracking: http://www.persistentteachercommunity.com/2019/01/teaching-students-to-self-assess-and.html

David Ramirez

9:55 AM

Extrinsic motivation Butler vs Intrinsic motivation

Mujde Pidduck

9:57 AM

I think you'd make an awesome admin girl

Wendi Butler

10:02 AM

And...have teachers analyze their gradebooks to see what they valued with their grading systems!

This is a persuasive experience - support a claim/concept with logical reading and reasoning.

Wendi Butler

10:03 AM

But....in small groups with purposeful break out topics can be rich!!

Mujde Pidduck

10:05 AM

M&M!

Remember that!

Kim Stephenson

10:08 AM

A group of "my classrooms" can prove to the rest that something good is happening, then it expands to other classrooms.

Heather Molloy

10:08 AM

I don't know how this will work, but I am going to put the ELA CCSS into my gradebook at the beginning of the quarter.

And I am going provide feedback on assignments with a "grade" and rubric of:

Heather Molloy

10:09 AM

Advanced
Proficient
Developing
Introductory

Theresa Lujan

10:09 AM

@heather, I love the narrative as a grade

Heather Molloy

10:10 AM

Thanks. I am also developing gamified choice boards as a weekly "learning log"

That's why I was late!  I was too enthralled in my work!  Hahaha!

Wendi Butler

10:13 AM

Sooooo....when homework is not scored....the work is for the practice and learning....not for enough points

Wendi Butler

10:14 AM

evaluating

Elisabeth Harrell

10:16 AM

Thats what I was going to share Roger. Especially if some teachers are making equity changes and others aren't.

Heather Molloy

10:16 AM

@theresa: yes!

And when we backwards plan, we won't have to put so much "busy work" in!

Carly Jones

10:18 AM

@Theresa--Norma had identified four of the SEPs that she wants to focus on. All of them would be too much.

Heather Molloy

10:18 AM

Deadlines are really more for teacher convenience than anything.

So we can meet our deadlines for grading, state assessment, etc.

You

10:20 AM

multiple assessments to measure learning

Heather Molloy

10:20 AM

I started typing as I read this morning:  Learning is a lifelong process.  My goal for you in this class is to practice the educational standards regularly to improve your skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking.  Your grade will come only from your comprehension and ability to express it related to the ELA CCSS Standards 11-12.

However, I do also value learning and growth in other areas often referred to as soft skills.

We will be practicing soft skills regularly, but you will not receive a grade from doing so.  Instead, your value in return will be growth and improvement in: communication, responsibility, work ethic, etc.

You will find that my grading this quarter will be very different from other teachers.  I will not be awarding points at all this quarter.  I will be providing you with feedback instead.

Practice will be assigned regularly and you are expected to practice regularly and complete all assignments because I need to have evidence that you are able to meet the standards to assign you a passing grade in this class.  Evidence of your practice will be kept in a weekly learning log and/or a game board.

You

10:22 AM

I'm excited to see this in action

quarter system that is

Heather Molloy

10:23 AM

I love quarter system.  It's my fave.

Mujde Pidduck

10:24 AM

Yep, multiple measures, assessments, projects!

Mujde Pidduck

10:25 AM

Multiple intelligences need to be taken into consideration

Wendi Butler

10:26 AM

My students who were involved in the large scale projects I ran were the most engaged, saw the most relevance in the build up work they did and took the most pride in their final product that I EVER saw in 25 years of teaching. Projects - well run, well organized projects - transform classrooms and kids

Norma Salcido

10:27 AM

On page 164 instead of 0-4 or A-F they use descriptors  to let the kids know where they are in the learning process. *Exceeding Standards * Meeting Standards *Approaching standards * Not Yet Met Standards * Insufficient Evidence

Mujde Pidduck

10:28 AM

I had one of the top students this year who did amazingly in every assignment, but cried when she was given the assignment of writing a poem. That wasn't her. BUT the creative student who hated all other types of assignments LOVED that project. Here you go! All learn differently!

Heather Molloy

10:28 AM

@Norma: I like that too.

I think the only thing I would change would be instead of Not yet met standards.

Theresa Lujan

10:29 AM

@Milly, TY

Heather Molloy

10:29 AM

to Practicing Standards

Mujde Pidduck

10:29 AM

That top student still did the work. Got a great score still, but was challenged. That's ok!

Kim Stephenson

10:30 AM

Project based really flips equity...a lot of our street-smart kids do way better than "compliance" kids when having to "do" something that's not prescribed.

Mujde Pidduck

10:30 AM

@Kim- I agree!

Kim Stephenson

10:31 AM

@mujde - and being able to perform is way more important in life than simply being able to follow concrete instructions.

Roger Adams

10:32 AM

Continuous Growth Models

Roger Adams

10:34 AM

I have to step away.  Thanks everyone! Great discussion.

Mujde Pidduck

10:34 AM

@Kim- exactly. Huge fan of project-based learning and I see the students are usually appalled by the amount of presentations they have to do but appreciate it at the end. It's unorthodox for them to not have multiple choice tests. But they realize that "hm, education can be meaningful!" It prepares them for life better!

David Ramirez

10:34 AM

Oh and my friends call me Chris (my middle name). Please call me Chris.

You

10:35 AM

Got it, Chris!

David Ramirez

10:35 AM

You're all friends!

Kim Stephenson

10:35 AM

@Sorry, Chris...i only saw your name on the screen.

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For students and families, grades help determine course placement, athletic and extracurricular eligibility, employment possibilities, and college admission and financial aid. Grades shape students' identities as learners and their life trajectories. To district leaders, grades are a barometer of their schools' effectiveness, pointing to achievement gaps, weaknesses in instruction, and professional development needs.

But across most schools, grades do not provide fair, objective, and accurate reflections of student academic performance. Because grading is not addressed in teacher preparation or professional development, teachers often develop their own way to grade, uninformed by research or best practices. Many common grading practices perpetuate achievement gaps, reinforcing differences in family resources and support based on students' race and income.

Specifically, traditional grades and grading practices:

Vary from teacher to teacher, resulting in student grades reflecting a teacher's specific grading practices as well as the student's achievement. Schools with formal grading policies typically focus on surface-level consistencies, such as a grading scale. They should be developing a common understanding of what content mastery looks like or how to measure and report it consistently.

Provide unclear and often misleading information to key stakeholders. Grades combine so many diverse aspects of performance-academic proficiency, "soft skills," behaviors, attendance, participation, and effort. It is often impossible to determine what grades represent.

Are often infected by implicit racial, class, and gender biases. Teachers who include a student's "effort" or "participation" in the grade are evaluating a student's behavior-not their learning. They unavoidably infuse their grades with subjective and culturally biased lenses that frequently penalize African-American, Latino, low-income, and special education students. Further, students with greater resources are more likely to complete homework and earn extra credit-both of which are often incorporated into grading. Students who have weaker education backgrounds and fewer supports are likely to be penalized even when they show growth and learning.

Are based on mathematically unsound calculations. Current grading systems conflict with contemporary beliefs about growth mindset and encouraging students to learn through practice and experimentation. An F earned early in learning and an A at the end of learning traditionally average as a C, regardless of the progress and final achievement, punishing students for early struggles.

What more equitable grading looks like

By contrast, more equitable practices:

Apply mathematically sound approaches, using a 0-4 instead of a 0-100 point scale; avoid giving students scores of zero; and weigh more recent performance and growth instead of averaging performance over time.

Value knowledge, not environment or behavior. They reflect what students know and can do, not how teachers perceive or interpret their behavior. Grades are not used to reward compliance.

Support hope and a growth mindset, encouraging mistakes as necessary for learning and building students' persistence. Teachers allow test or project retakes and replace previous scores with current scores.

Make grades simpler to understand and more transparent. Teachers create detailed rubrics to evaluate student performance and use simplified grade calculations and standards-based scales and grade books.

Build soft skills without including them in the grade, supporting students' intrinsic motivation to learn rather than relying on an external system where every action is worth "points."

Questions and strategies

School board leaders can encourage a critical examination of grading practices by probing how much teachers' grades are based on students' mastery of course content and standards versus extra credit, homework, and behavior. They can explore how much grades correlate with test scores and consider the value of more equitable grading to close achievement gaps.

Districts who have successfully implemented equitable grading share some common strategies:

Bring the right people to the table at the beginning. In San Leandro Unified School District (SLUSD), a racially diverse, low-income district outside of San Francisco, district leaders hosted a workshop strategy session for middle and high school administrators to introduce the concept of equitable grading. In California's Placer Union High School District (PUHSD), a more rural and suburban system, central office leaders convened a closed study session on equitable grading with the school board to gain approval and generate a "tailwind" for launching the work.

Pilot test approaches through teacher-led action research. Both districts identified an initial cohort of interested department chairs and other teachers to explore new grading practices and launched a series of workshops. SLUSD included instructional coaches. The cohort learned about more equitable grading practices and tested them, examining results within a structured series of action research cycles. After a year, the responses from each district's pilot cohort were overwhelmingly positive-not only because evidence demonstrated the benefits of these practices, but because the professional development design was empowering.

Expand the effort over time. For two more years, the districts enrolled additional cohorts of teachers. They reached a critical mass of teachers who experienced how the equitable grading practices improved their effectiveness, increased student motivation, and reduced stress in the classrooms. Data revealed that:

The rate of students receiving Ds and Fs decreased-and decreased more dramatically for students of color and those with special needs. In SLUSD, the reduction in Ds and Fs rates among a single cohort of teachers allowed the district to reallocate the cost of 250 remedial "seats" to other instructional needs.

Grade inflation decreased, especially among more privileged student populations. In PUHSD, this reflected how traditional grading disproportionately benefits students with resources because of the inclusion of extra credit and other resource-dependent grading criteria.

Students' grades improved, and grading was more accurate. External evaluators found that more equitable grading practices significantly decrease the difference between students' grades and their scores on standardized tests. The effect has been stronger for low-income students.

Students felt less stress and anxiety. Now that they weren't being judged for their behaviors, every classroom activity, and homework assignments, students felt more comfortable taking risks. Classrooms felt more relaxed and mistake-friendly. Students continued to do their homework even when they weren't getting points.

When district leaders don't critically examine their grading policies, they unwittingly perpetuate the very disparities that they want to correct. School board members, alongside their administrators and teachers, can make equitable grading a priority that affirms their district's commitment to providing all children full opportunities for success.

Joe Feldman (joe@crescendoedgroup.org) is a former teacher, principal, and district administrator and is the founder and CEO of Crescendo Education Group. He is the author, most recently, of Grading for Equity and School Grading Policies Are Failing Children.

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For students and families, grades help determine course placement, athletic and extracurricular eligibility, employment possibilities, and college admission and financial aid. Grades shape students' identities as learners and their life trajectories. To district leaders, grades are a barometer of their schools' effectiveness, pointing to achievement gaps, weaknesses in instruction, and professional development needs.

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The thing about grading reform is that it isn't really about reforming grading. It's about reforming how the people who do grading think.

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How Teachers Are Changing Grading Practices With an Eye on Equity | KQED

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Joe Feldman contends many of the earnest practices teachers continue to use are hold-overs from how they were graded and may actually be doing harm to student learning.

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Why Asking Students to Choose the Grade They Want Motivates Them to Learn

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Why Asking Students to Choose the Grade They Want Motivates Them to Learn

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*The article is there; not sure why it posted the way it did. Just click on what looks like a template :)

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"Prologue: Mallory's Dilemma" excerpted from Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms by Joe Feldman. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2019. This is the first article in a two-part series about equitable grading practices. This article sets up some of the challenges. In part two, learn how teachers are addressing this issue. By Joe Feldman
The data couldn't be possible. Actually, it shouldn't be possible.

Mallory had just completed her first year as principal of Centennial College Prep Middle School, a new public charter school in Huntington Park, California. As a young, white woman leading a school that served nearly all Latino students, many living below the poverty line, Mallory had approached her job humbly, not immediately pushing initiatives and changing policies to align to her own personal vision (what she called the "new sheriff in town approach"). Instead, her priority was to first understand her school community: its context, history, strengths, and needs. She had watched, listened, and built relationships with her faculty, students, and their families. She had visited classrooms, reviewed teachers' lesson plans, and studied the school's statistics: attendance percentages, disciplinary referrals, and test scores.

Whether the data she reviewed was "hard" data like test scores or "soft" data like her observations of teacher-student dynamics in classrooms, Mallory kept a sharp lookout for how the school could be made more equitable. Mallory's vision was that students should have equal opportunities for success regardless of their ethnicity, first language, gender, income, or special needs. She paid attention to patterns of unequal achievement or opportunity in her school. For example, were boys being referred more frequently to the office? Were poorer students showing a common weakness on a strand of skills on the writing assessment? Did students who received special education services have a higher rate of absenteeism?

But that wasn't all. To Mallory, one of the most important indications of a high quality, equitable school is that students are successful regardless of their teacher.

One teacher's students shouldn't learn different material or be less prepared for the next grade than another teacher's students. Fortunately, based on her classroom visits and other data, Mallory found that although teachers approached their work in ways that reflected their individual backgrounds and personalities, students' learning experiences were generally consistent across classrooms. Students in the same course taught by two different teachers-such as Ms. Thompson's and Ms. Richardson's sixth-grade English classes-were learning the same skills, reading the same books and essays, getting the same homework, receiving similar support, and taking the same tests. Mallory was confident that regardless of their sixth-grade teacher, students would be similarly prepared for seventh-grade English.

Since teachers were aligned with what and how they were teaching, and because the school didn't track students or create unbalanced classes where one sixth-grade English class would be stronger than the others, Mallory reasoned that by all accounts the performance of students should be comparable across teachers of the same course. In other words, the rate of As, Bs, Cs, Ds, and Fs in any course should be relatively similar for each teacher of that course. But that wasn't happening. Strange things were showing up in the data.

Take, for example, her school's sixth-grade math and English classes, each taught by three different teachers:

If you were a student in two of the three teachers' math classes you had about a 20 percent chance of getting a D or F, but if you were in the third teacher's math class, you had 0 percent chance of getting a D or F. In the English classes, taught by three different teachers including Ms. Richardson and Ms.Thompson, the range of D and F rates-4 percent, 22 percent, and 35 percent-was even more dramatic. Mallory double-checked the grade data, then double-checked that students in the classes weren't significantly different-in other words, one teacher's students as a group didn't have lower standardized test scores or higher rates of absences. No, the groups of students were similar; the only difference among the classes seemed to be the chances of receiving a particular grade.

Mallory put on her detective hat and considered, investigated, and then rejected several explanations: No substantive differences in instruction. Teachers were using the same curriculum with the same tests and even scored those tests as a team to ensure fairness and uniform evaluation. Mallory scoured students' previous test scores and grades, with no indication of drastically different profiles of the classes as a whole. No substantive difference in the classroom physically-it wasn't as if one classroom had a broken thermostat or was closer to a noisy playground. What was even odder was that students with identical standardized test scores received different grades depending on their teacher. The teachers were teaching similarly, the students were demonstrating similar achievement, but the grades showed inconsistency. This data seemed unexplainable, impossible, and grossly inequitable.

On a lark, Mallory looked at the syllabus for each class-each teacher of a course had created her own personalized version-and it shocked her. Each teacher's syllabus began with a similar introduction to the course content and description of important materials for the class, but then it was as if each teacher was in an entirely different school:

One teacher accepted no homework after the attendance bell rang, some deducted points if homework was late (although the amount deducted ranged from a few points to two letter grades' worth), and another accepted work beyond the due date up until the end of the quarter, with no penalty.

One teacher gave each daily homework assignment a grade of 10 percent or 100 percent based on how much of the homework was completed and correct, and allowed students who had received 10 percent up to one week to correct mistakes. Another gave full credit for an assignment if the student showed effort to complete it, regardless of whether answers were correct.

One teacher reduced points on an assignment if the student didn't completely and correctly write her or his first and last name, along with the title of the assignment. Another subtracted points if an assignment was submitted on notebook paper that had ripped holes or ripped edges.

Most teachers organized their gradebook by grouping types of assignments into categories (Homework, Classwork, Tests, etc.), and weighted each category to denote its importance (Homework = 30% of the grade; Tests = 70%). However, no teacher had the same weightings for any categories. For example, the weight of tests ranged from 40 percent to 70 percent of a student's grade.

Some teachers had only three categories of assignments (Tests, Classwork, and Homework), while others included categories that seemed more subjective, such as Citizenship, Participation, and Effort. There was no explanation in the syllabus of how these subjective categories were calculated or on what they were based.

Other teachers didn't use percentage weights at all, but assigned different point values to different assignments. For example, Homework assignments might be 5 to 10 points each, with tests worth 100 points.

Teachers' different grading policies made it possible for two students with the same academic performance to receive different grades. What particularly confused and concerned Mallory was that some teachers were grading students on criteria that seemed to have nothing to do with their academic achievement -- such as whether their paper had intact holes or had the proper heading -- and others were basing parts of students' grades entirely on subjective criteria, such as effort, that were susceptible to teachers' implicit biases. This grade data that couldn't be possible suddenly was.

A few days later, something happened that changed Mallory's confusion to concern. Maria, a shy but earnest eighth grader, came to her office nearly in tears. Last year as a seventh grader, she had received a B in math, her most challenging subject, but this year was barely passing with a D. What was really frustrating Maria was that even though she often handed in homework assignments late or incomplete -- she had after-school responsibilities at home in addition to dance class three times a week -- she consistently performed well on every exam. She obviously had learned the math and had shown it when it mattered most, and though last year this type of performance had earned her a B, her teacher this year gave zeros for late or incomplete homework, resulting in her D. Maria was feeling a crisis of confidence: Other students copied to get their homework in on time for the homework points, which Maria had resisted, but would she have no other choice? Had last year's teacher lied to her about her math skills? Was she not as good at math as she thought? Or was this year's teacher out to get her?

To Mallory, no longer were her teachers' inconsistent policies a theoretical dilemma. The school had spent months of planning and coordination to make sure teachers in the math department were using sequenced curriculum and that each teacher was preparing students to be ready for the next year -- called "vertical alignment." Yet teachers' different approaches to grading was undermining all of it, sending confusing messages about learning and impacting students' grades and promotion rates, their beliefs about school, and even their self-image.

Mallory had to talk to her teachers about what was happening. The prior year, she had broached many conversations -- some quite difficult and uncomfortable -- with her teachers about curriculum, teaching strategies, job responsibilities, even evaluation. Surely, she assumed, they would be as astonished as she was when they saw the data and would reconsider how they graded.

But now came her second shock: When she began a discussion of grades with her teachers, it was like poking a hornet's nest. Nothing prepared her for the volatility of conversations about teachers' grading practices. Many of her teachers, previously open to exploring new ideas about nearly every aspect of their work, reacted with defensiveness and adamant justification. Teachers with higher failure rates argued proudly that their grading reflected higher standards, that they were the "real teachers." A teacher with low failure rates explained that he was the only teacher who cared enough to give students retakes and second chances. One teacher simply refused to discuss the topic, citing her state's Education Code that protected teachers from administrators' pressure to change or overwrite grades. One teacher began to cry, confessing that she had never received any training or support on how to grade and feared that she was grading students unfairly. Conversations about grading weren't like conversations about classroom management or assessment design, which teachers approached with openness and in deference to research. Instead, teachers talked about grading in a language of morals about the "real world" beliefs about students; grading seemed to tap directly into the deepest sense of who teachers were in their classroom.

When she talked about these grading problems with principals of other schools, Mallory was surprised and dismayed to learn that grading varied by teacher in every school. This phenomenon was widespread, even the norm. Teachers thoughtfully and intentionally were creating policies that they believed, in their most thoughtful professional judgment, would promote learning. Yet they were doing so independently and often contradicting each other, yielding in each school a patchwork of well-intentioned but ultimately idiosyncratic approaches to evaluating and reporting student performance. Even when a department or a group of teachers made agreements -- for example, to have homework count for no more than 40 percent of a grade -- teachers' other unique policies and practices, such as whether homework would be accepted after the due date, made their attempts at consistency seem halfhearted and ineffectual.

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Why It's Crucial - And Really Hard - To Talk About More Equitable Grading | KQED

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"Prologue: Mallory's Dilemma" excerpted from Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms by Joe Feldman. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2019. This is the first article in a two-part series about equitable grading practices. This article sets up some of the challenges.

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Most schools have decided "What to do about grades" during #COVID19. Have these policies mitigated or exacerbated inequities? Joe Feldman and Mark Boswell of Crescendo Education help us examine these policiesーas well as those that were already in place!

Other resources:

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#TG2Chat: Grading for Equity During COVID-19 - April 26, 2020 - Teachers Going Gradeless

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Most schools have decided "What to do about grades" during #COVID19. Have these policies mitigated or exacerbated inequities? Joe Feldman and Mark Boswell of Crescendo Education help us examine these policiesーas well as those that were already in place! Other resources:

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Ask any faculty member about how they grade their students, and they will probably explain the precise weights they give quizzes, tests, papers, labs and other factors -- as well as how they average student results over the term to determine a final grade.

Even though the scholarship, technology and pedagogy of postsecondary courses have significantly evolved in the last century, the ways students are graded has remained unchanged. This should come as no surprise, considering that most college and university faculty members receive no training in how to grade, either in graduate school or professional development on the job, and so most typically grade as they were graded. Plus, because faculty members rarely receive support to examine and learn about grading, each professor's grading policies are filtered through their own individual beliefs about how students learn, how to motivate them and how best to describe student achievement.

As a result, grades often vary within a department and even within a course taught by different instructors. That is particularly true at community colleges, which depend heavily on part-time faculty who are rarely involved in any deep way with the department in which they teach, but it is also often the case in research institutions, where grading is often the responsibility of teaching assistants, who rarely discuss grading practice with faculty members or department chairs.

While faculty members believe that their grading practices are fair and objective, a closer look reveals that they are anything but. And while employers and other institutions rely on those grades as a reliable marker of student achievement, it might shock them to know how much grading practices reflect the idiosyncratic preferences of individual faculty members.

Two examples:

Frequently, faculty members incorporate into a student's grade many highly subjective criteria -- such as a student's "effort," "participation" and "engagement" -- behaviors which the professor subjectively witnesses, interprets and judges through a culturally specific and biased lens.

Many faculty members grade on a curve, which makes grades dependent on the particular students in that particular classroom in that particular term. It unhelpfully describes student achievement not based on what the student learned but rather on how well they did relative to others in the class. Plus, this method translates learning into a competition, which adds stress that undermines collaboration and has been found to inhibit learning.

But beyond the fact that a grade can be more reflective of how a professor grades than what a student learned, many common grading practices have a more profound consequence. As colleges and universities become more committed to enrolling and retaining historically underserved students, they rarely recognize how traditional approaches to grading frequently result in perpetuating achievement disparities -- advantaging higher-income and privileged students with inflated grades, while lowering grades for underserved students and painting a misleading picture of performance. For example, professors typically calculate grades by averaging a student's performance over time, which actually punishes those who enter the class with less prior knowledge, even if they ultimately master the content, and hides their growth.

In advising faculty members at a variety of institutions -- including the College of Marin, Stanford University, the State University of New York at Cobleskill and the University of California, Berkeley -- I have found that educators at all levels of schooling, including college faculty, are motivated to try alternative, more equitable grading practices once they learn about the harms caused by our century-old approaches to grading.

These improved grading practices:

Are mathematically accurate to validly describe a student's level of mastery. They apply a more proportionately structured 0-4 scale instead of the 0-100 scale, which is mathematically oriented toward failure. They also use sound mathematical principles that reflect recent performance and growth instead of averaging performance over time.

Evaluate students based on their knowledge, not their environment, history or behavior. They exclude subjectively interpreted behaviors, such as a student's "effort" or "participation." They determine grades based on a student's demonstration of course content and not homework completion, and they don't use grades to reward compliance.

Support hope and a growth mind-set. They allow test/project retakes to emphasize and reward learning rather than penalize it, and they override previous scores with current scores that build learning persistence.

"Lift the veil" on how to succeed. They create explicit descriptions of what constitutes demonstration of content mastery through rubrics or proficiency scales. In addition, they simplify grade books and expand the methods of assessments to generate more accurate feedback and reporting about each student's learning relative to the expected outcomes.

Faculty members, rightly so, need to own their grading, so colleges that want to explore new approaches must support learning communities where professors can critically examine current practices and try more equitable approaches. One model of this type of learning incorporates a research cycle in which faculty members try new practices in their own classes, examine changes in their students' performance and motivation, share results with colleagues, repeat the cycle to continue integrate new approaches over time, and ultimately build a body of evidence that supports common and coherent grading practices.

Professors who have gone through this kind of process become comfortable and confident with equitable grading, and they report that it provides them an opportunity to uncover and reimagine what effective learning could look like. They find that their students experience less stress in learning and shift their focus from earning scores and behaving in ways that appeal to the teacher's cultural expectations of a "good student" to learning and achieving demonstrations of course content mastery.

Independent researchers have also found that, in secondary schools, such practices result in fewer D's and F's, particularly for underserved students, and lower costs for remediation. They also improve engagement and student-teacher collaboration, reduce grade inflation, and more closely align grades with test scores. As increasing numbers of colleges and universities pursue this work, researchers are also conducting similar investigations at the postsecondary level. In their preliminary feedback, faculty report similar results in their own classrooms with their own students.

If we are serious about eliminating achievement disparities, we have to be willing to tackle grading, an important but largely unaddressed aspect of higher education teaching and student success. With college faculty leading this work, postsecondary institutions can grade in ways that more consistently and accurately reflect student learning and counteract long-standing inequities. We can foster a conversation about why grades are important, what we want to measure and not measure, and how to ensure that our grading practices reinforce -- rather than undermine -- our commitment to excellence and equity.

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Advice for how to make grading more equitable (opinion)

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Ask any faculty member about how they grade their students, and they will probably explain the precise weights they give quizzes, tests, papers, labs and other factors -- as well as how they average student results over the term to determine a final grade.

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As you can see, Ss have a better chance at failing than they do at passing when Ts use the traditional grading system. It's time to ditch this and move to the alternative scale.

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1. What would have to change for your classroom or your school to commit to mandatory retakes and redos? What would make these difficult? What could your school do to make it easier to make retakes and redos mandatory?

2. How much of a motivator is hope? How could offering redemption via retakes and redos affect students’ motivation?

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“It is our moral imperative to stop using grades as [rewards] and punishments and instead reframe and reemploy them to give more students a sense of self-efficacy, endless capacity and hope’ (159).

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Frustrated? Persevere.

Fail? I learn.

Succeed? Inspired.

Feedback? Improve.

Challenges? Embrace.

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Hope=Redemption

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Googling the answer during the learning process isn’t cheating.
For this remote thing to work, this needs to be made explicitly clear to students.

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Feldman’s comment regarding a question about a student who has done well on all assignments prior to final assessment and then bombs final assessment.

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Emily Gutherie                      Mastery Tracking: Student-led Assessment

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Emily Gutherie                      Mastery Tracking: Student-led Assessment

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Mona Pinon (d.o.), Brianna Davis (Rancho), and Milly Madonna (CIHS)                Key Points

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Mona Pinon (d.o.), Brianna Davis (Rancho), and Milly Madonna (CIHS)                Key Points

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Verity Olliff from Rio Mesa    How to Use Rubric Scoring

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Verity Olliff from Rio Mesa    How to Use Rubric Scoring

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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This will give you access to the entire conference

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This will give you access to the entire conference

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Feedback for growth is a lot like the "Everyone gets what they need" situation we have discussed elsewhere.  For example, in student 1's case, I'm going to encourage her to use better punctuation because her message will be so much clearer.  Knowing you're sh*, versus Knowing your sh*."  In student 2's case I'm going to ask him to expand on his thoughts about xyz.  It is such a good point that should really stand out more in his argument.  In student 3's case, I'm going to suggest that a reorganization would make more sense to the reader.

This emphasizes growth, student voice and choice, and shows that you value their individual work/purpose.

Where you put your attention, reinforces the behavior.

Everyone moves forward from where they are., and in the end it's less of a comparison/competitive culture (some win, some lose) than a growth/effectiveness/we all can contribute in our own ways (we all win) culture.

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The three pillars (Presented Monday during Oxnard U)

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The three pillars (Presented Monday during Oxnard U)

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Accurate (Mona)-we don't include irrelevant info
Bias-Resistant (Brianna)-all students are given the opportunity to succeed regardless of privilege
Motivational (Milly)-emphasis on value of learning rather than point collecting; practices support a growth mindset; encourages risk-taking; increase student confidence that all are equally eligible to succeed-even predestined for this success- regardless of circumstances or educational background; encourages "soft skills".

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"We want our grading practices to promote the best and most aspirational thinking of what our students are capable of as learners, regardless of their race, their first language, their family's income...and to support the best of what we are capable of as educators" (65)."

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'How can we minimize traditional grading's negative impact on learning, particularly for vulnerable student populations, and instead reimagine grading to encourage, rather than undermine, effective teaching and learning"" (63).

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homework with no flexibility may encourage cheating (62-63).

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homework with no flexibility may encourage cheating (62-63).

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When we encourage a grow mindset yet grade everything, we send the wrong message.

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"When everything is judged and assigned a point value, students can't be realistically confident they will succeed at all the many tasks" (60)."...students don't know whether any given teacher's system will benefit them or be fair" (60).

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Okay, this is an early morning stream of consciousness.  No extra credit anymore for me. Offering choice in assignments will allow students to utilize their strengths or challenge themselves accordingly. Alternative assignments will be offered via distance learning to address issues or concerns with equitable access keeping biases in check (building in low-tech options into a choice board might accomplish this and provide for all to make a decision based on what best suits their circumstance, without having to explain to me).  In the past, I've used a 5-point scale for all grades and in a separate class, I had a no-zero policy with 50% being the minimum percentage achieved. Both worked well. There is so much to consider, but I know I'll be grading differently this year. Right now I am leaning into the idea of adopting the A, B, C, D, F scale utilizing modes for each of the standards. But I don't like the F just like I don't like the 0. Can I call it an E (as a logical progression, or will that confuse people?) I also have to keep in mind that my fellow colleagues look at my gradebook regularly to help report performance in IEPs.    

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Okay, this is an early morning stream of consciousness.  No extra credit anymore for me. Offering choice in assignments will allow students to utilize their strengths or challenge themselves accordingly. Alternative assignments will be offered via distance learning to address issues or concerns with equitable access keeping biases in check (building in low-tech options into a choice board might accomplish this and provide for all to make a decision based on what best suits their circumstance, without having to explain to me).  In the past, I've used a 5-point scale for all grades and in a separate class, I had a no-zero policy with 50% being the minimum percentage achieved. Both worked well. There is so much to consider, but I know I'll be grading differently this year. Right now I am leaning into the idea of adopting the A, B, C, D, F scale utilizing modes for each of the standards. But I don't like the F just like I don't like the 0. Can I call it an E (as a logical progression, or will that confuse people?) I also have to keep in mind that my fellow colleagues look at my gradebook regularly to help report performance in IEPs.    

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The Case Against the Zero (Reeves, 2004).pdf

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I was particularly impacted by the fact that when zeroes are included in an average, the entire average is skewed. In a scientif

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The Case Against Percentage Grades (Guskey, 2013).pdf

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Does Grading Undermine Equity? (Feldman, 2017).pdf

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If you would like to follow Feldman's Twitter he's @JoeCFeldman

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If you would like to follow Feldman's Twitter he's @JoeCFeldman

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Also, located on his website gradingforequity.org is a quiz you can take to see how equitable your grading is. FYI, i didn't take it because I already know it's not.

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
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My daughter was recently given an assignment to create a model of a volcano. It was a group project, meant to be done entirely at home, and the only clear requirement was that it had to look like a volcano, with extra points if it could actually erupt.

And so it began: My daughter and I planned when her two friends would come over to work on it. I texted their moms and we set a date. We also figured out what supplies she'd need from the craft store and when I would drive her there to get it all. We ended up spending about $40 on modeling clay, spray paint, fake palm trees, and tiny dinosaurs. And that's after I said no to about $40 worth of other stuff she wanted to get.

The three girls met at our house one afternoon. One of the other parents brought over the materials they used to make the volcano erupt. I insisted that they do the project in the dining room, where we could make sure they stayed on task, instead of my daughter's bedroom, where I knew they wouldn't. My husband helped them hunt through the basement for an old lampshade to give the model some height, helped them figure out how to make the clay stick to the lampshade, then did a few trial runs of the "eruption" with them, so they knew it would work in class. A few days later, I drove my daughter to school and helped her walk the model safely into class.

So much had to happen to get this assignment done, and very little of that was actually done by the three students whose names went on the project. I'm not saying my daughter and her friends didn't build the volcano, but they got a lot of support along the way, and if any of that support had been missing-time, transportation, money, space, suggestions, supervision-the project would have been less successful.

When I ask my daughter about the other student projects that were turned in that day, she confirms my suspicions that they ranged in quality: Some, she says, were "huge and detailed," while others consisted of little more than a painted water bottle.

Though I never confirmed it, I suspect that each of those projects got vastly different grades.

What Are We Measuring?

Although a movement is growing to eliminate grades, they are still a reality for most of us, and they impact everything from college admissions to whether students get to go on certain field trips. So it's important that we do whatever we can to make sure they measure what matters.

And in too many cases, that's not happening. Take the volcano project: The grade students received on that ultimately reflected the resources each group happened to have at home-not what they learned or even the effort each student personally put into the task. Those with the "huge and detailed" ones probably got the best grades, and those with the painted water bottles probably got the lowest.

Or consider these other scenarios:

The student whose essay gets a D, because even though he organized it pretty well, made some strong, well-supported arguments, and used rich vocabulary, his teacher's rubric allotted 40 percent of the grade to neatness and correctness, and he had a lot of mistakes. The teacher lets him revise for a higher score, but only gives half credit for the points earned the second time around.

The student who raises his grade by earning extra credit for donating tissues and hand sanitizer to the class.

The student who gets a C on an assignment that requires her to compose an original song to explain a constitutional amendment. Despite her solid understanding of the constitution, she doesn't happen to have a knack for writing lyrics and music.

The student whose project is turned in a day late and gets only half credit according to her teacher's "no excuses" late policy.

In all of these cases, the grade is not an accurate representation of what a student has learned. This is a problem of design: When constructing assignments, assessments, and grading policies, every teacher makes dozens of small decisions that determine how much a grade reflects a student's academic work and how much it reflects a mishmash of other factors. Those quantities are different for every teacher and every assignment. Despite that, we tend to treat grades as if they mean the same thing all the time.

Some Questions to Ask While Planning

So what's to be done about this? If you or your colleagues aren't ready to completely overhaul your grading system (again, see how others are doing that here), or you haven't moved to standards-based grading, you can still improve the integrity of traditional grades by considering some important questions while planning for instruction.

1. What learning does this task measure?

The grade on an assignment should match the learning students are supposed to be doing in your class. This sounds simple, but it amazes me how often I see assignments that seem to have no real connection to what the curriculum says students are learning.

If your standards require students to "be able to explain how geography impacts culture," then assignments should ask them to do some variation of that: explain how geography impacts culture. If, instead, they are making a relief map that shows geographic features, and their grade is based largely on how accurately they represent those features, then they are being graded on map-making skills, not on the standard.

This is especially problematic when qualities like "creativity" are part of your criteria. For one thing, this term means completely different things to different people, so students will have to guess how to perform well on this metric. More importantly, grading for "creativity" on an assignment that is supposed to measure something else will distort the results, making it much harder to tell who actually mastered the skill.

2. Are you going to teach everything you will measure?

We often assign points for skills and qualities that students happen to bring with them, but are never taught in our class.

Suppose you assign a group project, and part of each student's grade will be based on how well he or she worked with the group. Collaborative skills are important, absolutely, but if you're grading for them, shouldn't you also be teaching them?

Similarly, if you're going to ask students to do an essay-type question to demonstrate their learning, and part of their grade will be based on how effectively they write, then ideally, some of your teaching prior to that assessment should give students practice in the kinds of writing skills you want to see on that task.

If our lessons don't prepare students to do well on graded assignments and assessments, then those grades aren't a fair measurement of learning in our class.

3. What will quality work look like on this task?

When creating assignments, we often have a general idea of what a good end-product will look like, but we don't always know for sure until the work gets turned in. At that point, it's too late for students to rise to our expectations, and if we haven't clearly defined them ahead of time, it's easy for personal bias to cloud our judgment.

We'll get better work from students and judge it more fairly if we identify and communicate the criteria for success ahead of time. Many teachers accomplish this with a rubric given to students before they start. These come in different formats: A growing number of teachers are finding that students appreciate the single-point rubric for its clarity and ease of use.

I would also strongly recommend you do the assignment yourself as if you were a student-a process we call dogfooding. This will help you get much clearer on how you define excellence for this assignment.

4. How much of the grade depends on outside resources?

If an assignment is going to be completed partly or entirely at home, take a good look at how much the available resources outside of school could influence the grade. Things like transportation, money for supplies, access to technology, or help from an adult can all contribute to an end product that looks impressive, but may not directly reflect that student's academic skill or effort.

If your assignment is designed so that the focus stays on content and skills, and if you set things up so that the majority of the work happens in class, the assignments you get back should be a more accurate representation of what each student can do.

5. Can all students do well on this task, regardless of how they learn best?

If an assignment is delivered with only one type of learner in mind-with instructions only given verbally, for example-some students will be behind before they even start. Ideally, every task will be designed in a way that all students can access.

Universal Design for Learning is a framework that can help teachers design materials so that all learners have equal access to them. To learn more, watch this overview video or explore the UDL Guidelines developed by CAST. As you work to make your assignments more universally accessible, take a look at some of the great accessibility tools Microsoft offers teachers for free.

Similarly, if the task favors students who happen to have a specific type of artistic skill-the way the constitutional song assignment did for students with musical talent-others who might have preferred to demonstrate their learning through an essay, a poster, or a video are less likely to shine.

Instead of limiting student products to a single, narrow option, consider whether you can give them choices in how they demonstrate learning. If the volcano project had been designed for students to create a model for how a real volcano works, that model could have been done with a paper diagram, in a video, with a student-produced skit, or with a physical model. Not only would this give students an opportunity to put their unique gifts to use, it would also provide options that cost a lot less money to bring to fruition.

6. Could this assignment be called "practice" instead?

Too often, teachers give grades to all classroom activity; they are convinced that kids won't do something unless it's going to get a grade. And that means tasks that are really meant to give students practice in a skill or early exposure to content are ultimately included in final grade calculations.

They shouldn't. Instead of making everything graded, have students do some class work as practice, in preparation for a task that will be graded. So if students have to take a test on long division, require them to do enough self-graded practice pages until they get 80 percent or better. These problems won't be part of their final grade calculation, which also means you don't have to grade them, but students can't take the test until they can demonstrate proficiency on the practice, and their grade on the test will count. This way, their grade will reflect their mastery of long division without penalizing them for how long it took to master the skill.

Other Factors to Consider

Late Work

Some policies on late work can have a significant impact on student grades, so that a student who turns work in late can have very low grades, even if they have mastered the content. In classes where late work is penalized, a grade is a reflection of the student's time management, or of stress, or perfectionism, or dozens of other possible factors. What it isn't is a reflection of learning.

Despite this, many teachers feel that taking points is their only option for responding to late work. This piece by Starr Sackstein explores this dilemma and considers some ways teachers can address the problem without docking points. Spoiler alert: It's not a one-size-fits-all solution, because students turn work in late for a variety of reasons. "At the root of every challenge we face with students of all ages is a story," she writes. "Our job as teachers to figure out what the story is. Some students will be an open book and others we will need to be detectives to figure stuff out. Don't give up on the kids. Giving a zero is giving up and almost expecting them to do the same."

Extra Credit

Giving points for anything that doesn't directly reflect learning can have an incredibly distorting effect on grades. In some cases, it elevates grades, giving the impression of mastery without the actual mastery. In other cases, it masks problems: If a student misses a few test items, but erases them with bonus points, that student could fly under the teacher's radar and miss opportunities for reteaching.

Students who are doing so well on the regular class work that they finish early don't need extra credit, they need differentiated assignments and more challenge. Students who do poorly on assignments don't need extra credit to make up the missing points; they need opportunities to re-do and improve on the work.

This piece by Joy Kirr does an excellent job of showing how a variety of typical extra credit assignments are rife with all kinds of problems.

Grade Averaging

If you calculate your grades by simply averaging them-dividing the points earned by the total possible points-your final course grade could be doing a poor job of representing what your students actually learned in your class. In this piece on the pitfalls of grade averaging , Rick Wormelli uses specific examples to illustrate this problem.

Having graded this way myself, I always liked the simplicity and convenience of grade averaging, so I know that the thought of trying some other system will likely be daunting. But if it means our grades will have more integrity, it's worth it.

One alternative to consider is something called a decaying average , which puts more weight on assignments done later in a learning cycle. In theory, this recognizes that skills should improve over time. Although this approach seems to work better in skill-based classes, it shows us one way to rethink the way we calculate grades so they are better aligned with who our students are as learners.

Grades are inherently imperfect. To truly assess our students' learning, we need to get to know them, observe them, and study a wide sampling of their work over time. When we reduce all that to a single measurement for the sake of efficiency, we lose that bigger picture. But as long as grades remain a reality in our system, let's be thoughtful and deliberate when we calculate them. ♦

Come back for more.
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Grades impact everything from college admissions to whether students get to go on certain field trips. With so much at stake, how can we make sure they measure what matters?

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The practice of using single point rubrics is slowly but surely catching on. The simplicity of these rubrics - with just a single column of criteria, rather than a full menu of performance levels - offers a whole host of benefits:

Teachers find them easier and faster to create, because they no longer have to spend precious time thinking up all the different ways students could fail to meet expectations.

Students find them easier to read when preparing an assignment. With only the target expectations to focus on, they are more likely to read those expectations.

They allow for higher-quality feedback, because teachers must specify key problem areas and notable areas of excellence for that particular student, rather than choosing from a list of generic descriptions.

Want to Learn More?

I first talked about this type of rubric in an earlier post ( Know Your Terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics). If this is the first time you've encountered this type of rubric, reading this will give you some background knowledge on all the different types of rubrics and why the single-point deserves world domination.

To give credit where it's due, I did not come up with the name single point rubric. Although the idea for a simplified rubric with a single set of criteria came to me independently, when I went looking for academic support for its use, I found that the type of rubric I had in mind was given the name "Single Point Rubric" in 2000 during a conference presentation by someone named Mary Dietz. Attending that conference was a researcher named Jarene Fluckiger, who published a study on its effectiveness in 2010. (The reference to Dietz is in Fluckiger's paper, but no one named Dietz has published anything on the topic.)

Show Us Your Rubrics!

I urge you to take one of your most convoluted rubrics and make a single-point version of it. Then show it to the world, so other teachers can learn: Take a screenshot of it and post the picture on Twitter with the hashtag #singlepointrubric. If you aren't on Twitter or don't feel like doing this, just put a link to your rubric in the comments below. Help us start a movement to rid the world of ineffective rubrics!

Another Variation (Added in 2017)

After considering some of the limitations of this format, I played around with the rubric a bit more and came up with this variation:

The original version of the single point rubric allowed no space for actually pointing out when the student hit the standard, apart from maybe circling or highlighting the middle column. With this format, teachers can pinpoint where the student is on each descriptor, then offer feedback, either constructive, positive, or both.

To grab a copy of this for your own modification, click here.

Need Ready-Made Rubrics?

My Rubric Pack gives you four different designs in Microsoft Word and Google Docs formats. It also comes with video tutorials to show you how to customize them for any need, plus a Teacher's Manual to help you understand the pros and cons of each style. Check it out here:

Stick around.
Join my mailing list and never miss another post. You'll get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration - in quick, bite-sized packages - all geared toward making your teaching more effective and joyful. To thank you, I'll send you a free copy of my new e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half. I look forward to getting to know you better!

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The practice of using single point rubrics is slowly but surely catching on. Try one for yourself and let us see it!

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Traditional grading methods perpetuate inequities. Any new grading system must counteract both individual and institutional biases.
In the May 2018 issue of three experts on grading - Ken O'Connor, Lee Ann Jung, and Douglas Reeves - make a convincing case for teachers and school leaders to reject traditional approaches for evaluating and reporting student performance. The authors argue that instead of using grading practices that emphasize mathematical precision and the accumulation of points, teachers should implement standards-based grading practices that are Fair, Accurate, Specific, and Timely (or "FAST"). Such practices exclude student behaviors - such as lateness or compliance - and rate students only on academic performance and include a more flexible array of assessment strategies. The authors also call for educators to incorporate into the grade a student's performance on only summative, not formative, assessments and to consider a student's recent academic achievement rather than averaging performance over time.

Standards-based grading and examining grades through a schema such as FAST is a vast improvement over common grading practices . However, the authors' argument overlooks one of the most insidious aspects of traditional grading: Many common grading practices in K-12 classrooms perpetuate the historical inequities woven into our schools for a century. The Grading for Equity Initiative that I lead critically examines the legacy of traditional grading and considers how teachers can reduce bias in grading and promote educational success, particularly for students who have historically been underserved. Multiple qualitative and quantitative external evaluations of the initiative conducted by Leading Edge Advisors and Elite Research, LLC, have found that equitable grading practices that are more accurate, bias resistant, and motivational lead to stronger teacher-student relationships, less stressful classrooms, reduced failure rates and grade inflation, interruption of the cycle of achievement disparities, and grades that are more closely correlated to student test scores (Feldman, 2018).
Grading's historical legacy
In the early 20th century, as techniques of mass production reshaped the U.S. economy and families from rural areas and immigrants flooded to cities, the need to educate large numbers of students led educators to apply the efficiencies of manufacturing to schools. So, just as manufacturing sought to increase production and maximize value, our schools were charged with sorting students into academic tracks that best reflected their supposedly fixed intellectual capacity and prepared them for their assumed life trajectories. In most cases, this sorting, facilitated by the introduction of the A-F scale, was used to justify and to provide unequal educational opportunities based on a student's race or class.

A century later, we have drastically different beliefs about students and the goal of schools. We believe that every student can meet challenging academic standards, and we want our classrooms to interrupt the cycle of disparities that allows us to predict students' success based on their race, resources, and native language. To promote equity, we implement restorative justice discipline policies, learn culturally responsive instructional strategies, teach more diverse authors and perspectives, and expand our repertoire of assignments and assessments to address the different ways students learn. Yet our grading system remains virtually unchanged. By continuing to use century-old grading practices, we inadvertently perpetuate achievement and opportunity gaps, rewarding our most privileged students and punishing those who are not.

O'Connor and his colleagues mention equity in passing, but a focus on making grades equitable not only provides a sharper lens through which teachers can interrogate and examine how they grade, but also provokes an ethical obligation to change. Grading for equity goes beyond FAST grading and standards-based grading in two ways: It protects grading from implicit individual and it counteracts the institutional biases in traditional grading.
Inoculating grading against implicit bases
Many teachers are familiar with the concept of implicit biases: attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions without our conscious knowledge or awareness. We make assumptions about people and interpret their behavior through lenses that are clouded by our personal experiences, our country's legacy of discrimination, and media-driven stereotypes; and because we may not be consciously aware of our biases, they may even be contrary to our explicit beliefs. In other words, even those of us with an avowed commitment to impartiality and fairness are susceptible to judging students unfairly.

Grading practices in which teachers choose to award or subtract points in a grade for students' behaviors are susceptible to misinterpretation and implicit bias.

Educators, policy makers, and social justice advocates have taken this idea to heart when reforming school discipline policies and practices in recent years. For example, when researchers found that implicit biases contribute to disproportionate punishment of Black and Brown students for infractions based on educators' subjective judgments, such as showing "defiance" or "disrespect," some schools and districts dropped those infractions as punishable offenses (Staats, 2014).

Grading practices in which teachers choose to award or subtract points in a grade for students' behaviors are just as susceptible to misinterpretation and implicit bias as these disciplinary practices. For example, in classrooms taught by White teachers, Black students are typically rated as "poorer classroom citizens" than their White peers (Downey & Pribesh, 2004) based on the types of behaviors often included in graded categories of "participation" and "effort."

As O'Connor and his colleagues (2018) assert, including student behavior in grades creates "an uncertain mix of achievement and behavior" that renders grades meaningless. But that's just the beginning of the problem. When teachers include in grades a participation or effort category that is populated entirely by subjective judgments of student behavior, they invite bias into their grading, particularly when teachers come from a dominant culture and their students don't. Awarding points for behavior imposes on students a culturally specific definition of appropriate conduct that involves interpreting their actions through an unavoidably biased lens. Just as teachers might require students to write their name on the back of a test to prevent their opinions about students from infecting scoring, equitable grading inoculates grading against bias by excluding from grades any judgments about student behaviors.
Counteracting institutional biases
Institutional biases show up when the procedures and practices of institutions, which may appear neutral, result in certain groups being advantaged or favored and others being disadvantaged or devalued. Many traditional grading policies that seem innocuous on the surface can reinforce existing disparities, rewarding students who already have more resources and punishing students who come to the classroom with fewer resources.

Consider the common practice of factoring students' homework performance into their end-of-course grades. Students are much more likely to complete homework if they have a quiet, well-lit space to work and college-educated parents who have the knowledge and availability to help (or, if not, a paid tutor). By contrast, students are much less likely to complete homework if they live in a noisy apartment or have parents who didn't graduate from high school, have jobs in the evening, or speak a first language that isn't English. Plus, nearly one-fifth of students report that they are unable to complete homework because they lack internet access at home (Project Tomorrow, 2017). When teachers include homework performance in the grade, they give points to students with resources and deny points to students without. Put simply, educators often inadvertently translate student economic disparities into achievement disparities, replicating in classrooms the very achievement disparities they want to interrupt.

Another example of an institutional bias in traditional grading is the common practice of averaging a student's performance over time. O'Connor and colleagues (2018) explain how this practice violates the A (for accuracy) in FAST grading: When students struggle with content initially but ultimately master it by the end of the term, the averaged performance will inevitably be lower than their actual achievement, and the final grade will misrepresent the students' true level of content mastery. Viewing the practice through an equity lens reveals another problem: Students who earn high marks from the start of a unit likely had prior experiences with the content before the unit even began. Perhaps they participated in an enrichment program, received tutoring from an instructional program that anticipated the school's curriculum, or had teachers the previous year who effectively taught essential pre-skills. Other students who lack these advantages may receive lower scores early in the unit, and although they can make up the ground during the unit, when all performances are averaged together, those early scores place them at a disadvantage. By only considering students' final learning in the grade rather than averaging performance over time, educators more accurately describe students ' level of content mastery and level the playing field, allowing all students to be successful regardless of their resources and histories.
The benefits of equitable grading
There is evidence across dozens of schools, hundreds of teachers, and thousands of students that more equitable grading practices not only make grades more accurate but also reduce achievement disparities. When teachers use equitable grading practices their rates of failing grades decrease significantly, with low-income students and students of color experiencing a more dramatic decrease. Across all middle and high school students in an urban California school district, for example, the percentage of D and F grades assigned dropped by almost a third when equitable grading practices were put in place, allowing the district to reallocate the cost of what would otherwise have been 250 remedial seats to other instructional needs (Feldman, 2018). At the same time, equitable grading decreases grade inflation, and does so more significantly for White and higher-income students. In a cohort of teachers across four high schools in California, there was a statistically significant decrease in the rate of A grades awarded, particularly for White students and students not qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch (Feldman, 2018). With a reduction of D and F rates for historically underserved student groups alongside a reduction of A rates for White and higher-income students, more equitable grading reduces achievement gaps in grades.

A focus on making grades equitable not only provides a sharper lens through which teachers can interrogate and examine how they grade, but also provokes an ethical obligation to change.

In addition, independent research on the Equitable Grading Initiative has found that equitable grading results in a statistically significant increase in the correlation between teacher-assigned grades and standardized test scores, with a greater increase in this correlation for low-income students. These results illuminate how traditional grading disproportionately punishes vulnerable students and rewards more advantaged students.

Finally, we've seen that equitable grading affects student motivation and the culture of the classroom. Students who have experienced years of failure - whether from constant judgments of their behavior or unsound mathematical calculations - respond to more equitable grading with more intrinsic motivation to learn, more trust in and stronger relationships with their teachers, and greater confidence in their own capabilities as learners. (See www.gradingforequity.org for direct quotes from teachers and students.)
The motivating power of equity
Teachers are always interested in improving their work, and for some teachers, pedagogical justifications may be enough incentive to make a major change. However, teachers often enter the profession because of a conviction that every student deserves a full opportunity to succeed. When we explicitly connect grading to equity and teachers learn how traditional grading practices undermine the very equity they want in their classrooms, they feel the urgency and develop persistence to learn more, to push through skepticism and discomfort.

Nearly every school and district's goals include a commitment to equity, which makes the importance of tackling grading more obvious and justifiable. Explicitly naming the inequities in current grading and how grading can promote equity means seeing grading improvements as more than a nice-to-have pedagogical shift. Educators have a moral imperative to dismantle the inequities that endure in our schools, and we cannot make good on our promise to give every student a real chance at success until we make our grading equitable.
References
Citation: Feldman, J. (2019). Beyond standards-based grading: Why equity must be part of grading reform. Phi Delta Kappan, 100  (8), 52-55.

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Beyond standards-based grading: Why equity must be part of grading reform - kappanonline.org

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Traditional grading methods perpetuate inequities. Any new grading system must counteract both individual and institutional biases. In the May 2018 issue of three experts on grading - Ken O'Connor, Lee Ann Jung, and Douglas Reeves - make a convincing case for teachers and school leaders to reject traditional approaches for evaluating and reporting student performance.

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Midwest Instruction & Computing Symposium

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Grading for Equity: A Rationale and Guide for Instructional Change

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Joe Feldman's Grading for Equity webinar

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Joe Feldman's Grading for Equity webinar

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Links to two videos on the impact of traditional grading 

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Links to two videos on the impact of traditional grading 

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Why the traditional grading system does more harm than good | Chip Porter | TEDxYouth@MBJH

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PDF to the Grading for Equity workbook we used during the institute

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PDF to the Grading for Equity workbook we used during the institute

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Traditional grading tells students that it is a lot easier to fail than it is  to succeed; i.e., students' chances at failing are far greater than succeeding. Furthermore, traditional grading disempowers and demotivates students because in the space of learning, students may fail and it will be held against them. It goes back to how it stifles risk-taking, too.

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So I think traditional grading demotivates students because it stifles risk-taking, hides information, invites biases, and provided misleading information (See question regarding Ch. 3 and 4). In a way, what Kim said below about speaks to how choice and opportunity empowers to have a bit more agency over their grades.  It expertly answers the above question by providing a non-example. I do worry a wee bit about how kicking back an assignment multiple times might be frustrating or demoralizing to a student.  The purpose is to give them agency not to defeat them.  So I would love to hear thoughts/ideas about walking the line (as Johnny Cash so eloquently sang about) between the two positions.    

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So I think traditional grading demotivates students because it stifles risk-taking, hides information, invites biases, and provided misleading information (See question regarding Ch. 3 and 4). In a way, what Kim said below about speaks to how choice and opportunity empowers to have a bit more agency over their grades.  It expertly answers the above question by providing a non-example. I do worry a wee bit about how kicking back an assignment multiple times might be frustrating or demoralizing to a student.  The purpose is to give them agency not to defeat them.  So I would love to hear thoughts/ideas about walking the line (as Johnny Cash so eloquently sang about) between the two positions.    

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Long post here to put in writing some of the things I mentioned in this week's discussion, which might have been confusing since it was coming unprepared and off the top of my head from practices I used about a decade ago....  These were some of the thoughts that went into my grading when I had to shift to an A-F grading system after having taught elementary, then in an open middle school that didn't have traditional grades, and after having done my dissertation about open and traditional classroom practices and outcomes.  I was assigned to teach 7th and 8th grade "Passport to Math and Science" - a block for both subjects with students who were either 2 or more years behind grade level (in one block) or ELD (in another block). Here were some of my grading practices and the thoughts behind them:

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Long post here to put in writing some of the things I mentioned in this week's discussion, which might have been confusing since it was coming unprepared and off the top of my head from practices I used about a decade ago....  These were some of the thoughts that went into my grading when I had to shift to an A-F grading system after having taught elementary, then in an open middle school that didn't have traditional grades, and after having done my dissertation about open and traditional classroom practices and outcomes.  I was assigned to teach 7th and 8th grade "Passport to Math and Science" - a block for both subjects with students who were either 2 or more years behind grade level (in one block) or ELD (in another block). Here were some of my grading practices and the thoughts behind them:

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1) Daily practice/homework was only worth 10% of the overall grade and only checked quickly for completion at the beginning of the period - checked off while kids did a warm up.  I think I marked my chart with a slash if done, an A if absent (which I would slash when they returned and showed it to me), or an M if missing.  At the end of the week, I just counted the slashes for their Practice Points for the week. The idea was to accommodate life and not penalize heavily for missing/late work.  If a student could pass the assessments/projects, showing me they could meet the standards to go on to the next level, daily practice/homework could only penalize them by 10% max - or one grade level (A to B, for example, not completely knock them out).  Why knock a student 25% from his assessment/project grade (say from an 85% B to a 60% D-), for not doing homework that apparently s/he really didn't need to do anyhow?

2) We spent most of the rest of the period discussing the issues they had on the warm up (typically spiraled concepts) and on the practice work, then starting the next activity/assignment, so I could make sure they were off to a good start to move forward on their own after class.  The discussion was really a self-evaluation of mastery.  I encouraged them to correct their own work, argue, mark all over it, and I always praised risk-taking/question-asking as an example of how excellent students learned. They weren't used to being called excellent students.  I was changing mindsets, and when admin/visitors would come in, I would have to change their mindsets about my kids too - pointing out that based on how they were engaging in class, you wouldn't be able to tell them from an Honors class.

3) Students could collaborate with a willing partner on an assessment, but they each had to write their own work, and the max they each could earn on the assessment was a C.  Before I would hand out the assessment, I would ask, is anyone partnering today?  Usually they had already decided; sometimes they just decided right there, but they did have to decide before I'd give them the work. I would grade each of the partners' assessments separately, so they wouldn't necessarily walk away with the exact same score. Students who thought they could do better than a C knew better than to partner with someone else and limit their own grade to a C max. I didn't see a lot of higher achieving kids "saving" lower achieving kids, and heard conversations between friends, like "I studied hard.  Sorry, I think I can do better than a C on this one."  And if they sacrificed for a friend on occasion, it was their choice.  Choices are empowering and can be lessons of their own right.  I would keep an eye out in case I might need to talk to someone about their choices, but that really didn't come up very often (or I would learn there was a good reason that I wasn't aware of).  It was really the students who would have gotten lower than a C on their own who opted to work together, and that seemed like better learning to me than what they would have done otherwise, and definitely led to more engagement than sitting there feeling hopeless. The D they would often earn was better than the 2 Fs they would have earned separately. Students were allowed to work together in class most of the time - collaboration was part of the culture.  It was an option for learning, not automatically considered cheating. Cheating would have been something deceitful.

4) Students who earned less than a C on the initial assessment could retake assessments as many times as they liked on their own time (not during class time) by arrangement with me - lunch/before/after school until 1 or 2 weeks before the end of a grading period.  (I didn't want them missing the new stuff we were going over in class to take retakes.)  We had lots of talks about not wasting our time by retaking tests without studying in between. If I saw that happening, I would make them prove to me what they had done (or have them explain why they thought they would do better this time) before I'd give them the assessment again. The max they could get on a retake was a C.  I usually gave a different version of the assessment, because we would discuss assessment results in class.

5) So...students who took assessments in pairs and students who retook tests would get a maximums of Cs in the gradebook.  If they earned an A or a B, they would get a C in the gradebook.  If they earned a C or below, the grade they earned was what went into the gradebook.  This seemed to be a pretty good representation of their performance and mastery relative to their classmates.  I also didn't want to encourage putting things off, thinking they could just retake things later and still get an A (kid-think).

6) There was a lot of learned helplessness in the group.  I felt confident and reassured them that passing my class meant that they had proven that they were ready to take the next class.  It was my honor at stake, so they had to prove to me they could do the essential work..

7) There have been a few times in my career where I have told naysayers, "Give me a year to prove that this works.  Why give the kids the same work in a different colored textbook?  It didn't work the first few times.for these kids.  Let me do it a different way."    Sure enough, my standardized test scores in those classes were triple those of like classes in the district that Spring.  Their scores were in the teens, like before. Ours were in the 45-50s.  It wasn't just the grading practices. I taught the course differently in several ways, trying to be more relevant and culturally responsive.  One more example: When I taught K, I was criticized for "allowing invented spelling" (in the early 90s) in a very high achieving traditional school. About 2 years later, we were talking about writing in a staff meeting and that same critical 1st grade teacher rose her hand and said, 'I don't care what she does, her kids write when they get to me and they're not afraid to do it" (unlike the kids who came from the teacher who wanted everything to look perfect, held their hands to make sure it did, and marked it wrong when it didn't).  My goal was for them to get their ideas on paper then work with them on fine-tuning bit-by-bit over time to improve their abilities to communicate in writing - and that looked different for each student..

Teaching outside the norm takes a lot of thought and research - What are your goals?  Are your practices consistent with them?  And a lot of guts!

As I said today, I've only read the Prologue to Ch. 2 that were available online.  I picked up my book this afternoon, so the author may say some of this is not so good, but I thought it worked pretty well!

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I am loving reading this dialogue! We are on the cusp of greatness!

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Regarding Multiple Intelligences: Here are some resources for those interested.  

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Regarding Multiple Intelligences: Here are some resources for those interested.  

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https://www.verywellmind.com/gardners-theory-of-multiple-intelligences-2795161

https://www.edutopia.org/multiple-intelligences-research

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2EdujrM0vA

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What were the greatest surprises to you in this reading? Your "ah ha" or ideas that challenged your own paradigm?

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What were the greatest surprises to you in this reading? Your "ah ha" or ideas that challenged your own paradigm?

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Another good read, which I am concurrently devouring at a criminal pace is The Skin that We Speak, which addresses bias in the form of racism and classism of language and linguistics. I recommend for all English and ELD teachers.  If you have an Amazon Prime account, you can read it for free with Prime Unlimited.  If you do decide to pick it up, please let me know.  I would love to discuss!  :)

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Another good read, which I am concurrently devouring at a criminal pace is The Skin that We Speak, which addresses bias in the form of racism and classism of language and linguistics. I recommend for all English and ELD teachers.  If you have an Amazon Prime account, you can read it for free with Prime Unlimited.  If you do decide to pick it up, please let me know.  I would love to discuss!  :)

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Traditional grading stifles risk taking because students focus only on the outcome...not the process. It hides and provides misleading information because different teachers weigh differently and two students can have the same grade but with different competencies and areas of need. It invites biases because of "fudging," which I am guilty of doing. :(

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Traditional grading stifles risk taking because students focus only on the outcome...not the process. It hides and provides misleading information because different teachers weigh differently and two students can have the same grade but with different competencies and areas of need. It invites biases because of "fudging," which I am guilty of doing. :(

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I loved the addition of the student comment on being confused about how teachers grade. That kid was right.We all do our own thing, have different requirements, and place more or less value on different parts of student participation in class (homework, tests, projects, participation, etc). This is part of the reason I have stuck toa simple 0-100 system for so long and modified by removing late work penalties and allowing for retakes of exams. I hoped to keep it simple for me and the students but now know that the whole system wasn't working!

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This section on the mathematics of grading was spot on! At the end of every semester, I change "0" to "40" for any assignment not completed to boost the grades of my students and I know this is a common practice. Grading systems are so personal to teachers and our values so grades do not always accurately reflect the success of our students. I was never taught in my credential classes how to grade. We didn't discuss assessment until my masters program and even then I made changes but not enough to grade fairly and accurately.

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P. 62 "...we as teachers influence whether students see academic success as a mastery of performance goal, and we therefore influence how they behave in response to the task we give them, which in turns affects their likelihood of success."

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P. 62 "...we as teachers influence whether students see academic success as a mastery of performance goal, and we therefore influence how they behave in response to the task we give them, which in turns affects their likelihood of success."

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I would like to move toward mastery learning and have my student continuously evaluate and reflect on their progress. Need to work on the how. Maybe that is in the following section.

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P. 56 "Because of inconsistent grading practices teachers receive misplaced students from other teachers." 

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P. 56 "Because of inconsistent grading practices teachers receive misplaced students from other teachers." 

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I've heard this general complained about students moving to the next class without having the skills needed. Maybe this could encourage teachers to start the discussion about creating a more common grading system.

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P. 36 "Many educators, whether limited by unconsciously racist assumptions or guided by theories of a "culture of poverty", too often apply a "deficit lense" to African American, Latino, and low-income students, believing that those groups of children require and even hunger for immediate, concrete rewards and extrinsic incentive systems - that their environment simply does not support, and they cannot handle intrinsic motivation. 

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P. 36 "Many educators, whether limited by unconsciously racist assumptions or guided by theories of a "culture of poverty", too often apply a "deficit lense" to African American, Latino, and low-income students, believing that those groups of children require and even hunger for immediate, concrete rewards and extrinsic incentive systems - that their environment simply does not support, and they cannot handle intrinsic motivation. 

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P.35 "We preach the gospel of learning, but we make students genuflect to the altar of points." 

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P.35 "We preach the gospel of learning, but we make students genuflect to the altar of points." 

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I've seen this so many times. Students asking how many points some assignment is worth when I haven't even finished explaining what it is we are doing :( Other students asking what their grade will be if they don't do an assignment, which also speaks to the difficulty students have calculating their grade when it is divided into weighted categories.

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P.29 - Study by John Hattie on student teacher relationships and success. - SO Important!

P.30 Ts depend on Ss to make mistakes - I ask for feedback on labs and activities and try new things all the time. When labs don't work we look at what went wrong and it doesn't affect their grade. I thank them for participating in the process and taking risks in being wrong. That's how learning happens!

This can only really happen successfully when there is a trusting and positive
relationship between Ts and Ss.

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About five years ago I read the book listed on the back of this one by Ken O'Connor. It's a great read. - Ransom

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About five years ago I read the book listed on the back of this one by Ken O'Connor. It's a great read. - Ransom

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Also, on Facebook there is a "Standards Based Learning and Grading" group I belong to. Ken O'COnnor is a frequent poster/responder. Most of the posts are for people who are newer to SBG and most of the posts
are about practical issues. -Ransom

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This may be premature, given that we need to finish reading the book... but can we (or should we) consider standards based report cards? Each department has a report card that lists the standards for the discipline and grade level.  Marks reflect progress towards achieving the standard.  This then leads me to ask, what evidence should these marks be rooted in? 

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This may be premature, given that we need to finish reading the book... but can we (or should we) consider standards based report cards? Each department has a report card that lists the standards for the discipline and grade level.  Marks reflect progress towards achieving the standard.  This then leads me to ask, what evidence should these marks be rooted in? 

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Priorities based from our discussion is to: 1. Define the intention and purpose of Grading; 2. Discuss what each of the Grades communicate; 3. Determine how to implement soft skills for successful learning.

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Priorities based from our discussion is to: 1. Define the intention and purpose of Grading; 2. Discuss what each of the Grades communicate; 3. Determine how to implement soft skills for successful learning.

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How do we align our grading to the standards?

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"To my relief, I also learned that grading, if done differently, can be accurate, not infected with bias, and can intrinsically motivate students to learn. Grades can clearly and more objectively describe what student know and can do. Grading practices can encourage students not to cheat but to learn, to persevere when they fail and not lose hope, and to take more ownership and agency for their achievement. And the power of these approaches can be especially transformative for struggling students - the students who have been beaten down year after year by a punishing grading system of negative feedback and unredeemable failure."
This is the Hope of Equitable Grading

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1. So things that stood out to me were: "Extra credit provides multiple ways for students to succeed." (P. 7) I have a hard time understanding how extra credit dilutes or devalues a grade. If it was my job to do the dishes on Monday, but I didn't follow through, does it make the fact that I did them on Tuesday and washed the kitchen towels afterward any less valuable?

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1. So things that stood out to me were: "Extra credit provides multiple ways for students to succeed." (P. 7) I have a hard time understanding how extra credit dilutes or devalues a grade. If it was my job to do the dishes on Monday, but I didn't follow through, does it make the fact that I did them on Tuesday and washed the kitchen towels afterward any less valuable?

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The author goes to great length to set up the reality that inequity in grading exists, in part, due to different strategies and philosophies being used from teacher to teacher.  Added to this, teachers do not want to discuss or give up their practices.  Given the circumstances that grading is squarely in the teacher's domain, how can we effect systemic change in this area beyond any of us adopting practices that come out of this discussion? This book club is a great start.  I do find it illogical that any student will have a different grade in one teacher's class vs. another. How do we fix that?

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The author goes to great length to set up the reality that inequity in grading exists, in part, due to different strategies and philosophies being used from teacher to teacher.  Added to this, teachers do not want to discuss or give up their practices.  Given the circumstances that grading is squarely in the teacher's domain, how can we effect systemic change in this area beyond any of us adopting practices that come out of this discussion? This book club is a great start.  I do find it illogical that any student will have a different grade in one teacher's class vs. another. How do we fix that?

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I think the thing that blew me away the most is found in chapter two. The fact that most of us grade using a system that was developed over 100 years ago and was used to separate whites from blacks and immigrants makes me sick to my stomach: "Their scores were ascribed to weaknesses in intellectual capacity, character, and upbringing...rather than to the cultural biases of the tests...Higher scores among white[s] ...and lower scores among immigrant groups and African Americans were used to both affirm the idea of the United States as a meritocracy and to reinforce the validity of the existing hierarchy" (20). Coupled with this is the idea that "schools assigned African Americans, immigrants, and lower-income student groups to lower tracks that would teach them behaviors and skills that consigned them to reap fewer opportunities an a smaller share of the American Dream" (22). This tracking of students was based off of IQ tests that "helped to replicate the existing social and racial hierarchy" of that time (21). What a bunch of crap that was!!!

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I am sooooo guilty of using grades to light a fire under my students' fannies. I believed that a zero would motivate students to do the work. But grades need to exist only to show what students know and don't know. I'm guilty of taking points off for late work, too. Page xxiii of the prologue identifies a series of variables that show why a student didn't do an assignment. I can't in my right mind ever deduct points for late work again.
I also like the idea that allowing students to turn in assignments when they have the opportunity may cut back in cheating. Yes, we will have students who don't do the work out of sheer laziness; this will be something I will have to navigate but I'm willing to accept this truth FOR NOW.

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It's going to take some work to make the change and maybe that's another reason why teachers are hesitant.

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What makes grading so difficult to talk about is that it is the one thing teachers have absolute control over, and asking teachers to change the way they grade may feel like that form of control is just another thing admin wants to strip teachers of. I disagree with this idea but I believe there is some truth to it. However, the traditional grading policy I have in place is doing more harm than good. I've short-changed many students and I've included things that have no business in my students' grades.

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"Students may skip class because they are unprepared or not confident." We see this as defiance while it may just be self-preservation. Grading all assignments and every mistake leads to student shutdown and a decrease in educational risk-taking. Woah!