Your Grade is an 89.9% B+ and That’s Final!

How do teachers determine the grades students receive? I have discovered that many teachers do not determine grades. They leave students’ grades to the numbers. They call this a “fair” grade. It is not fair. It is poor. It is a dereliction of duty.

Even putting aside the inherent problems with using averaged percentages as a grading “system,” teachers, not numbers, should monitor the progress of their students. Good teachers use a variety of assessments and instruments to evaluate what students can do and what they know. It is a teacher’s responsibility to make certain that the grades assigned to students are valid representations of students’ mastery. Leaving that to the numbers takes the teacher off the hook.

“Wait a minute,” some teacher cries! “I graded the quizzes, tests, and homework. The grade is merely the average of the students’ work. It is a fair representation of how many items the student answered correctly.”

True. However, is it a fair representation of how well the student has mastered the material taught? No. Two points off.

Students’ success on assessments should improve over time. This is called learning. If a student is getting everything correct from the start, little learning has occurred. Is the teacher even needed? Teachers often love the kids they don’t need to teach. They are the easy A’s. It is critical to provide students with instruction, practice, feedback, and assessment – and then do it all over again. Through this process, students’ achievement should improve.

So is it “fair” to average the speed of the learning process into the grade? If one student did poorly on some assessments, but then mastered the skill later and clearly demonstrated this, should that student be penalized for the time needed to learn the skill? Should the grade be more about which student made fewer errors getting to the goal? We don’t take away an Olympic swimmer’s gold medal because he didn’t make a world record in practice. No one graded down Shakespeare for bad drafts or Einstein for failed formulas.

Thus, a student whose average is on a border, who earns 89.9 or 92.4, should not automatically be given the B+ or A-. A student whose grades are trending up is really learning the material. In truth, the most recent assignments are the best measurement of mastery. Although the student may have earned an A- for the quarter, if she rocks the final or the last major assignments, a teacher should ask if the numbers accurately reflect her learning.

At this time of year, many students and parents are asking teachers, “Why is my child on the grade border? What could have happened to push him from the lower to the higher grade?”

Teacher shrugs and says, “the numbers tell the story.” But that is incorrect. What is the grade trend? Has the student mastered the skills? Are you certain, teacher, that a few items on a few assessments are not the reason for the average? Is your certainty grader (oops –I meant greater) than your margin of error? What would you see if you looked more closely?

Yes, it is more difficult and time consuming to examine student individually. It is easier just to pop numbers into a computer and let it determine the grade. But such unprofessional laziness is not an accurate representation of student achievement, and it is unfair to both the students and the learning process.

Teachers do not want to be evaluated exclusively on their students’ numbers. Their students should not be evaluated that way either!