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A recent article in USA Today on changes in grading policies brought some much expected reaction from the public.

One of my former school districts, briefly adopted the policy of giving no score lower than 50 on student report cards. The well-intentioned purpose was to make it possible for students who failed earlier in the school year to have some chance of passing should they pull their grades up later in the year. It was a common scenario. Students would glide through the first semester, especially at the high school, enjoying football season, homecoming, and anything other than schoolwork. Then, sometime after Christmas, some of them would wake up (or get shaken up by a conscientious parent) and realize they were not going to make it unless they got serious about their assignments. Setting the floor grade at 50, it was thought, would give these slackards a fighting chance at redemption. One problem with this system, however, was it made the grades at the top and the bottom of the scale worth less.

Of course some students were truly struggling all the way along, but some were just plain lazy.

As I shared with folks over at Shrewdness of Apes, where this same conversation is raging from teachers points of view, certainly, there are problems on all sides of this puzzle. Students who won't do what they're asked, then lie about it. Unethical, unprofessional teachers who grade based on emotions, family history, or the moon phase. I actually reported one former colleague who sat down with coffee in the faculty lounge and went through his empty gradebook at the end of the semester making up grades for each student. (Principal's response: "Oh well, he's about to retire anyway.")

And what can you do with parents like the one who showed up at my house one July evening having JUST learned that her son had failed 10th grade English, and begging me to change his final grade because "he really wants to be in the 11th grade with his friends."  BTW, while she was standing in my doorway crying, the aforementioned son was blasting rap music in my driveway from behind the wheel of the brand new truck his mother had bought him.

That we have these debates about grades and fairness this time every year should tell us something. For one, grades are not the reason for education and are not the motivators of student learning many would like to believe. They are prized by some, but not usually for the right reasons. An on-going challenge in many schools and classroooms is to make the learning experiences more substantive and engaging, and making our evaluations of student learning more meaningful. Raising eleven children, my husband and I never asked "What grade did you get at school today?" but "What did you learn new today?" 

Grades are, at best, muted directional signals: Straight A's usually mean the work is boring and non-challenging, but I'm behaving well in class. F's signal there is a problem, and I need to investigate to find out exactly what it is. My dear, departed, former Army sergeant father used to say: "D's stand for 'didn't do a d--- thing'." C's and B's suggest there's work going on, maybe some real learning, and probably some learning challenges; we (parent and teacher) need to work with student and find ways to support the learning.

I would much prefer to move away from a system of letter grades or scores into more of an evaluative feedback system. This of course would require more time by instructors to prepare and more time by parents to understand (are you listening administrators). It could also be the basis for some real discussion about what children are learning and how, rather than some of the inane fingerpointing that passes for parent-teacher conferences in too many places. This has been tried in some schools with generally unfavorable results. In many instances, parents resisted the move away from a single grade or score, sometimes on the basis that evaluative comments wouldn't help their child get into college. But higher ed institutions have been complaining for some time about the relative uselessness of grades and grade point averages as accurate measures of student ability. Of course, the colleges are fighting their own battles over grade inflation and inequities.

Still, I think it's a battle worth fighting for the sake of students, teachers, parents, and sanity.