Education

San Diego Schools Are Changing Their Grading System. Is It A Good Idea?


Some internet eyebrows shot up this week over headlines like “San Diego school districts overhauls grading system to combat racism.” It turns out that what San Diego is doing is following in the footsteps of many other districts and implementing a type of system usually referred to as standards based grading.

Standards based grading belongs to the same family tree as mastery learning and a few other not-necessarily-new ideas. In a traditional grading system, a student might take quizzes, do homework, take some tests, write some essays, and maybe earn some participation points. In some districts, teachers might also count attendance and behavior. All those various scores are thrown together and the resulting lump is a student’s score for the grading period. It’s not unlike a job performance evaluation where you are judged for the quality of your work over the past few months.

But over the years, educators have asked, “What if we just came up with a list of things we expected the students to be able to do or know and gave an evaluation based strictly on whether or not they achieved those objectives?” Never mind how you spent the last year; now that we’re at the end, do you know what we want you to know? That’s standards based grading—a job evaluation based strictly on whether you hit your targets for the quarter or not.

There are plenty of things to like about that approach. In the traditional approach, a student’s formative assessments (the quizzes given mid-unit to see if everyone’s getting it) can pull down a grade on the final test of that skill. Behavior unrelated to the actual quality of the student’s work can end up lowering the student’s grades. But does it really matter how much the student struggled if they eventually mastered the material?

Standards based grading can also be much more descriptive. A traditional grade can be one label for a whole lump of student activity, while a standards based grade can be much more specific and descriptive of what the student actually did and didn’t achieve.

More importantly, the folding in of non-academic measures can unfairly penalize students for outside circumstances. In my first year of teaching, my class included a bright student who rarely completed homework and often fell asleep in class; that turned out to be because he was working two jobs to try to support his family. Another sharp student later in my career rarely completed homework because her parent didn’t have the money to heat their home in the winter. These students could master the material; what was the point of giving them a lower grade because they lacked the same resources as students coming from comfortable homes with a corner set aside just for them to do school work?

Standards based grading generally involves coming up with a list of standards, then focusing on whether or not students meet those standards. Students often achieve those goals at different times and at different speeds—sometimes involving multiple attempts to succeed at the assessment. The grades and report cards often look different from a traditional report card.

Discussions of standards based grading raise a variety of contentious issues. For instance, eliminating the whole idea of work being “late,” or allowing students as many tries as they need to pass the assessment strike some people as “not like the real world.” And some differences seem pointlessly cosmetic; standards based grading often replaces A, B, C, D, and F with 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Standards based grading (like mastery learning) allows for a broad range of implementation. If your district decides to do it, there are several factors that they can get right or get terribly, terribly wrong. There are many devils hiding in the details. Just a few things concerned observers should ask about.

Quality of Standards

A standards based grading system is only as good as the standards it’s built on.

Some districts simply grabbed the Common Core Standards and used those; that was not a great choice. The ELA writing standards, for instance, are a muddled mess, while the ELA reading standards make no reference to content. If you think competence would involve knowing certain things (plot of Hamlet, author and cultural context of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”), Common Core Standards won’t get you there.

In a traditional approach, we’re used to the idea of bonuses and enrichment laced throughout the class. In standards based grading, only what’s listed as a standard counts.

Detail Level of Standards

Many elementary goals lend themselves well to standards based grading (recite times table; correctly read list of sight words). But the more advanced the level, the more complex educational goals become. To be effective, standards should not be too broad (”Student will be able to write a good essay”). But breaking large goals into small standards can result in dozens of micro-standards; that list may be not only long and cumbersome, but may not truly add up to the larger goal. In writing, for instance, the whole may be greater than the sum of the parts.

Setting the Mastery Level

How well does the student have to do to display mastery? Standards based grading can face the same problem as a pass-fasil system; set the bar too high, and many students will become frustrated and fail, but set the bar too low, and many students will become disengaged and bored. One critic complained that his school’s new system “made it harder to get the equivalent of an A and easier to pass a course.”

Measuring Mastery

How will the school determine that the student has met a standard? You may have done a workplace online training where the measurement at the end is five or ten multiple choice questions that you keep answering until you get enough correct. If you’ve done that, you’ve seen how bad an assessment can be. Standards based grading needs to rest on authentic and quality assessments. Otherwise students become focused on breezing through a bunch of simple tests so they can check items off their standards list.

Teacher Workload

In a standards based system, students will be moving through the standards and the material at their own pace, which creates a greater workload for teachers. Your school should have a good plan for managing that (hint: adding more staff is better than just turning parts of education over to computer software).

The impulse to implement standards based grading often comes from a good place. But if not managed properly, it can create far more problems than it solves.



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