We need to talk about your grades.
Dear Kids,
We need to talk about your grades. Like many other things in life, they’re not going to look or feel like anything you’re used to for the next few months. You could work really hard, or choose to slack off, and still end the semester with the same word on your report card: Credit. It might not feel fair. Or it may be a relief.
A former student of mine rang up my groceries at the market a few weeks ago. “I heard,” she said conspiratorily, “that we’re not even going to get any grades for the work we did. But I worked so hard on it! Is it going to stay like that for the rest of the year?!” This was followed by one of her signature eye rolls and an exasperated plop of cheese crackers into my grocery bag.
I agree, it’s awful to feel like no one will acknowledge the caliber of hard work you’ve done. It’s especially tough when that work required immense self-discipline, because it would have been easier to lose yourself in social media all day. You probably know people who did exactly that- and no, there will be few repercussions for their actions (or lack thereof). You are not old enough to be rewarded with a promotion at work, or a fat bonus at the end of an especially profitable quarter. Grades may feel like the one sort of “payment” you receive for your efforts. Now, we’ve taken that away.
You and your teachers have operated within a social contract for years, ensuring that we would do our best to dole out grades that fairly and honestly reflected the quality of work you turned in. Being fair is really important to us. Some of your teachers are conflicted by our new “no grades” policy too.
Grades can feel like our tiny way to promote justice in a world that doesn’t operate according to our rules.
We like rewarding your hard work with terrific grades. We rejoice when we watch you apply yourself and see your scores rise as a result. Even failing grades- though they don’t feel good- serve a purpose. Low marks can be our last straw at communicating to students and their families. At our best, failing grades say, “We see you. What you’re doing and what we’re doing isn’t working. Let’s make changes.” At our worst- teachers are humans too- the message may be more like, “I worked really hard to teach this class, and you worked really hard to ruin my efforts. You earned this.” For students that are highly capable, and only taking home Cs on their report cards, a certain message is also begging to be heard.
Traditional grading systems refereed most of our own schooling and that of your parents. As the authors of A School Leader’s Guide to Standards-Based Grading (2014) explain, letter grades are a widely accepted shorthand for communicating students’ success. In middle and high school, your teachers may have upwards of 150 students on their roster; this “shorthand” is far more efficient than an in-depth conversation with every family. In issuing letter grades, we’re carrying on a tradition that feels familiar, efficient, and fair. You might feel frustrated that this familiar give-and-take has been upturned; rest assured that many of your teachers share that same sentiment.
But I wonder if this pause on grading could get us to ask some deeper questions:
What if your only job was to learn? And what if our only job was to make sure that it happens?
Learning has very little to do with completing assignments or scoring 70% or higher on exams. And teaching well is not the same as grading assignments. Scores and percentages are very practical ways for adults to measure your learning- many of you will even encounter similar assessments in your adult life. They are not, however, the point.
Let’s think instead about learning that makes changes in how you understand the world, and what you’re able to do in it.
This includes learning how to navigate life in the company of others, whether you sit by them in school or share the virtual space in a Zoom meeting. Discovering new things that you find beautiful, following your own path of curiosity, enjoying a nurturing space to create new things: that’s the kind of learning that doesn’t stop after 12th grade. Thank goodness! It’s also the kind of learning that inspired many of your teachers to throw themselves into the challenging career of education.
Here’s something worth thinking about: by the time your teacher enters a grade into a progress report or report card, you already had a pretty good idea of what that grade would be. Research suggests that most students are 80% accurate at estimating their own grades (Kuncel, Crede, & Thomas, 2005). In other words, you tend to know what’s expected of you, and how well your work fits within those expectations. This may or may not ring true with your own experience- such is the nature of research- but the trend has been confirmed with over 80,000 students (Hattie, 2009). Our grades are telling you how well you fit within the parameters we created. That might reflect learning, and it might not.
Striking the right balance between ethics and accuracy, in a profession made up of adults who love young people and want to see them succeed, is a tricky thing. We want you to learn. We want you to feel supported. We want you to know when you’re not quite there yet. Behavior, effort, and attendance often influence a student’s final grade in conjunction with measures of their achievement (O’Connor, 2011). There is also real reason to place value on the 21st century skills that go beyond school. We are constantly trying to to our best- but authentically knowing what’s most important to measure learning, and the best way to guide 150+ individuals on that path without losing work-life balance ourselves, is a challenge.
What we do know for sure is that the clearer you and your teachers are about what it is you’re supposed to learn, the better the chances are that you’ll learn it (Hattie, 2009). This clarity is different from knowing that if you read six chapters of a book, and complete all the reading comprehension questions, you’ll get an A. It’s more like understanding from the get-go that you’re going to learn how an author creates a coherent theme, and knowing that when you’ve learned it when you can predict how a theme would change if a book ended differently. Contributors to the world of academia describe these clear things you need to learn as learning intentions, and evidence of how well you’ve learned it success criteria. Those aren’t phrases that roll of the tongue, per-se, but there are volumes written about how essential they are to learning. They give us much more to think about than, “Did I get an A?”
If for this time period you don’t have grades to measure your success, consider a personal reflection: What am I supposed to be learning here? How well have I learned it?
Moreover, if you don’t need to worry about good grades right now, there’s more reason than ever to pay attention to feedback. Your teacher might be offering feedback to the whole class during a virtual meeting, or putting some serious time into adding comments to your works-in-progress. That feedback required significant focus from your teacher, and he did it because he knows that timely, appropriate feedback can double your rate of learning (Hattie, 2019). It can give you a clearer picture regarding the difference is between your current learning status, and how far he expects you to rise. Getting into the habit of seeking out, and responding to, feedback, is a skill that will enrich your learning and your work for a lifetime (Dunning, 2014).
A colleague of mine recently lamented that if she was grading during distance learning, she was only grading privilege. In a time of unprecedented social upheaval, I couldn’t agree more. When I see students balancing the demands of caring for their siblings, food insecurity, and a shared anxiety about the future, the least “fair” thing to do is to assign them grades. But if your family situation allows you to maintain high academic expectations, now is the time to use what we know about how learning works, and have a some fun with it. Get really clear about what it is you’re supposed to learn. Seek honest feedback about where you are in your learning, without fear that it will sink your grade.
Since so many of our schools are on hiatus from a grading system that has hardly changed since the industrial revolution (O’Connor, 2011), perhaps now is the time to take a fresh look at learning. How does it interest us? Where could it take us? How do we do it better? Your learning habits impact you more than anyone else, and we can’t put a grade on that.
References:
Hattie, J.A.C. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of 800+ meta-analyses on achievement. London: Routledge.
Hattie, J., and Clarke, S. (2019). Visible Learning Feedback. New York: Routledge.
Helfebower, T, et. al (2014) A School Leader’s Guide to Standards-Based Grading. Indiana: Marzano Research.
Kuncel NR, Credé M, Thomas LL. The validity of self-reported Grade Point Averages, class ranks, and test scores: A meta-analysis and review of the literature. Rev Educ Res. 2005;75: 63–82.
O’Connor, K. (2011). A Repair Kit for Grading (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.
Sheldon, O. J., Dunning, D., & Ames, D. R. (2014). Emotionally unskilled, unaware, and uninterested in learning more: Reactions to feedback about deficits in emotional intelligence. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(1), 125–137.
Sticca, Fabio et al. “Examining the accuracy of students' self-reported academic grades from a correlational and a discrepancy perspective: Evidence from a longitudinal study.” PloS one vol. 12,11 e0187367. 7 Nov. 2017.
