Grades should reflect achievement.
By Michael Zwaagstra
In some
school jurisdictions, teachers are not permitted to use letter grades or
percentages; instead, they are required to use other schemes such as the
four-point categorical scale recommended by assessment guru Ken
O’Connor, with the following descriptors: 1) Not yet meeting performance
standards, 2) Meeting performance standards with assistance, 3) Meeting
performance standards, and 4) Exceeding performance standards. More
significantly, O’Connor recommends that teachers should assess many
objectives for every assignment in every subject. Thus, for example,
instead of assigning a percentage or letter grade for an essay, teachers
would identify a large number of specific objectives and evaluate essays
on each of them. For teachers, this would often prove to be overwhelming
in complexity, details, and the time required.In addition, this complexity
is not likely to make reporting achievement easier or more accurate for
students or their parents because they will need to know the answer to a
number of important questions. What knowledge and skills need to be shown
by students to improve from one category to the next? How much assistance
is being provided? Will sufficient independence be developed by the
student to warrant promotion to the next grade? Is the performance minimal
or beyond it? How do students and parents know? Obviously, an evaluation
system based on standards requires that they be explicit for every subject
at every grade level—can these be communicated effectively to students
and parents?Teachers and parents will recognize that any scheme for
evaluating and reporting achievement raises important questions; indeed,
it is supposed to do that. But it is not obvious that novelty in
evaluation and reporting schemes is an advantage, or that complexity and
detail make them necessarily superior than more conventional ones. In many
situations, percentages and letter grades have the advantage of being
familiar and well understood, and can convey students’ achievement with
considerable precision. For example, students and parents easily
understand that a grade of 50 per cent is usually a pass, and that 95 per
cent is outstanding. Fundamentally, percentages and letter grades should
not be hastily discarded. To have a better understanding of our concerns,
we need to return to the fundamental reasons for assessing students. In
order to be effective, teachers must know how to focus their instruction
to meet the diversity of their students’ knowledge and skills. Also,
teachers have to evaluate their students’ learning against mandated
standards of achievement. Furthermore, they need to communicate the
results of their evaluations to the students themselves, to their parents,
and to other teachers and administrators, as necessary. We urge classroom
teachers to make sure their grading practices are relatively simple,
appropriate to the subject and grade, and understandable by the students
and their parents. Teachers should use a variety of assignments and tests
in evaluating their students so they have greater confidence in the final
grades that students receive. The weightings of the various assignments
should be clearly explained to students and parents. We do not think that
these requirements are too burdensome for teachers. Teachers should not be
overly rigid or, indeed, too flexible in grading their students, and
should be cautious in assigning zeros or docking marks for late
assignments unless there are good reasons for doing so. Clearly,
incomplete work cannot be tolerated indefinitely. But these decisions are
fundamentally instructional ones and are best left to teachers, within the
framework of a school policy.Parents, specifically, deserve to receive
accurate and readily understandable information on the achievement and
progress of their children. They should not receive report cards with
information that is difficult for them to interpret. Of course, we are not
opposed to teachers providing additional information that places the
students’ performances in a broader context. The range of scores and the
average achievement of students writing examinations, for example, would
be helpful.Generally, we encourage parents to examine carefully the report
cards their children bring home, and if they cannot understand how their
children are being graded, they should ask their teachers to explain their
grading scheme and justify the marks that their children received. If they
remain unsatisfied, then they should take their concerns to the principal,
parental advisory committee, and the school board, as necessary. Finally,
we urge senior educational administrators to consider the merits of a
common and largely conventional grading scheme for use throughout the
school district.Excerpted from What’s Wrong with Our Schools: and How We
Can Fix Them by Michael Zwaagstra, Rodney Clifton, and John Long.
Zwaagstra and Clifton are research fellows with the Frontier Centre
for Public Policy, and are, respectively, a high school social studies
teacher and a University of Manitoba education professor. Visit Frontier's
website at www.fcpp.org.
