A Four-Step Plan for More Meaningful Grades and Report Cards

“School leaders have become increasingly aware of the tremendous variation that exists in grading practices, even among teachers of the same courses in the same department in the same school,” say Thomas Guskey and Lee Ann Jung (University of Kentucky) in this thoughtful Principal Leadership article. “Such inconsistencies lead many to perceive grading as a distinctively idiosyncratic process that is highly subjective and often unfair to students.” In addition, the grades students get from teachers may not align with their performance on state tests. Guskey and Jung propose these steps to improve grading:

• Articulate the fundamental purpose. Are report cards for students, parents, or school staff? Are they designed to communicate information about achievement or decide which students qualify for certain programs? The school needs to answer these questions and print the rationale on each report card.

• Separate out grades for achievement, attitude, responsibility, effort, and behavior. “If someone proposed combining measures of height, weight, diet, and exercise into a single number or mark to represent a person’s physical condition, we would consider it ridiculous,” say Guskey and Jung. Yet that’s what many schools do when they give students a single grade for a subject. Electronic grading programs have made this easier, automatically giving different weights to different criteria. A far better practice is to separate final product grades (the summation of a student’s work) from process grades (responsibility, learning skills, effort, work habits, homework, etc.) and progress grades (the student’s value-add that marking period). This gives students and parents detailed feedback on how they are doing in each area and what needs to improve. The key, though, is clearly explaining all this to students and parents.

• Stop grading on a curve, ranking students, and selecting a valedictorian. These practices, say Guskey and Jung, lead to bitter competition among high-achieving students and discourage students from working cooperatively with classmates: “Early in their high-school careers, top students analyze the selection procedures and then, often with the help of their parents, find ingenious ways to improve their standing. Gaining that honor requires not simply high achievement; it requires outdoing everyone else. And sometimes the difference among top-achieving students is as little as one-thousandth of a decimal point in a weighted GPA.” Far better is to establish demanding criteria for academic excellence (similar to the summa cum laude, magna cum laude, and cum laude system used by universities) and place no limits on the number of students who can attain the highest honors. Schools that have taken this approach see a rise in student achievement and an increase in students helping each other reach the top honors. “Instead of pitting students against each other,” say Guskey and Jung, “such a system unites students and teachers in efforts to master the curriculum and meet rigorous academic standards.”

• Give honest, accurate, and meaningful grades. “Of all the students in a school’s population, those who have disabilities or who are struggling learners have the most to gain from a standards-based approach,” say Guskey and Jung. “For those students, intervention decisions depend on having clear and complete information on their performance.” The best approach is giving below-level students grades on modified curriculum expectations, with a clear notation on the report card to that effect (for example, an asterisk by the grade and a notation at the bottom of the page saying, “Grades marked with an asterisk are based on modified expectations. For additional detail, please see the attached progress report”). This approach is also more legally tenable than saying grades are based on special needs or an IEP. “By being transparent about where students are, schools make themselves accountable to employ evidence-based interventions and demonstrate progress toward grade-level standards,” say Guskey and Jung. 

“Four Steps in Grading Reform” by Thomas Guskey and Lee Ann Jung in Principal Leadership, December 2012 (Vol. 13, #4, p. 22-28), 

http://www.nassp.org/tabid/3788/default.aspx?topic=Four_Steps_in_Gr... 

Jung can be reached at ljung@uky.edu. 

From the Marshall Memo #464