Does Minimum Grading Inflate Grades and Lead to Social Promotion?

From the Marshall Memo #451

In this Educational Researcher article, James Carifio and Theodore Cary (professor and researcher at University of Massachusetts/Lowell) report on their study of seven years of student grading data from an urban high school. They wanted to see if the practice of minimum grading (which the school used throughout the study) had the negative effects critics allege: grade inflation or social promotion. 

Minimum grading, which usually involves setting 50 as the lowest grade students can get, is a response to the devastating impact that one or two atypically low grades can have on students’ overall achievement, leading them to give up hope of passing. The problem is inherent in the 100-point grading scale, in which failing grades make up a disproportionate 3/5 of the scale – “a badly lopsided scale that is heavily gamed against the student,” say Carifio and Cary. “Current 100-point grading scales stand in sharp contrast to the original use of the 100-point scale in the 19^th century, where an average grade was 50, and grades either above 75 or below 25 were rare.” 

The argument for minimum grading is that it keeps struggling students in the game, motivating them to keep working because they feel more in control of their achievement. Critics argue that minimum grading waters down academic standards, inflates grades, and provides an unfair and unearned boost to students who are not cutting the mustard. Districts that implement minimum grading sometimes encounter fierce, ideologically driven opposition. In fact, the governor of Texas recently signed legislation outlawing minimum grading (which 1,000 of the state’s 1,139 districts were using in some form). Six districts have taken the state to court in an effort to continue using minimum grading. 

Carifio and Cary’s study of one Massachusetts high school’s grades addressed these questions: 

• How often were minimum grades assigned and how often did they result in a passing course grade? Over the seven-year study, 1,159 minimum grades resulted in students passing the course. This was an average of 165 instances a year and involved about 142 students each year – in other words, minimum grades were benefiting a good many students, not just a few low achievers. Looking at these figures financially, Carifio and Cary estimate that minimum grading saved the school at least $150,000 a year on summer school costs, or more than $1 million over seven years. 

• Did the use of minimum grading result in grade inflation or social promotion? The researchers found no evidence of increased grade inflation or social promotion. In fact, student attrition declined over this seven-year period, and the composite performance index on state test scores went up significantly – 20 points in math (from 61.9 to 81.9) and 16 points in English language arts (from 70.7 to 86.8). The conclusion: “[M]inimum grading is both a low-cost and low-risk strategy based on sound educational and psychological theory,” say Carifio and Cary.

However, the authors believe that minimum grading goes only part of the way to mitigating the unfairness of the 100-point grading scale. Comparing students’ grades to their state test scores, it was evident that grades were still under-reporting the achievement of many students. “The results suggest that policy makers who are looking to institute reforms that lead to fairer, more accurate, and more consistent student assessment will need to look beyond minimum grading to more substantive reforms, such as instituting standards-based grading and proficiency scales…”

“The Minimum Grading Controversy: Results of a Quantitative Study of Seven Years of Grading Data from an Urban High School” by James Carifio and Theodore Cary in Educational Researcher, September 2012 (Vol. 41, #6, p. 201-208), http://bit.ly/U4FRmz; the authors can be reached at James_Carifio@uml.edu and tedcarey@comcast.net