{"id":13526,"date":"2020-10-21T11:46:39","date_gmt":"2020-10-21T15:46:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/?post_type=cw_post&p=13526"},"modified":"2020-10-23T11:04:41","modified_gmt":"2020-10-23T15:04:41","slug":"how-standards-based-grading-led-us-to-empower-part-1-the-tyranny-of-82","status":"publish","type":"cw_post","link":"https:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/cw_post\/how-standards-based-grading-led-us-to-empower-part-1-the-tyranny-of-82\/","title":{"rendered":"How Standards-Based Grading Led Us to Empower, Part 1: The Tyranny of 82%"},"content":{"rendered":"

Increased interest in student-centered learning management systems that support equitable assessment and student self-direction as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic further amplify the value of this excellent two-part series that was originally posted<\/a> on the <\/em>Edtech Elixirs blog. Adam Watson is Digital Learning Coordinator for Shelby County in Kentucky, a district that\u2019s deeply devoted to competency-based education.<\/em><\/p>\n

I have often talked in Edtech Elixirs about how digital tools should help us serve an academic objective. For our district, the need for effective standards-based grading (SBG) began a search for a transformative digital tool. In this blog entry\u2014the first of a two part series\u2014I discuss how the limitations of a traditional grading system led us to SBG, and ultimately, Empower Learning.<\/p>\n

I’d like to start this entry with what I like to call “the tyranny of 82%.” While it’s fictionalized, it’s based on the reality I have faced in the past as a classroom teacher in a traditional grading system.<\/p>\n

A parent walks into a classroom to discuss her son’s current grade with his English teacher. “I’m worried,” the parent frets. “Timmy currently has a 82%. That’s a B. A low B. What can he do to raise it to an A?”<\/p>\n

“I’d be happy to help,” the teacher smiles. “I have some practical advice for him. He should work 8% harder.”<\/p>\n

“But…how?” the parent asks.<\/p>\n

“Well, let’s say right now he studies 50 minutes a week. Timmy should start studying 54 minutes a week. That’s eight percent more effort.”<\/p>\n

“Oh yes. I get it now. Anything else?”<\/p>\n

“Yes. He should always get a high grade on every assignment, right from the start. Let me give you an example. Last week we started a new unit on a concept he had never done before. He got a 20 out of 100 points on the first big assessment. At the end of the unit, he aced a final assessment with 100 out of 100 points. But it was too little too late. All that effort at the end and he only got an average of 60 percent in summative assessments. Of course, if it makes you feel any better, Timmy could have gotten a 100 on the first assessment and 20 on the last one and would have gotten the same grade overall. He should have scored high all along, you see? The math of averaging doesn’t lie. And I average all students, all the time. It’s only fair!”<\/p>\n

“Ahhh! Very fair. Thank you for the practical advice!”<\/p>\n

Of course, the above is farcical. But as a classroom teacher analyzing an overall course average in a traditional grading system, I wish I could have given feedback to a student or parent as confidently as the fictional teacher above. On a good day, I could have pointed to a well-designed rubric for a particular assignment to show how you could improve from good to great, but therein lies the problem\u2014a rubric helps explain the score on a particular assignment, and not really an overall course grade. For a typical student that wants to increase their class grade by a level or two, I would usually fluster through a conversation on points\u2014if only they had gotten a bit higher on this quiz or that project, or would get full points on an assignment next week, their grade would go up. For failing students, it would be a much easier conversation, since it was often a problem of zeroes, and therefore the talk was about completion and compliance. If Timmy had just turned in a few more of his homework assignments and that big paper from last week, he might not have a F!<\/p>\n

If all this talk of points makes school with traditional grading sound like a game to either win or lose, it often is, and therefore no teacher should be surprised when students try to manipulate such a high-stakes and highly subjective system. (Don’t even get me started on how “extra credit” skews the validity of academic data even further, or how enough zeroes can create a statistical hole that even the most motivated student would not be able to climb out of.) However, the problem in all of this talk of points and completion and compliance is the absence of what should be the true question to consider: how does 82% reflect what Timmy actually knows in English?<\/p>\n

The answer: it doesn’t.<\/p>\n

Percentages aren’t always impractical, of course. If I have a 82% approval rating, there was a poll result that revealed 82 out of 100 people like me. If a medical procedure has a 82% success rate, I can take comfort in the fact that there are “only” 18 out of 100 case studies when the procedure fails. But if someone said that I am 82% in my husband skills, or a podiatrist is 82% in his medical knowledge, we would laugh at the absurdity of how non-informative those percentages are for such broad concepts. Yet no eyelids are blinked when a percentage is applied to an entire course and we say a student is 82% in English, or Geometry, or Physics, or U.S. History.<\/p>\n

We should note something about letter grades before we move on. An A-B-C-D-F system is not in and of itself necessarily bad\u2014I would rather deal with a five-point-range system than the hundred-point-range system of percentages\u2014but what is troubling is often the vague understanding and frequent inconsistency of what a letter grade means. For most traditional grading systems, the letter grade is simply the mask that a school or district’s percentage wears at the ballroom school dance of public opinion, in an attempt to feign academic consistency and conformity.<\/p>\n

To take the simplest example of how this mask conceals more than it reveals, consider that even the scale used to translate a percentage into a letter grade can vary district to district in the same state, or even school to school in the same district. An 80-89.9% could be a \u201cB\u201d in one location and 86-92.9% could be a \u201cB\u201d in another. So, again: How does a \u201cB\u201d reflect what Timmy actually knows in English?<\/p>\n

If we take it as a given that a game of percentages is not the best system of grading\u2014and many of you were likely nodding your head about that way before this point in the blog entry!\u2014what could replace it? First, we need to start with the question that Ken O’Connor poses in the short video (2:36) below: “How confident are you that the grades your students receive are consistent, accurate, meaningful, and supportive of learning?” If we are not confident in the system we have, let\u2019s find a better one. To paraphrase from O\u2019Connor\u2019s video, if students are \u201cplaying the game of school,\u201d let us at least make sure it is a learning game and not a grading game.<\/p>\n