Turning in assignments late tends to cause a significant drop in a student’s grade, whether it’s one homework assignment or a test. While students wait for an opportunity to do the assignment as they juggle all of their other classes, teachers put in zeros in the grade book until the student turns in the assignment, but once it’s late, the assignment would no longer receive full credit.
The Department of Education has discussed a way of grading to remove zeros from the grade book. “Equitable grading is not a system, per se, but a set of values, principles, and practices that help guide educator decision making,” ODE Director of Assessment and Student Reporting, Andrea Lockard, states via email. Middle schools have already adjusted to this change, but The Department of Education is looking to expand this change to high schools.
Brittany Ketter, an eighth-grade language arts teacher at Memorial Middle School, explains, “There isn’t a situation in which a kid would receive less than 50% of the points available no matter what they scored.” Memorial Middle School uses equitable grading practices; although, staff members have raised concerns since this has been implemented.
“If a student who had been consistently getting 20-30% on an assignment and they’re now up to 45%, they’re [still not] passing, but that’s still huge growth,” Ketter said. “But according to the gradebook, it’s all the same.” By giving students 50%, it makes students believe they aren’t making progress. Students then get into the mindset of, ‘What’s the point?’ which lowers their motivation to keep trying and working to better their grades.
Once students enter high school, there is currently an entirely different grading system, which can catch students off guard. When their grades don’t reflect what they did in class when they were in middle school, they enter high school with a mindset that they can pass by doing less work, but that isn’t the case. “I’m sure there are students who don’t fully understand mathematically the implications of not doing their work because they see 50% as easy to make up, and before you know it, they have maybe created some bad habits and a spot they find themselves in that they can’t pull out of before the end of a grading period.” Memorial Middle School Principal Ken Gilbert said via email.
“The real answer is that right now, most students aren’t actually benefiting from the 50% in terms of having falsely inflated grades,” Ketter said. She describes that students tend to stick with the grades they work toward. “A lot of students who are passing are pretty much [going to pass], and the kids who aren’t turning in anything are still going to get an F”
ODE Director of Assessment and Student Reporting Andrea Lockard states via email, “Students often experience grading practices that are mathematically unsound, inconsistent, and include information such as behaviors and attendance that should not be part of an academic grade and do not actually motivate learning.”
Kayla Adair, a math intervention teacher and NTSS coordinator at Memorial Middle School, says, “When you’re absent, either for a long block of time or consistently a couple of days every other week. It impacts your ability to continue your education because you’re just missing [the instruction].” When students miss class, they tend to think the assignment will be excused before they think to talk to a teacher about the work they missed.
Several students now don’t want to be at school due to unknown factors in their lives, and “If you have 35 kids in the room, and one of them’s checked out, and three of them are up and moving around in the room and the rest are trying to learn you have to prioritize” Adair said, “so sometimes the kid with their head down doesn’t get addressed.”
Behavior doesn’t directly affect a student’s grade but indirectly affects the student’s academic grade. When countless students are misbehaving in class, it makes it challenging for the students around them to learn and focus, and it makes it challenging for teachers to get through the entire lesson if no one is paying attention.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many schools had a late work policy that would deduct points from a student’s grade based on how late they turned an assignment in. However, during the pandemic, many schools removed the deduction on the grade because teachers didn’t have the ability to know what was happening in student’s lives, and they gave full credit if earned on the assignment.
“At the middle school level, each grade level could determine how they wanted to handle the [late work policy].” Ketter states, “We were told […] If a kid turns an assignment in within the quarter, just take it and do not penalize them.”
The ODE believes that these grading practices will boost the students’ intrinsic motivation to learn because they won’t fail their classes. However, as stated by Ketter, some students still fail.
Adair states, “It’s a false sense of security. It just delays the incentive for them to get their work done.” When students don’t see that they are behind because their grade isn’t affected as drastically, they don’t feel the need to get work done. Students don’t understand that this won’t be available in high school.
“The work ethic and apathy of students prior to the pandemic and post-pandemic are very different. It would be very hard to determine [whether] the grading scale is causal to that apathy or just coincidence.” Memorial Middle School Principal Ken Gilbert said via email.
“A system that would feel more fair to me would be proficiency grading,” Ketter said. “If the standard is that a student can write a paragraph, and I give them 5 opportunities to write a paragraph, and they show me one or two times out of five that they do it in proficiency grading, that overall score credit becomes their official score.”
Proficiency grading measures a student’s mastery of the essential skills or how well the student understands the material in the class the student is taking. At the beginning of every unit, the teacher will break down the proficiency for the unit into smaller objectives and criteria using a detailed rubric. During the unit, students will be assessed to see if they truly know the material using a variety of assessments, such as traditional pencil-and-paper tests, projects, discussions, or reports.
However, these aren’t the only changes teachers want to make. “Academic assignments are worth 80% of their grade, and effort assignments are worth 20%. The effort should be slid up to the reward of trying,” Adair said. “I would slide [effort assignments] up to at least 30%, if not 40%.”
By implementing equitable grading practices, the intentions aren’t effectively matching the results. While the goal is to motivate students, teachers have seen the opposite because students are unable to see the progress they make when doing work.
