View Content #20593

Nicole Naditz is a National Board Certified Teacher of French, Google Certified Innovator, and 2015 ACTFL National Language Teacher of the Year

As a language teacher and self-proclaimed fan of geeky tech and gadgets, you may be surprised that I'm not going to write about language acquisition, pedagogy or methodology for world language instructors. I'm not even going to write about one of my favorite topics: Web tools to meaningfully engage learners in authentic media. I want to talk about grades and grading systems. More specifically, I want to talk about why our grades are broken. Our grading system is so institutionalized that most teachers use it without even giving it a second thought. But traditional grading systems–with a 100% scale and traditional grade book categories full of points do NOT value proficiency and we are losing language students–sometimes proficient students–as a result. So if traditional gradebook categories and the 100% scale do not value proficiency, what DO they value?

They value points. And points and proficiency aren’t the same thing.

In American education, we often do things the way they have always been done. For example, many teachers use gradebook categories whose sections have names such as “homework,” “tests,” “quizzes,” and “participation” and “extra credit.” Each of those sections is often assigned a percentage value (or a “weight”). All the assignments the students complete receive points and the points are input into the correct category. Math is done and the whole thing adds up to a score out of a possible 100%. Teachers then convert that score to a letter grade using the 100% scale and that letter grade gets reported to parents, students, and others. There is some variation to this conversion, but most scales go something like this:

    90-100 = A
    80-89 = B
    70-79 = C
    60-69 = D
    0-59 = F

That’s not proficiency. That’s 100 shades of grey. And "tweaking" the scale won't help: it gets no better if the A starts at 87%. Why? Because no one can truly quantify the difference in proficiency OR performance between the student who earned 92% and the one who earned 93% or between the student who earned 77% and the one who earned 78%. And we can't even quantify the difference in student knowledge and skills between the student who earned 89% and the one who earned 90% even though the two students will receive completely different letter grades. No matter how the scale is set, in a 100% system, there will always be a cut-off point at which the only difference between any two letter grades is ONE point, meaning that the difference isn't in fact about the student's knowledge, proficiency, or skills. Again, points and proficiency aren't the same thing.

We have used this grading system for a long time. It's tradition. And for many teachers (and students and parents), it is very "comfortable" because we all think we understand the results. Frankly, if we don't think too hard about the traditional grading system, it seems to work great. But this system only works if the accumulation and reporting of points is your primary objective. I don’t think any of us see that as our primary objective. In fact, we don't even see the accumulation of points as the main goal of calculating and reporting grades. When teachers are asked what is the purpose of grades, the answer is usually something about accurately reporting the achievement of the student within a field of study. But that is NOT what happens when we convert "points" to a letter grade. Points mean such different things in each class and for each teacher that an A based on points adding up to 100% in one class is likely to have very little in common with an A in the same subject from a different teacher. Even worse, earning points in a class can (and does) happen in lots of ways that have little or nothing to do with a student's actual proficiency in content and skills of the subject taught. So although we know what the purpose of calculating and reporting grades is, we can't accomplish that purpose if we continue to teach for standards (and proficiency) but then grade for points.

Click here to see my “TOY Talk” where I break down even further why this traditional grading system is actually less fair to all of our learners and what I (and a growing number of teachers in all subjects, including ours) believe may be a better way.