UPGRADING the Letter Grading System in Middle and High School

Guest Writer Terry Underwood Addresses AI's Challenge to Traditional Grading and Assessment

Dear Educating AI Readers,

Since the spring, Educating AI has consistently emphasized that AI is pushing us towards a reevaluation of how we approach education. This involves a shift in how we conceptualize "AI-responsive" practices. Rather than simply adapting our systems to accommodate AI, we're analyzing the weaknesses in our educational frameworks that AI systems have revealed, and improving our approaches accordingly - even if it means the challenging work of starting anew.

In this endeavor, no thought partner has been more central and important than

Terry underwood

, Ph.D. Drawing on decades of experience in instruction, curriculum design, and assessment as a theorist, instructor, and classroom teacher, Dr. Underwood will walk Educating AI's readers through the initial stages of upgrading our grading system - a special treat for our audience.

This process will involve nothing less than a deep dive into the multifaceted purposes, diverse contexts, and far-reaching consequences surrounding existing grading practices. It will require thick skin and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths about our current methods. We'll need to question long-held assumptions and be open to radical reimagining of how we evaluate student learning.

As we'll discover along the way, while shifts to process instruction, standards-based grading, and assessment of AI-produced content may offer initial stepping stones, these alone are likely insufficient. We may need to delve even deeper, examining the very foundations of our assessment philosophies and practices. This could involve rethinking the balance between formative and summative assessment, reconsidering the role of standardized testing, and exploring innovative approaches to capturing and communicating student growth and achievement.

Ultimately, our goal is to develop a more equitable, meaningful, and learning-focused grading system that can withstand the challenges posed by AI while better serving our students' needs. It's a daunting task, but one that's essential for addressing the assessment and academic integrity crisis of the moment and preparing our educational systems for an AI-infused future.

Nick Potkalitsky, Ph.D.

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This article examines the complex issue of multi-leveled evaluation systems in American high schools. We focus on the complex entanglements of external standardized testing systems operating simultaneously with internal grading systems which have opposing purposes. The sociological force of high school as an institution in shaping students' futures is more palpable than ever, and current unrest about educational injustice calls the functions and limitations of current evaluation methods into question.

My argument recognizes the rightful significance of normative standardized tests in the policy arena even while staunchly opposing current test designs and uses. Decisions about federal resources intended as solutions to widespread problems of learning identified via a test like NAEP across states are appropriately informed by large-scale quantitative indicators. However, pressurized state-sponsored and/or district-level tests indexed to state content coverage expectations can change the nature of local pedagogy against the wishes of local teachers, a battle where learning can be lost. Standardized regimes situate teachers and learners within a paradox.

The letter grading system occupies a central place in high school classroom learning communities. I explore the double-edged sword of the traditional letter grading system as an accountability device teachers currently are required to use to enforce a work ethic. We look at current rationales and recipes for grade reform of what I refer to as the third rail of the social contract between universities and high schools, a rail that extends into the university through General Education, the first two years of college. Advanced Placement systems illuminate what happens when traditional grades come face to face with standardized tests

The article identifies four main themes in current efforts to reform grading practices: 1. Alternative Grading Approaches; 2. Equity and Mental Health Concerns in Grading; 3. Technology and Data in Grading; 4. Examining Grading Practices in Context. It concludes by advocating for systemic change in grading practices, emphasizing the need for local collaborative assessment construction projects among colleagues to create more equitable and effective assessment strategies that better reflect real learning in whatever community the school happens to be.

PART I: Background on the Interplay Between State-Sponsored Tests and High School Grades

Sociological Forces

The societal structure of an industrial American public high school still functioning today became a fact of life in the years following the bombing of Pearl Harbor and WWII. Since then high schools have been given and have embraced the charge¹of producing citizens capable of working productively for a living. High schools and teachers today are held accountable for their mission in the macro system by normalized and standardized state-sponsored testing regimes and by the federal Department of Education’s unique innovation, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, (NAEP). Students in high school classrooms are held accountable by the letter grading system. The system is grounded in a supervisorial model with labor and management relations embedded in the foundation of any school extending into classrooms.

The Great Depression in 1929 ushered in a period of poverty unprecedented in the United States, and the crushing pressure of simply surviving produced a deep social critique of the muscular way of American industrialized life during the 1910s and 1920s. Traditional schooling rooted in teacher authority and learners relying on rote memory was then the dominant method of instruction. Before the 1930s, for example, social science textbooks often omitted controversial social issues (Connor & Bohan, 2014):

“…[C]oncerns of social class were largely ignored in social studies textbooks prior to the… [market crash]. When discussing social class at all, texts infused the Horatio Alger rags to riches theme…that social mobility was possible because in America, there was equal opportunity for all. …[T]extbooks…slighted labor issues in the industrial era by stating there was only a ‘supposed conflict between capital and labor’…. Instead, textbooks…used men like Cyrus McCormick, Andrew Carnegie, and Thomas Edison as role models for students.”

During the years leading up to the market crash when the industrial or factory model of public schools was solidifying, forward thinkers started a movement we now call “progressive.” John Dewey, for example, believed that students ought to learn subject matter in school, but they also ought to learn how to participate in a democracy. Dewey valued an experiential mode of learning by participating in activities above the transmission mode. Participation drove both learning content and democratic dispositions. Connor and Bohan (2014) summarized Dewey’s philosophy as follows:

“To foster democratic schools, Dewey challenged traditional methods of teaching because they were static, emphasized rule following and discipline, and failed to incorporate experiential learning. He believed education and learning were interactive processes and students should not only interact with their environment, but also play an active role in their learning.”

It’s ironic that Americans needed a cataclysm the magnitude of the Depression to take seriously the ideas of the progressive movement which had been percolating many, many decades before 1929. It took a Second World War to jolt the country from its flirtation with a more egalitarian perspective on schools back to its more industrial model. Beginning in 1942, the Wartime Commission took control of American schools and universities in an all-hands-on-deck approach to the crisis. Curriculum changes were made to prepare students for working in national defense with emphasis on topics like "…effective study by many people in the United States of the languages of other peoples in the world is a necessary part of world understanding” and “75% of the failures in the study of navigation must be attributed to the lack of adequate knowledge of mathematics.” Instead of high school as preparation for a satisfactory job and, while progressives had their way, experiences in participating in a democracy, high school became preparation for War.

Within this ethos where schools are instruments to serve state and federal government interests and goals were planted the seeds of several dilemmas. One, for instance, is the tension between special interests, particularly moneyed interests, and mainstream interests, particularly working-class and minority interests. To be sure, every parent would want their children to have expert teachers, small class sizes, tutors, rich cultural experiences, and strong extracurricular opportunities as well as full development of their personal strengths—private school education. Then there is reality.

Another dilemma is how to evaluate the learning of a high-achieving population of affluent learners and an underachieving population of garden variety learners. The state-sponsored testing system and the grading system have roots firmly planted in our capitalist democracy. First to appear was the grading system in the early 19th century as ivy grew on university walls in the East. Next the normative testing system appeared in France when Alfred Binet put a young Albert Einstein to work as a technician (cf: Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein). As the next subsection discusses, the normative test system today is viewed as the gold standard when it comes to drawing conclusions about what and how well students have learned. The grading system is controversial for a variety of reasons. The bottom line is many teachers want to fix it while the industrial model seems to ignore their protests.

Separation of the External and Internal Systems in Educational Research and Policy

These systems are separated for purposes of educational research. Teachers’ grading practices have been studied, and these studies have raised concerns about pervasive damage done to the motivations of mainstream and affluent learners alike. State-sponsored normative tests have also been found to damage learning as a result of restricting the curriculum and intervening in pedagogy. But the research on grades and on the effects of tests is not nearly as thorough as the research on normative standardized tests vis a vis reliability, construct validity, bias, generalizability, and the like. Highly precise psychometric properties of normative tests afford researchers and policy makers a scientific basis for drawing inferences irrespective of their damage to learning.

Hence, a double standard of sorts exists among educational researchers, universities, and policy makers on one hand and teachers in their classrooms, on the other, which could become a major obstacle for systemic reform to the grading system. For stakeholders on the outside of schools, the grading system is functioning perfectly despite the deep impact it has in classrooms. GPA, for example, is among the strongest predictors of performance in college, a great help to admissions committees. When consequential policy decisions are made about schools, standardized evaluations are privileged. This privileging is the source of the influence such tests have on instruction.

The Illusion of Systemic Alignment among External Standard/Tests and Grades

Curriculum alignment is another of those double-edged swords that have differing effects depending on the socioeconomic status of the learners. In the best case, the term alignment is a synonym for coherence. In the worst case, alignment is a superficial checklist of items that regulates selection of materials and classroom activities. Teachers have been aligning their lesson plans with Common Core standards, publishers have been aligning their textbooks and materials with Common Core, corporate assessment companies have contracted to produce state-sponsored normative tests aligned with the Common Core. The missing element is to align teachers’ grading scales to the Common Core.

One approach to this project could be systematic, amenable to psychometric study. Grading rubrics tied to specific grade level standards could be written by experts and required for use in classrooms. The role of the teacher would then include using prealigned activities and materials, following a scripted lesson plan, and evaluating student learning according to the rubric.

The call to reform grading systems to make them more equitable has the potential to fall into the prealigned instruction and evaluation trap. Many institutions require teachers to designate which Core standard(s) are being addressed in their unit and lesson plans and other documents ranging from course syllabi to, in some cases, grade books. This level of standardization extends the reach of external agents to control not just measurement, but pedagogy. Whether this reach helps create fairness in the existential asks teachers make of their students, that is, what they ask students to do and how they grade their work, remains to be seen. This aspect of grade reform—the intersection of external standards and the largely multiple-choice tests which measure them with lesson planning and classroom grading—seems to me treacherous.

In my view, reform of grading must be considered in any local project in the context of common standards, state-sponsored tests, and university requirements for curriculum and instruction and measurements. But grading practices must also safeguard the role of the teacher as a mentor and a motivator. Grades constructed from rigid rubrics and viewed alongside normative test scores would decontextualize human aspects of learning to provide interval data , which can be added, subtracted, multiplied, divided—portable data which can fit in a cell of a spreadsheet—and converted to standard scores. In this system we would have successfully disappeared the learner.

Standardized Tests as a Remedy for Inequity

Standardized tests, including clinical instruments, evolved in the corporate-university sphere² outside the high school. Coming more and more into play with advances in statistical analysis and test design, tests were developed to measure learning with sufficient reliability to predict, for example, a high school student’s performance years later in college.³ After WWII these tests found widespread acceptance because they helped returning soldiers get into college. ETS developed its first college aptitude test to fling open the doors of the ivory tower to poor but brilliant individuals who came home from war.

Standardized tests are predictive measures. A student who is in fifth grade but scores at the second grade level on a reading test can be predicted to be able to read texts at a second grade level. College aptitude tests like the SAT and the ACT are predictive; through statistical analyses these tests have been designed according to psychometrically privileged specifications and have been shown to be predictive of learning when it is measured in college. Aptitude tests are theoretically immune to the specific effects of any particular mode of instruction or curriculum. They were built to eliminate bias against any particular student group.

In recent years SAT and ACT have lost some of their force in college admissions, partly because they don’t add much predictive value when plugged into the computation of a prediction score. Additionally, nagging concerns about bias have lessened their appeal. Many elite colleges no longer use them. So what has replaced them?

Letter grades are notoriously unreliable in isolation. It’s hard to know what factors individual teachers consider, and they can change. For example, some teachers reward effort, attendance, and growth. Others reward individual accomplishment on what they consider objective exams. But when ten or twenty or thirty grades are given to one student over several years with different teachers, reliability gets better and better.

This reliability gets better because teachers consider so many different facets of learning. Everything from just showing up to class to stellar work on classroom assignments shows up somewhere in the overall GPA, which has been shown to be more reliable than the ACT score. The resilience of the GPA and its utility single it out as a measure that might be worth keeping in the system. Clearly, the research on the damaging effects on learning indicate that, regardless of its utility, it must change not just for some teachers, but for all high school teachers in a systematic way.

Using Evaluation Data to Improve Learning

Of course, finding evidence that either multiple-choice tests or grades not only measure, but improve learning is a tall order. To communicate the ethos of the school evaluator in the standardized past, theorists (Guba and Lincoln, 1989, Fourth Generation Evaluation) described an imaginary scientific examiner in wire-rimmed glasses, wearing a hazmat suit with a pocket protector and gloves, holding a clipboard, to characterize a sterile, scientifically immaculate approach to measuring teaching and learning. The idea was to depict in an understandable way how test makers reduce the risk of data contamination from human debris by standardized testing protocols, which increasing reliability by decreasing validity, deliberately placing impenetrable barriers between the examiner and the examined.

There may never have been any intention to improve learning through normative tests. From Binet forward, the impulse to standardize tests probably arose from democracy’s need to sort individuals to get the right individuals to the right places and stations such that social structures in the macro sphere would function and improve life collectively—my two cents. A tension created by cognitive friction in the minds of teachers from teaching to insure a child ends up at the right place at the right time where society needs them can cause sleepless nights. What is a teacher’s obligation to draw the best out of each student? How can one resolve the moral pressure to help a young person reach their potential while simultaneously helping the university admissions committee?

Teachers would like to believe that grades improve learning, but recent informal surveys suggest that teachers really don’t believe grades improve learning at all. Indeed, researchers suggest grades can have negative impacts on student motivation and learning. A study comparing the motivation of students getting “multi-interval grades” to those getting pass/fail and narrative evaluations found that grades did nothing good for motivation to learn. Instead, grades created anxiety and brought about avoidance of challenging courses. In contrast, narrative evaluations supported mental health issues and increased motivation.

Grades can increase fear of failure, reduce interest and creativity, increase anxiety, and lead struggling students to withdraw. High-achieving students may be motivated to keep getting good grades, but this effort doesn't translate into deep and intentional learning. Grades don't communicate what students have actually learned, just points earned. (Check here for a rebuttal of this perspective.)

Stepping Back and Consolidating

Guba and Lincoln’s external examiner in a hazmat suit changed costumes in recent years, but the need for objective data uncontaminated by human vagaries remains intact. Interestingly enough, GPA may be more robust than any other single indicator. Society needs information about how to maximize human potential. So far every experimental replacement for normative tests and the letter grading system hasn’t improved the situation for high-poverty and minority learners. So far it doesn’t look like phonics is going to change the picture.

By harnessing the power of AI and computer-based testing, modern standardized assessments can adapt in real-time to a student's responses, presenting test tasks at the right difficulty level that more accurately reflects their current level of understanding and potential for growth, ultimately providing a more nuanced and informative picture of their academic capabilities. LLMs and other predictive language algorithms are already in the chain of decisions made by admissions committees, not a standardized test as such, but a standardized evaluation process involving statistical prediction.

Grading has a shroud around it, covering up a set of rituals and norms we don’t know much about. The awesome power to grade children drives teachers into a cave several times each year in isolation and solitude, maybe grading on the curvethey hated growing up, guaranteeing winners and losers. Like monks leading monastic lives of ritual and sacrifice, the pure autonomous reflective analysis teachers do during this act stimulates them to improve their work, but craft knowledge tells me grading is an unwelcome task.

Recall that not every theorist theorizes GPA as an internal measure; some look at it as an external data point like the ACT in admission cycles. Grades, however, when they are scribed into report cards or written at the top of an essay are personal. Angst may creep in during late night grading marathons when teachers might weigh the impact of a grade on GPA. Grading is really a hybrid, a practice that teacher preparation programs don’t prepare candidates for, perhaps the most meaningful and yet emotional measure of student achievement, perhaps the most distorted, perhaps the most in need of remodeling to capture its value as a learning tool.

PART II: Grading and Test Scores: Two Different Coins

Most high school teachers find standardized tests pretty useless, with some exceptions, but tests can impact how teachers teach and grade. Teaching to the test can actually erode teacher effectiveness. Literacy research (Johnston, Afflerbach, and Weiss, 1993, Educational Assessment) has shown  troubling effects in schools where there is intense pressure to raise test scores. Teachers actually knew less about their students' individual reading and writing attitudes and experiences in schools under “heavy threat” from test machinery compared to teachers in schools with less pressure, one large-scale study of two large districts revealed. In this case, the threat likely went unnoticed by district leaders in the compromised district.

A thought experiment may clarify why this finding is so disturbing. Suppose two students (Alfie and Rose) got the same number of items correct on a reading comprehension test—a standardized passage, vetted items and options, bias free, no dif. Suppose further that Alfie and Rose missed the identical same questions and even chose the identical same wrong answers. Teaching by the numbers, a teacher might infer that Alfie and Rose should get the same dosage of the same instructional prescription. Teaching from the heart, a teacher might know full well this score pattern is a meaningless coincidence.

Standardized test scores correlate well with socioeconomic status of the school population. Historically, remediation of deficiencies in a high-poverty school because of low scores brings about draconian pedagogical mandates like required materials and assignments and scripted teaching. I, personally, consulted at an urban middle school which tested its population in every English classroom every three weeks on retired tests and planned upcoming instruction to use test prep materials. Grades and standardized test scores were synonymous. It was impossible for these teachers to have any data to grade other than students working alone on multiple-choice exercises.

A perfect example of a use of tests to burnish an affluent school’s reputation is the Advanced Placement (AP) external credit award system. Founded in 1952, Advanced Placement began as a way to extend the opportunity to earn undergraduate credits to high school students. The tests themselves are written by teams of university professors and high school AP teachers to capitalize on professional experience as a way to validate the tests. Much more thorough than off-the-shelf tests, with probes including but reaching beyond multiple choice, AP tests are long and difficult, requiring a level of stamina developed through regular disciplined study. They are also scored by humans, so I am told, by expert and experienced judges.

The College Board and the federal governmentrecently campaigned to increase the number of poor and minority students who participate in AP courses and become eligible to take the exams. Since 1998 federal dollars have been available to pay testing fees through state grants. Ethnographic studies of high schools in San Francisco and Milwaukee recently documented horror stories wherein minority students were used as pawns to increase the numbers of minority course takers.The incentives are for students to enroll in AP classes irrespective of actually taking the exam or even passing the exam.

Journalists report in regard to tests like AP exams that schools with high concentrations of Black and Latino students are more likely to be underfunded, overcrowded, and lack resources like textbooks and technology. They are, however, measured by the same standardized tests. They also tend to have less qualified teachers and fewer AP course offerings. Nationally, over 70 percent of African-Americans and 57 percent of Hispanics who took an A.P. test in 2016 did not pass. (Over all, the failure rate was 42 percent.) And over the past two decades, although the percentage of students scoring between 2 and 5 remained fairly stable, the percentage of students scoring 1 has grown to 19 percent from 12 percent. These numbers were produced after both the College Board and the federal government mandated an open enrollment policy in AP courses.

Against this backdrop of history and the complexity of testing and grading in high schools, we turn now to dissatisfaction with internal evaluation, the grading system. Note that none of the grading reform projects begun over the past seven years have proposed abolishing the standardized test system, the GPA system, the AP test system, nor the ACT or SAT exams. Teachers wanting to restructure their grading policies appear to accept grading as a task will remain isolated when grading time rolls around. Teachers understand that learning becomes richer and deeper when students collaborate in activity with peers. I want to argue that grading will also become richer and more impactful when teachers exercise their agency in collaborative evaluation sessions with department colleagues.

Why and How Teachers See a Need to Change Grading Practices

Given the existence of a massive and expensive external evaluation system operating far from the classroom for purposes unrelated to daily teaching and learning, teachers it appears have largely ignored the results from this system beyond the Common Core standards themselves. As it was in the beginning, letter grades are still registered by a human instrument who strives to make evaluation consistent, fair, clear, and predictable for students—even if it means a point system and a bell curve—and some teachers are satisfied or enthusiastic, about giving letter grades. Others, however, are so frustrated with it they’ve become activists.

Many teachers argue that if letter grades have meaning, it is a contextual meaning and therefore meaningless in any actionable way outside of the classroom. An A is an A, a C is a C, for grade consumers who don’t know how the grade was derived. One problem is that teachers of today understand that complex learning is rife with ambiguity and nuance, non-quantifiable, never finished, never boxed up and stowed away. Perhaps most importantly, learners who assign meaning to grades can become so preoccupied with earning an A that they prioritize figuring out how to get a good grade above engaging in deep learning. In this sense grades de-emphasize learning.

Many teachers also embrace the significance of student self-regulation, self-assessment, and reflective analysis in learning. They are troubled by the fact that traditional grades focus one doing assigned tasks that are content-focused. Teachers who see their role as teaching students to self-regular, to self-assess, and to do reflective analysis want to teach and assess these aspects on par with course content. Yet there is no space in letter grades for this, no report card item for reflective analysis. This issue is forward-looking and critical for grade reformers.

PART III: Four Themes in the Work of Grade Reformers:

The four themes I induced from this non-scientific exploration among teachers working on alternatives to the grading system are meant to stimulate conversation. It behooves the system to acknowledge that grade reformers are working individually, not in professional communities. There is a burgeoning publishing industry generating books narrating the ideas and experiences of individuals teachers with suggestions for other teachers, but I haven’t come across any school-sanctioned effort to take on the problem as a faculty.

The first and most varied theme we will call Alternative Grading Approaches; this theme includes teachers who accept a ranking system whether letters or numbers but seek to clarify, equalize, and stabilize how these letters or numbers are determined for all learners⁴. It values evidence of content learning prescribed by standards, and it works to minimize credit for effort, attendance, behaviors, etc.

With common standards and common-sense adherence to clear criteria using transparent rubrics, grades can have meanings to outsiders and serve as useful feedback to students. Students who work for a grade know precisely what they need to do and to learn to earn an A or a B. This approach changes nothing in the big picture of the traditional grading system, including the requirement that every individual teacher registers a grade for every individual student on the roster.

Standards-Based Grading in its purest form means summative evaluation of a course in Biology, for example, not with a single grade, but with multiple grades according to the external standards associated with the course. A high school biology teacher might grade students in five areas listed on the report card: 1) lab skills, 2) cell structure and function, 3) genetics, 4) evolution, and 5) ecology standards. Students are allowed to retake assessments until they demonstrate mastery of each standard.

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The second and perhaps the one with the most multidimensional aspects we will call Equity and Mental Health Concerns in Grading, a theme linking two related issues of selfhood and identity⁵. This group shares with others the idea of making grading decisions transparent, predictable, and impactful in three ways. 1) Grades should accurately reflect a student's level of academic performance, not their environment nor behavior. 2) Grading policies should be mathematically sound and easy to understand. 3) Grading should minimize bias and not punish students for circumstances out of their control, like home responsibilities or lack of support.

Grading should motivate students and show them that success is possible with effort, no matter their starting point or failures along the way. Practices include allowing retakes and revisions to show learning is a process, using alternatives to grading on a curve, explaining assessments and providing rubrics, giving small stakes assignments along with larger ones, and using self-assessment, peer feedback and reflection. Mental health advocates share these ideas and argue for diminishing the pressure and anxiety grades provoke among all students.

This theme has recently become a hot topic in high schools struggling with issues of social justice, fairness, and school-induced anxiety. Not surprisingly, interest in grading practices among this reform group derives from common complaints that grades are subjective and culturally biased and cause a deterioration in motivation to learn among historically and socioculturally disenfranchised populations. Top priority is to construct classroom grade systems built around classroom content as articulated in curriculum guides or state standards, create clear and specific rubrics to illuminate the visible characteristics of high quality work, and focus on doing the work, redoing as appropriate.

Restorative approaches to grading fall in this equity theme as well. These approaches include using "no zero" policies so grades reflect content mastery rather than behavior, allowing students to use notes on assessments to make learning more accessible, and using "daily grades" to track engagement rather than heavily weighting attendance in the grading algorithm. Responsive grading focused on support rather than punishment may improve student-teacher relationships and boost motivation as well.

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Technology infused grading reform as a theme has no substantive core like equity strategies or even standards-based strategies. However, digital grading tools are now routinely available that make both qualitative and quantitative evaluation much more doable. One equity strategy, i.e., daily grades for engagement instead of behavior, open up communication channels between learner, parent, and teacher in unprecedented ways.

Digital grade books and related learning management systems like PowerSchool, Canvas, and Google Classroom are changing the ways teachers track and report grades. Leveraging tools like online quizzes, polls, and interactive exercises to frequently check for understanding and adjust instruction in real-time is an affordance for immediate evaluation. Of course, automated essay scoring and automated feedback from chatbots is possible, but few teachers have faith at this point in using it, and others recoil in horror..

Examining Grading Practices in Context is our fourth theme. Grading practices are influenced by and interact with broader educational and societal factors beyond just the classroom. Ongoing debates about grade inflation, especially in higher education, have distorted teachers’ grading prerogatives to the degree that part-time faculty have been unhired for giving too many As. Rising GPAs without corresponding increases in student learning as measured externally raises questions about academic standards and the meaning of grades. With some colleges moving away from considering standardized test scores, high school GPAs are receiving even more scrutiny, putting even more pressure on high school grading practices. Equity and restorative grading practices implemented using technology with enhanced communication for more timely feedback might help.

Grading practices can shape students' academic mindsets for better or worse. Grades focused on ranking and competition may diminish intrinsic motivation and encourage a fixed mindset, for example, the belief that one lacks the ability and therefore ought not try. Alternative approaches evaluating growth using transparent topics and goals as well as clear assignments to foster a mindset that loves learning might reverse the effects of competition.

Conclusion: What Next?

This four-part cluster of themes is intended to be suggestive, not exhaustive. Teachers who want to reform grading practices not just for their own practice, but systemwide, must be prepared for a complex web of stakeholder expectations and entrenched practices. At the same time, changing grading paradigms can be a lever for shifting mindsets, reducing the production of surface learning, and dismantling inequitable systems in education and beyond. Examining grading and assessment from this broader perspective is crucial for envisioning alternatives that can support all learners.

Tinkering with traditional grading systems by individual teachers, working alone under the expectation that piecemeal adjustments will lead to substantive change, is not likely to have much impact. I liken this approach to "a thousand flowers blooming” because while it may result in random enlightened classrooms across schools, it fails to address the inherent flaws and systemic negative impact of grading on learning.

Grades have been repeatedly shown to inadequately measure actual learning, to diminish genuine engagement, to poorly motivate sustained learning, to encourage competition over collaboration, to provide insufficient feedback for growth, to perpetuate inequities, and to suffer from subjectivity and inconsistency. These are not isolated failings but rather predictable outcomes of a flawed system.

When teachers move beyond individual experimentation with grading practices and unite at the local level to advocate for systemic change, collaboration among educators can create alternative assessment strategies reflecting students' real learning and foster a more equitable, engaging, and effective educational environment.

My next essay in this series for Nick’s Substack will examine one school’s experience with uncoupling the responsibility for assigning grades from individual classroom teachers and relocating the grading authority within the academic department. Teachers and their students collaborated to produce a body of work representing learning with respect to departmental learning outcomes. Using time previously spent in monastic solitude grading tests and papers, department met as a group to assess portfolios of work done not by their students, but by students in someone else’s classroom. I’ve written before about these topic, once in a book, once in a book chapter, and once in a journal article. I’ll draw on these resources for the upcoming article.

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1

https://sethigh.org/what-is-the-purpose-of-high-school/?utm

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED606970.pdf?utm

https://www.horacemann.org/our-school/mission-core-values?utm

https://www.sunsetparkhighschool.org/?utm

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https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/schools/testing/companies.html?t&utm

https://www.spiritofchange.org/8-things-to-know-about-corporations-like-pearson-that-profit-from-standardized-tests/?t&utm

https://rethinkingschools.org/special-collections/testing-companies-mine-for-gold/?t&utm

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One wonders how often teachers think about how well the grade being recorded today would predict a student’s performance in upcoming years—or if it should. It seems reasonable that a standardized test score should be subject to the same variability as a grade. But tests are not overly sensitive to a “bad day” in that over time high school students tend to sustain a position in a set of norms equal to or better than earlier scores. I wonder how well test scores and GPAs correlate among seniors…

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For examples of this theme, see the following:

Brookhart, S. M. (2011). Starting the conversation about grading. Educational Leadership, 69(3), 10-14.

Guskey, T. R., & Bailey, J. M. (2001). Developing grading and reporting systems for student learning. Corwin Press.

Kohn, A. (2011). The case against grades. Educational Leadership, 69(3), 28-33.

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Feldman, J. (2019). Grading for equity: What it is, why it matters, and how it can transform schools and classrooms. Corwin Press.

Reeves, D. B. (2008). Leading to change/effective grading practices. Educational Leadership, 65(5), 85-87.

Schimmer, T. (2016). Grading from the inside out: Bringing accuracy to student assessment through a standards-based mindset. Solution Tree Press.

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Check out some of Nick’s favorite Substacks:

Terry Underwood’s Learning to Read, Reading to Learn: The most penetrating investigation of the intersections between compositional theory, literacy studies, and AI on the internet!!!

Suzi’s When Life Gives You AI: An cutting-edge exploration of the intersection among computer science, neuroscience, and philosophy

Alejandro Piad Morffis’s Mostly Harmless Ideas: Unmatched investigations into coding, machine learning, computational theory, and practical AI applications

Michael Woudenberg’s Polymathic Being: Polymathic wisdom brought to you every Sunday morning with your first cup of coffee

Rob Nelson’s AI Log: Incredibly deep and insightful essay about AI’s impact on higher ed, society, and culture.

Michael Spencer’s AI Supremacy: The most comprehensive and current analysis of AI news and trends, featuring numerous intriguing guest posts

Daniel Bashir’s The Gradient Podcast: The top interviews with leading AI experts, researchers, developers, and linguists.

Daniel Nest’s Why Try AI?: The most amazing updates on AI tools and techniques

Riccardo Vocca’s The Intelligent Friend: An intriguing examination of the diverse ways AI is transforming our lives and the world around us.

Jason Gulya’s The AI Edventure: An important exploration of cutting edge innovations in AI-responsive curriculum and pedagogy.