Grading in Education

 

I recently was listening to a the "MindShift" podcast that was talking about the grading system in Education. It was mostly discussing how it is a flawed system rather than being one that is effective for students. I thought about how I use grading in the classroom and realized that I may be setting my students up for failure based on an old grading system that is outdated and skews negative. Here are my thoughts below on a few things that really stood out to me. 

1. In the podcast, it was mentioned that the "grading practices [we use today] are the same that we have been doing since the Industrial Revolution" (Sung, 2021). In the past, grades had been given to immigrants who were learning how to work in factories and were given grades "to manage behaviors with positive and negative reinforcement" (Sung, 2021). This practice was then used in the school system to both manage behaviors and to reward academic learning and growth. If we think about the Industrial Revolution and how far our world has come since then, how is it that we are still using a grading scale that can be dated back to these times? How are we not making changes to adapt to the new world that we are living in? 

2. It was also brought up that as a teacher, we are expected to grade our students on various tasks, but are grades consistent among teachers? I think about myself and my job title as a Second Grade teacher. I have three colleagues who teach Second Grade along with myself. When it comes to grading an assignment, all four of us have a different scale in mind which we associate with an A, B, C or D. We may be looking for the same answers or standard, but each teacher has their own scale that is different from that of their colleagues. Is it fair to say that a student in my classroom may receive a B on a paper for having many grammatical errors, but may have received an A from another teacher who saw fewer errors? It begs the question, among colleagues, who is right when it comes to grading? In the podcast it was mentioned that "no one teaches us how to grade" when we are studying to become a teacher, but rather we "simply end up grading as we have been graded" (Sung, 2021). 

3. Finally, I thought about the use of the 100 point scale that many schools use to determine a grade for students based on a percentage. In MCPS, we only assign grades A, B, C, and D for the Elementary School levels. I had not thought about it in prior thinking of grading, but the podcast brought up the fact that in the grading scale "failure is over represented, [and] there are more ways to fail than pass"(Sung, 2021). We always think about anything below a 50% is failing, or in our cases anything below a 70% is a D, the scale is without a doubt tipping towards a lower grade. Shouldn't we move the percentages to more accurately be divided into 4 letter grades that add up to that 100 points? Why is it not that students receive a D for only answering 25% of the questions right? A C for 26%-50%? A B for 51%- 75%? An A for all remaining about 76%? If you think about it this way, a whole lot more children would be viewed as successful. 

I really enjoyed this podcast because it brought up some really good points that I had not thought about in the past. I have been a teacher for 5 years and have always given grades based on a 100-point scale because that is "what we do" and "what we have always done". But just because we have always done it one way, does that make it right? Check out the MindShift Podcast on Spotify here!

Sung, K. (2021, July 20). Grades have huge impact, but are they effective?  - mindshift. KQED. Retrieved October 2, 2022, from https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/58155/grades-have-huge-impact-but-are-they-effective