Grades Are Making Us Fail
Everybody has an idea of how to do well in school. In order for students to get A’s on the tests and quizzes, they have to do their homework and be active listeners in class. In return, the teacher than grades your work and assigns a letter grade to your assignment. What if you do what you are supposed to do but still end up getting bad grades? This exact situation is happening more and more in today’s society. Today’s grading system’s outdated practices are causing students to fail.
Most assignments are graded with the possibility of getting 0-100 points. Feldman describes the issue with this way of grading by saying, “Over half of our grading scale is an F, and if we assume a C grade signifies minimum attainment of course standards, then over two-thirds of our grading scale describes insufficient performance, and only one-fifth of the scale describes academic success (A or B).” This quote signifies that it is only a small percentage of the whole 100 points that is considered to be a “good grade.” With this way of grading, with assignments that weight the same, a low grade can ruin your grade. If a student were to miss or forget about one assignment, a 0% grade could take your grade from a B to a D. One single grade could do a lot of damage overall. The possibility of one or a few low percentage grades could ruin a student’s final grade. This type of grading system focuses on the failures of students and makes it incredibly difficult for a student to bring their grade back up. This dilemma can cause students to give up and lose hope in succeeding in the class.
Another popular practice done by educators today is curving an assignment grade. When a majority of students do badly on a test for example, a teacher may curve the grade so that more students achieve a higher grade. However, curving a grade promotes competition in the classroom. The grade becomes less about what you learned with how badly everyone else did on the assignment. This grading practice is also unreliable. Teachers only curve a grade when the class did unexpectedly good or bad. Students don’t know when the teacher is going to implement this practice, leaving the students to constantly be in fear for their grade. It can also be argued that this practice is unfair to students.
The purpose of homework is to work on and go over what was learned in class. Homework is supposed to be a helpful and supplemental aspect of schoolwork. However, when grading homework based on completion, the opposite effect happens. A highschooler interviewed by Feldman says, “If I don’t do the work then it affects me big time. That’s why some of us copy, not because we want to be lazy, but because our grade depends on it.” This type of grading is showing that it doesn’t matter if you understand the lesson, it only matters if there are answers on a piece of paper. Concepts like graded homework promotes cheating among students. Cheating on homework may seem like a small digression but could be seen as a gateway towards more types of academic fraud.
A similar concept to homework grading is a participation grade. Some teachers grade how often you speak in class, go up to the board, and participating in pair and share. This type of grading is problematic for two reasons. The first reason is that some students have anxiety when it comes to speaking up in front of the whole class. It is unfair to penalize a student who has a legitimate fear and learns better being by themselves. The second reason is that the classroom becomes hostile rather than collaborative. Students become focused on talking rather than sitting back and listening. With this grade, students are expected to preform every class.
These types of practices are outdated for today’s students. The grading system is why students are under the constant stress of failing. Schools are educators are starting to notice the effect the grading system has on their students. Amanda Parish Morgan writes, “But a more progressive argument can be made for eliminating grades, or at least grades as we understand them…” Morgan is acknowledging that some educators already have changing the system by which they grade their students. Morgan writes about how a teacher grades their students’ assignments by how much effort was given and how well the assignment was executed. Morgan suggests that this type of grading encourages the student to learn and diminishes stress. Lory Hough writes that, “A better grading system allows for multiple attempts of content mastery.” This method allows students to try and try again until they succeed. This grading system would allow the student to learn their material and determine the grade they want by how much effort they put into the redone assignments.
Those opponents against the elimination of the current grading system sometimes get the wrong idea of what that actually means. Some might think this new system is “hippie like” or “for the weak”. However, it is proved by ASCD that, “75 percent of students reported that they always or often feel stressed by their schoolwork.” This statistic shows that 3/4 of today’s students are being failed by the current grading system. This statistic shows that today’s students need a change for their own mental health.
References
“Taking the Stress Out of Grading”
“Is it Time to Reexamine Grading?”
“Are Letter Grades Failing Our Students”
Counterintuitive Fall 2024 