Grades Are Making Us Fail
I know how to do well in school. In order for my classmates and I to get A’s on the tests and quizzes, we should do our homework and be active listeners while in class. In return, the teacher than grades our work and assigns a letter grade to the assignment. What if we do all of the above, but still end up getting a bad grade? 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 Today’s grading system’s outdated practices are causing students to fail.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.” It is worth noted that most institutions allow a student to pass a course with a letter score of D. However, in most institutions, if the course is mandatory for a major, a student must achieve a C or higher. 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.
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 at the end of the day, it only matters if there are answers on a piece of paper. If a student is behind in a lesson or two, it becomes harder for the student to catch up without completing homework on a lesson he/her has missed. It becomes tempting for the student to copy their friend’s homework, rather than lose points for a small assignment.
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 and 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. Although school should be challenging, this statistic shows that today’s students need a change for their own mental health.
References
Feldman, J. (2020, September 1). Taking the Stress Out of Grading. ASCD. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/taking-the-stress-out-of-grading
Hough, L. (n.d.). The problem with grading. Harvard Graduate School of Education. https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/ed-magazine/23/05/problem-grading
Long, C. (n.d.). Are Letter Grades Failing Our Students? | NEA. http://Www.nea.org. https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/are-letter-grades-failing-our-students
Morgan, Amanda Parrish. (2020, September 2). Is It Time to Reexamine Grading? JSTOR Daily. https://daily.jstor.org/is-it-time-to-reexamine-grading/
MSN. (n.d.). http://Www.msn.com. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/goodbye-letter-grades-a-growing-number-of-schools-are-dumping-the-old-system-and-it-s-paying-off/ar-AA1ktgSi
Strauss, V. (2023, November 14). Analysis | Rethinking the way teachers assign student grades. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/11/14/rethinking-way-teachers-assign-student-grades/
Counterintuitive Fall 2024 
Fix your References list, Indigo. They need MORE than the much-appreciated links. I’ve said this elsewhere. Complete APA bibliographic references are required. The links are optional—and VERY MUCH appreciated—but they are no substitute for the Author Name, the Publication Name, the Date of publication, if available.
Thank you.
I wrote LOTS of feedback and lost it in a terrible WordPress accident, Indigo. The notes that follow might seem terse.
—Eliminate all 2nd-person language
—Crucial factual dispute: teachers don’t award grades based on “doing homework” and “being active listeners.”
—They might factor those criteria as tie-breakers, but grades are for achievement of course goals, mastery of subject matter or skills.
—I don’t love grades, but they distinguish good work from bad work, not good people from bad people.
—Feldman is clever, but he knows he’s lying.
—Achieving half of the possible does not consign 50% of students to failure. It tags the truly incompetent who can’t manage even half of what they should. And Feldman knows it.
—C does not signify “minimum attainment.” D- is the minimum.
—It’s clever, and at first glance, it seems reasonable.
—It’s also true that jerks will deploy the grading system to terminally penalize students who fail at a single assignment.
—But the remedy for unjust instructors doesn’t have to be a vast overhaul of the grading system, does it?
I’ve been interrupted, Indigo. I’ll be back.
—I’m not sure I see the problem here, Indigo.
—From my (obviously biased) perspective, the grade value doesn’t change at all. The point of a test is to measure how well students accomplished a learning objective RELATIVE TO EVERYONE ELSE IN THE CLASS. The curve doesn’t change that.
—If you’re suggesting that every test produced by every teacher should precisely measure what every student learned or can produce RELATIVE TO SOME PRECISE STANDARD, you’re placing WAYYYYYY TOOOOO specific a requirement on instructors. If the average grade on one test is 70, and the average grade on the next test is 90, the disparity is VERY LIKELY the test, not the students.
—You have to ask yourself, which grade is unfair to students? The low C, or the low A?
—I can’t tell if you’re serious about these claims or not, Indigo.
—Are you actually claiming that assigning work CAUSES cheating?
—I recently recognized an assignment that was clearly copied from another student’s earlier post. I admonished the student, who admitted the infraction and replaced the stolen copy with new copy. Who was responsible for what?
—I do find this whole essay fascinating. I wonder how classes should be conducted in order to be fair by your standards.
—I also recognize that you’re not responsible to CORRECT the problems you identify, so I’m completely comfortable with you identifying practices that can RESULT in unfairness even if you don’t claim to be able to remedy the practices.
—That’s fascinating, too, but I wonder how any teacher should be expected to know how much effort a student put into any assignment.
—I also wonder why anyone should CARE how hard a student worked to achieve a crappy outcome.
—And I also wonder how demanding MORE EFFORT would in any way REDUCE PRESSURE. Should students for whom results come easy be forced to PUT IN MORE EFFORT in all their classes merely to satisfy artificial measurements of the WORK they put in?
—That’s interesting, too.
—You won’t be surprised that it reminds me of a class like ours in which REVISION and response to feedback is valued above first-draft brilliance.
—I will tell you, though, and it should come as no surprise, that the BETTER ESSAYS will still earn higher grades than crappy essays into which mediocre students put a lot of EXTRA EFFORT.
—You’re a smart student, and I admire your willingness to present a controversial argument, Indigo. You’re doing a good job here. But I have to say, if only 75% of students experience the stress of keeping up with their schoolwork, 25% of teachers aren’t challenging their students enough. Learning is stressful.
Provisionally graded. Revisions are strenuously encouraged (required, in fact, for short arguments in your Portfolio), and Regrades are always available following significant improvements.
I won’t penalize you for presenting ideas that I think are bunk, Indigo. Your job is not to persuade me; it’s to be persuasive. I’m not your Ideal reader. I think what you’re doing here would resonate well with the reader you’re trying to reach. Therefore, the essay does its job.
Regraded.