The Culture of Grades and Changing the Solar System

 

              Our society expects it: when children go to school, they are graded in return for completed assignments.  Our college and university system demands it: the performance of a student is reduced to the numbers of GPA, class rankings, and test scores.  If secondary schools were to change its system of showing assessment of students, society would notice, and the feedback would undoubtedly be all over the media.  So why now?  I think schools are facing tremendous scrutiny from everywhere, so all parts of the system are under examination.  Tradition is no longer a good enough reason to continue our practices, but neither is it acceptable to change without a clear understanding of what our purpose, goals, and expectations are.

                When I begin class in the fall, I explain to the seniors who have elected to take our dual credit/college preparatory English class that, "Every essay you write begins at a C."  Inevitably, the looks on some of the faces range from relieved to terrified.  But let me explain as I try to do with them.

1.  I want the students to focus on the feedback I write on their rough drafts and use that to improve their writing.  That is my primary focus each year: improvement of current skills.  I try to work with each student to make him/her a more focused, organized, technically stronger writer before college.

2.  If I graded each paper comparatively--that is, comparing what one student writes with what another writes--I would "give" A's to the same students who have always received them and C's to the weaker writers.  I don't think that's fair.  I try diligently not to compare students' essays.  I only assess based on what I believe that student is capable of producing.

3.  Now, that last sentence is sticky.  What if that student that I am pushing to do better simply can't?  I have students write several short, less intense essays at the beginning of the year (I call them responses) so I can get a feel for how each student writes.  (And don't tell them, but they basically get points for getting it done according to directions--nothing else.)  I couldn't have done this when I started my career; I simply didn't have the experience or knowledge of student writing that I do now.

4.  Finally, I want the student to focus on improvement--not the grade.  And therein lay the struggle.  Kids, and occasionally their parents, want the grade.  I find that students who are inordinately focused on the grade are typically the students who are at the top of their class with perfect or nearly perfect 4.0 GPA's.  Their focus has been removed from the learning.  

                So, back to that C on the essay...what I explain after I talk about the value of feedback and the overall goal of improvement is that an A signifies excellence, superiority, and perfection.  Writing is nearly always imperfect because it is subjective.  I have to give a letter grade, or at least a percentage which is translated into a letter grade, so I do.  A student who demonstrates several strong elements beyond what I expect of him/her moves up from that C; a student who doesn't meet my expectation of him/her moves down.  In nearly every case of a student who ends up with a grade below a C, he/she admits to not spending much time on the writing, not following directions, or not focusing on my feedback.

                The problem about this approach should be obvious: it is all about me.  It is all based upon what I think.  What I judge a student to be capable of.  What I value as a composition teacher.  Standards based grading may alleviate some of that, but not all.  As someone who has been examining and discussing the new Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts, there is very little about what "good" writing looks like.  The elements included in the standards can certainly be added to the current curriculum, but they don't really help anyone assess more fairly or effectively.  That still comes down to me.

                I work hard to give my students valuable feedback during the writing process.  I can respond during writing, after a rough draft, during revision, and after the final.  By the time I read the final draft, I may have read a piece of writing a minimum of 3 times.  However, there are always those students who don't have anything on paper until the day the rough draft is due.  I don't read those essays nearly as much.  Do they deserve less feedback simply because they don't participate in the process like others?  Is their writing somehow less important?  And what if they don't turn in a rough draft at all?  Should I put a zero in the grade book or should I call that their "choice"?

                And the kicker for me: what about the student who doesn't turn in a final draft on time?  Does he or she deserve to be punished for not following the schedule?  (A schedule that is determined with their input!)  I have a really difficult time justifying the same grade for the student who does what is asked of them when it is asked as the student who does the work a week later than everyone else.  How is that fair to the 30 or 40 students who did the work on time?  Sometimes there are extenuating circumstances, but sometimes there aren't.  I wonder what the other 40 students would say if we asked them this question.

                I understand what the theorists and researchers say, but I also understand what I believe society expects of schools.  I would like every kid to learn the skills and concepts and have that learning reflected in a grade, but I also know that changing the culture of grading is a bit like asking the sun to come up in the west.  So how about it, sun?  If schools can change, so can you!