A Ceiling on Grades

Ethical Educator

Scenario:

A high school art teacher doesn’t give any grade above a 96 in her studio art elective because she believes there are always opportunities for improvement.

A senior consistently on the school’s high honor roll believes the 96 she earned fails to reflect her hard work and accomplishment in this course, thus leaving her with a lower grade than she believes she deserves.

Is this grading approach appropriate?

Max McGee: 

Having gone on record as a vociferous opponent of grade weighting because of its deleterious impact on learning and students’ mental health, nonsensical mathematics and contribution to the performance arms race, I am with the art teacher on this one.

Were this an AP art class in most schools, our hapless student with a 96 would earn a full extra grade point. Thus her 4-point A would actually be 5 points and her 96 percent would be a 106 percent. Wow! How one can get 5 points on a 4 point scale and a 106 percent of anything defies both common sense and mathematics. However, our driven young student has the good fortune to have an art teacher who believes that students always have room to improve and should strive to get better. The greatest artists, musicians, athletes, writers and scientists became great by continually finding new ways to accomplish what they did best, to put in long hours of practice, to immerse themselves in reflection and study, and ultimately to achieve goals that were once considered impossible to attain.

This art teacher’s grading philosophy is a valuable life lesson and one I hope sticks with this senior. If so, perhaps we will have the good fortune to see her work displayed. If not, I wish her luck as she continues to focus on grades instead of all that she has yet to learn. She will need it … and much more.

Maggie Lopez:

The district and/or school typically have a grading policy that teachers follow. This provides consistency for students as they move from class to class. This also allows grading guidelines to be consistent as opposed to at the whim of the instructor. If this district or school doesn’t have such a policy, this is a good reason to develop one.

Potentially, every teacher could have an exception to the traditional grading scale and create a tapestry of different rules regarding what a teacher perceives as an A or B. Are grades about performance or do they merely reflect whatever benchmark the teacher sets as his or her personal bar for a student’s accomplishment?

In this specific situation the teacher has created a scenario that is based on her personal beliefs as opposed to any regularly viewed academic guidelines. It is not appropriate for the teacher to be using grades as a way to “teach students a lesson.” Although grading art studio work is subjective at best, this is not only very much a personal view the teacher is imposing on her students, it also sends a message of “you will never be good enough.” If I were this student, I would be discouraged and angry that I could never attain better than a 96 no matter how hard I worked. Is that really the message this teacher wants to give her students? Furthermore, how does that motivate a student to improve?

Meira Levinson:

This grading approach is not appropriate because it fails to fulfill any of the criteria for assigning grades.

Broadly speaking, grades may be calculated on the basis of students’ demonstrated:

1. mastery of the learning goals (i.e., criterion-referenced grading);
2. improvement over time (something like a value-added approach for students, focused on growth rather than absolute attainment);
3. relative achievement in comparison to others (i.e. norm-referenced grading); and/or
4. effort to master the material (taking into account that students who face certain limitations may work very hard but demonstrate only small improvement and little relative or absolute mastery, and also enabling teachers to distinguish between students who coast on their talents versus those who work hard).

There are plausible justifications for taking each of these criteria into account when calculating and assigning grades. Even educators who claim to be focused solely on one metric (say, overall mastery) often tweak grades a bit in response to other considerations (say, demonstrated effort or improvement). Although teachers and even school districts often pretend otherwise, there is no objective science of grading. It is a messy and inevitably subjective practice.

No matter how the studio art teacher constructs her own criteria for grading, however, there is little justification for her refusing to make available to students the 97-100 point range that report cards could include. It is unreasonable to set maximal mastery, improvement or effort goals that are impossible for students to reach. (Presumably norm-referenced grading also would enable a student to earn 100 if she was significantly above the rest of the class.)  Such scores could plausibly be rare, but they should not be out of bounds.

All this being said, I am sympathetic to the art teacher’s goal of communicating to students that there is always more work to be done—and perhaps correlatively, that they should therefore be indifferent about whether they earned a 95 versus a 99 in a studio art elective. The question is whether grades are the right communicative mechanism to teach this life lesson. Because grades are used to communicate not only with students and parents, but also with college admissions officers, employers, merit scholarship evaluators, the art teacher needs to consider whether there are other effective ways to teach students about the never-ending horizon of improvement than to impose an artificial ceiling on numeric grades.

Shelley Berman:

Many problems exist with our grading and assessment systems, particularly ones using the 0 to 100 grading scale. However, this teacher’s approach is particularly egregious. In essence, this teacher sees herself as an autonomous actor and her grading as her own private practice. She fails to understand that grades should accurately reflect mastery of a set of content standards and be applied consistently across courses in a school in order to communicate effectively about student achievement.

Grades should not depend upon which teacher a student has or how hard or easy that person grades. Students achieving at the same level in different classes should receive similar grades, and teachers across the school should apply similar grading practices. Although subjectivity and teacher discretion in grading will still exist, the more a school focuses on a consistent standards-based model, the greater the likelihood that grades will relate to mastery in a meaningful way.

Grades communicate to the student, parents, employers, and college admissions how well a student mastered the subject. A teacher who grades much harder than another or uses a truncated scale distorts the accuracy of that communication and compromises the school’s consistency in grading practices. The teacher’s point that there is always room for improvement will be the case in every course and on every task, not just her courses and assignments.

However, consistency in grading practices across a school doesn’t necessarily mean that the school’s overall grading system is fair or that grading practices are well designed to promote learning or reflect mastery. Leaders and researchers in assessment have pointed to numerous practices that undermine the value of various grading practices; for example, using zeroes as scores in a 0 to 100 grading scale when 70 is established as a passing grade, giving equal weight to scores across an entire course rather than focusing on mastery at the end of the course, or using cumulative grade point averages to establish class ranks. Given that we should use grading systems to support learning and to reflect achievement on a set of content standards, schools would be well served to review their grading practices and systems to ensure these practices consistently encourage rather than undermine student achievement.

Each month, School Administrator draws on actual circumstances to raise an ethical decision-making dilemma in K-12 education. Our distinguished panelists provide their own resolutions to each dilemma. Do you have a suggestion for a dilemma to be considered? Send it to: magazine@aasa.org.

The Ethical Educator panel consists of

• Shelley Berman, superintendent, Andover, Mass.; 
• Meira Levinson, professor of education, Harvard University, and author of Dilemmas of Educational Ethics: Cases and Commentaries;
• Maggie Lopez, retired superintendent in Colorado Springs, Colo.; and 
• Glenn "Max" McGee, a former superintendent and regional president of ECRA Group in Schaumburg, Ill.