Have You Looked At Your Grading Formula?

As a student, I remember being keenly aware of my grades and how my course averages were calculated. I did well in high school and having a good GPA was part of the expectations in my home — and I bought into those expectations.

As a new teacher, I remember crafting a grading formula that was far fairer, relying less on major tests, and more on quizzes and homework. By my second year of teaching, I was grappling with some troubling issues with my grading formula, in fact, with grading in general.

The first issue was that I was perpetually unclear about whether I wanted the grade to represent the student’s level of mastery of the content or the growth and learning that they had done. Somehow, I wanted a singular grade to represent both things, but it was not long before I discovered that a single number cannot effectively represent multiple concepts.

The second issue was that I was asking students to do fairly complex, authentic work. I had already gotten away from multiple choice tests, realizing the problematic nature of these early on. However, trying to defend the awarding of an 85 instead of an 88 for an essay / presentation was proving difficult for me. It was easy for me to look at an essay and tell that it was in the 80’s or in the 90’s, but I could not distinguish, with validity, between something that was an 85 vs an 87. The notion of taking away a point for each grammatical error seemed inane.

An additional problem was that I only taught in a team environment, and sometimes my co-teacher and I had inter-rater reliability issues. This became a great learning moment for us when a student received two copies of her essay back, each with a different grade and asked to speak with us about it. We could have been defensive, but we sat down with her, and we each explained why we gave it the grade we did. At the end, we asked her which grade she thought was more valid. This student, proving she was the smartest of the three of us, said “I think I would like to revise it, given what you both have said about my writing.”

My fourth issue was that a great deal of what I wanted students to get from school, and my course, was neither in the curriculum, nor measured by any school or state test. I wanted students to persevere in problem solving, to be good community members in the classroom, to resolve conflict in productive ways, to manage their time well, and to treat themselves and others with respect. This seemed like an impossible thing for me to grade.

When I describe the way in which I overcame these grading dilemmas to new teachers, I tell them that I cheated, or implemented my own version of the Kobayashi Maru. Instead of chasing a grading formula that would always be ill-fitting, I decided to do away with a grading formula completely. Instead, students received grades and feedback on their assignments and these other expectations throughout the quarter. However, the last assignment of each quarter was a grade justification essay.

The grade justification essay is an opportunity for students to present a case for the grade they think they deserve for that quarter. Students would spend time reviewing their work for the quarter, make a claim as to the grade they felt they deserved, and then outline evidence and logic for that grade.

Sometimes a student asked for a grade that was beyond what they could effectively make a case for. In these instances, we went back into their work and asked what it would need to look like to justify the grade they wanted and then they had the opportunity to revise their work until it represented the level they desired. In most instances, students were tough on themselves and perhaps harder graders than I was.

In any event, my co-teachers and I discovered something in this exercise that ended up being incredibly valuable. By engaging in the practice of self-evaluation and by receiving feedback on how well they were doing with that skill, our students were becoming self-regulating learners. Something that we had been unable to articulate, an 8th grade student had operationalized for us. By listening to two adults discuss her writing, this student took an epistemological approach to her assignment and asserted a right to revise based on a much better understanding of what two different evaluators were looking for.

The point is that no matter how well thought out your grading formula is, it is deeply flawed. You will have issues of validity, bias, and reliability throughout it. It will be impossible to rid any formula of all these concerns. When you let go of the need to be the sole arbiter of the grading process and share ownership with students, you will begin to mitigate these sources of error.

Good luck, and I would love to hear how it goes if you choose to try a grade justification essay!

Laurence T. Spring Ed.D.