The following is adapted from Point-less by Sarah Zerwin.
The firmly entrenched approach to grading in most U.S. high schools operates on a familiar exchange: student compliance for points and grades. This grading system dictates far more than simply how we keep track of our students’ work. The exchange (Willis 1977) is how we entice students to do the tasks we ask of them, how we hold them accountable, and how we report out their progress. The ways students can earn and lose points organize what we do in class with them every day. The grade becomes central. All eyes—students’, teachers’, parents’—may focus on grades above all else.
I’d like to consider four specific ways a points-based approach to grading, what I’ll refer to as “the grading system,” subverts our efforts to inspire students to be readers and writers in a complex world.
The Grading System Rewards Compliance over Learning
The rewards and punishments of a points-based grading system often supersede students’ natural interest in learning. Students may have a desire to get better grades, but that desire gets in the way of their authentic engagement. Compliantly, they “chase marks and become less interested in the learning itself” (Kohn 2011). They read because there will be a test that impacts their final grade. They write because if they don’t, they’ll lose points. They don’t read or write to explore their own ideas, and research speaks to the impact of this on student learning.
A grading system based on compliance is especially damaging for students who simply won’t work for grades and points. The extrinsic motivation means nothing to them. They may or may not show up to class. When they are there, they may do little, no matter how serious the consequences for their grade. They need a totally different invitation to engage in the work of school, an invitation that has nothing to do with grades. But stuck in the grading system, these students are left with no real reason to work in school and do not even begin to practice the reading and writing skills they need to be full agents of their own lives.
The grading system is assessment done to students rather than assessment done with them as equal partners in their learning, and there is a constant threat of grade and point penalties when students don’t comply with what we ask of them. The system forces students to work and monitors them constantly, broadcasting their compliance or noncompliance out via the electronic grade book at every moment. Students learn from the system that what they do in school is not for their own benefit, but rather to satisfy whoever monitors their work—teachers, parents, school administrators, college admissions counselors, and on and on.
The Grading System Asks Us to Measure the Immeasurable
No series of numbers can adequately capture a student’s meaningful, authentic work as a reader and writer, and yet the grading system asks us to quantify the quality of a thesis statement, or the strength of a student’s response to something they’ve read, or how well a piece of writing does in each of the categories on a rubric. The problem is, of course, that the most important reading and writing work our students need to do is not quantifiable. We need them to develop lives as readers. We need them to work with words to capture their thoughts and questions about the world and to communicate them in ways that move readers. This work takes time, risks, reflection, mistakes, starting over, sticking with it. We can describe what all of this looks like, but measuring it fails to capture its full complexity.
The Grading System Suggests Objectivity, but It Is Not Objective
When it comes to data, it’s easy to think that numbers are more objective than words, and the grading system expects us to fill our grade books with numbers that reflect student learning. Even though we are dealing with the immeasurable, we must devise some way to arrive at numbers, so we create rubrics that define how students can earn or lose points on a task. But be honest. How consistently can a teacher objectively follow a rubric from paper to paper? We are not always perfect evaluation machines—teachers are human after all. What if the teacher is tired? Or impatient? Or not thinking clearly? Is it possible to award or take off more points depending on the time of day or how rested the teacher is?
For all their illusive objectivity, the numbers we record in points-based grade books create other issues as well. For example, there is an ongoing debate (Wormeli 2006) about the 0 and the inordinate effect it has on a student’s grade. Some say you should put in 50 instead of 0 to indicate a missed assignment. Other teachers bristle at that because it seems to give students credit for doing nothing. This debate never considers that the problem might be with the grading system itself that requires us to use numbers to document student learning.
All the options we have when we set up our grade books can also trouble with objectivity. What difference will checking the box to weight categories make in students’ grades? How many points should each assignment be worth? What happens if we change grade book settings after there are already several grades recorded—are the resulting changes to students’ grades fair?
The bottom line is, when every single set of points collected goes into a grade book and calculates into an overall, high-stakes grade, our human variances and inconsistencies belie objectivity and can have real consequences for our students. On the other hand, our professional, individualized assessments of our students’ work based on what we know about them as learners can render detailed and accurate descriptions of their learning (Guskey and Bailey 2001, 33). Words may be more subjective, but they are also powerful data.
