What's in a Name?

My husband asked me why I kept referring to this new grading system as "standards" based. It seems to imply that the traditional method of grading did not invoke any standards. Obviously the name was chosen to brand SBG in a good light. SBG is basically a relabeling of the failed"outcomes" based education theory which was unsuccessfully tried at various schools around the world. OBE has largely been dropped due to fact that it does not work. I believe the same outcome is in store for SBG. The question is how many children will be subjected to this progressive grading fad before it is dropped for the next latest and greatest trend?

The real irony in naming this type of system "standards" based is that it does not rely on any true set of standards. Under this type of system grading becomes much more subjective and a students progress is judged not based on their actual display of knowledge, but on the individual teacher's perception of their knowledge. I believe the chance of teacher bias goes way up when SBG is used. The fact that SBG is implemented in different ways every place it is used - even within a single school district - shows that it truly is without a set "standard."

An Overview

School seemed a lot simpler when I was young. You’d go to class, do your best to get good grades, and at the end of the term when you were handed you report card you pretty much knew what to expect. Sure, some teachers were harder than others, and while you might not have always agreed with every grade that you got, you knew what was expected of you. The system worked pretty well. Or so we all thought.

Enter the standard’s based grading system. The proponents of this system believe the old ways of grading are critically flawed. They seek to replace the standard grading scale (where you are given either an A, B, C, D or F based on a percent from 1-100) with different scale from 1-4, where the points represent the following:

4 = Inferences & application that go beyond what is taught

3 = No major error in the information that was explicitly taught

2 = No major errors in the simpler details but errors in the complex ideas

1 = With help, a partial understanding of the information taught

Some schools are working towards a system where these are the only scores reported on grade cards and class rankings no longer exist. Other schools are using a mixed approach where the number scores are then translated into a percent so that letter grades can be assigned. The translation in my school district is roughly as follows:

4 = 100% = A

3 = 92-93% = A-

2 = 76% = C

1 = 60% = D

Please note that not every teacher within my school district uses the same translation and it can vary immensely from school district to school district. Right off the bat it is easy to see that this system completely dismisses the “B” grade, a range that large quantities of students fall into. Some teachers gain a greater range of results by adding in half or quarter increments to the scale. However, this even further confuses and complicates the grading process.

Over the course of this blog I intend to give my viewpoint on the standards based grading approach. In a nutshell, I believe it is a confusing system that marginalizes students. I believe it will ultimately be unsuccessful in real world application.