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.
