January/February 2000

Teachers are using one blunt instrument-grades-to do the job of many tools. What are the alternatives?

By Lisa Birk

Whenever Carin Aquiline sat down to grade a stack of papers, she wondered what grades really meant. She even wondered whether they conveyed useful information to anybody-to students, parents, or teachers.

"I had a student with low skills, who plodded through her work," says Aquiline, a former 11th-grade English teacher who now works in professional development in the Boston public schools. "After a lot of hard work and time, she demonstrated the proficiencies to earn D's. And she was trying. I had another student who was capable of doing B work when he put his mind to it, but he very rarely did the work. His average grade came out to an F."

Those experiences and countless others in Aquiline's eight years of teaching raise familiar questions about how to assess student work. "What is it that we end up measuring by grades?" she asks. "What do grades tell us about students, and do they give us useful information about student learning?"

Practitioners face such questions almost daily. Researchers have been more reluctant to take them on because without commonly accepted yardsticks for student achievement, assessing the relative value and effectiveness of grades is so difficult. Opinions about what teachers do evaluate with grades often conflict with those about what teachers should evaluate.

While most would agree on the general purpose of grading-to provide feedback to students, parents, and others on student performance-finding a consensus on what criteria to use for grading is a different story. Should Aquiline have rewarded the D student for her effort and bumped her grade to a C, which may have caused her parents to interpret the grade as a signal that their daughter's work was adequate rather than barely passing? Or should Aquiline have risked discouraging her student by giving her the D her academic work warranted? And what grade should the underachieving student have received? An F for lack of effort? The failing grade might have prodded him to work harder, but would it have accurately reflected the real quality of his work?

What's in a Grade?

Grades are often based on a mish-mash of conflicting criteria, according to a 1997 survey by H. Parker Blount of Georgia State University. For 86 percent of the teachers questioned, student effort was a factor in their grading. Eighty-two percent said they used grades to motivate students. Said one teacher in Blount's study: "It isn't because I believe that grades evaluate a student's knowledge. It's because the grades motivate the students to work hard. I believe that if we were on a pass/fail system most students would do the bare minimum to pass." Blount explains the psychology of the carrot-and-stick motivational system: "[O]ne promising student with a sagging self-concept is rewarded with a grade. Another promising student who is off-track is threatened and cajoled with a grade."

In neither case does the grade reflect content mastered. And since at most schools there is no single grading policy, teachers tend to give grades for many different reasons: to measure content mastery, to chart progress, to motivate students, and to provide information to a variety of audiences from students to parents to college admissions boards. Meanwhile, parents are left to determine for themselves exactly what those grades reflect.

Part of the problem may be in the evaluation method itself. A grade does not communicate all that many teachers want to say. As researchers Jeanne H. Hubelbank of Pine Manor College and Peter W. Airasian of Boston College pointed out in a 1997 article for the American School Board Journal, teachers they studied "wanted to say much more than their report cards allowed. They were more interested in describing how a child [was] learning than what level she had attained."

English teacher Charles Kamar of Newton (MA) North High School sees that phenomenon at work in his own school. While Kamar reports that he has felt little pressure to inflate grades, he has seen colleagues deal out A's and B's on papers that he would not have given such high grades. He wonders if those teachers are trying to judge something other than content mastered. "There might have been a huge improvement in the student's work," he speculates. "The teacher might have been giving an incentive."

While using grades for motivational purposes is common, say Hubelbank and Airasian, the danger is that an A, B, or C-the teacher's "message" to the student-may have no clearly defined meaning. An A might mean 100 percent of material mastered, or it might mean the student tried hard-or something else altogether.

When it comes to grading, teachers face a variety of pressures, from administrators who want to make their schools look good in district studies to parents whose kids' GPAs may affect college and financial aid applications. As Blount points out, grades, like money, have become a medium of exchange. He writes: "Students can exchange grades for recognition, awards, scholarships, and admittance to prestigious colleges and universities."

Parents are especially eager to get more information from grades, according to an as yet unpublished survey of nearly 500 K-12 parents conducted by Dennis Munk of Northern Illinois University. In that survey, parents identified up to 10 different purposes they wished grades served. According to Munk's preliminary analysis of the data, the top three purposes parents identified were to "communicate progress on individual goals and mastery of specific content, communicate child's effort and work habits, and communicate child's strengths and needs and provide feedback on how to improve." But can a single grade communicate three data points? Perhaps it's not surprising that "[the majority of parents] felt that grades were not very effective," says Munk.

Why Are Grades Going Up?

Whatever it is that grades represent, more students are getting A's than ever before. In 1984, 28 percent of all students taking the SAT reported an A average, according to Wayne Camara of the College Board. In 1999, Camara says, 39 percent of SAT-taking students reported an A average, an 11 percent increase over 15 years.

Could it be that this year's crop of college-bound students are smarter than their 1984 counterparts? Not according to their SAT scores. Scores on both the math and verbal portions have fluctuated only about 20 points over the last 23 years-between 490 and 510 on a test where 800 represents a perfect score. Yet despite no demonstrable improvement on the SAT since 1976, students continue to report more A's.

One troubling aspect of grade inflation is that it masks the failure of many impoverished schools. Many students in both low- and high-poverty schools get A's, but their achievement diverges dramatically as measured by 8th graders' scores on the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) standardized tests.

In high-poverty schools (where more than 75 percent of students receive free or reduced-price lunch), students who got A's in English scored roughly the same on the reading test as those who got C's or D's in the most affluent schools, according to a 1994 U.S. Department of Education study. The Study, by researcher Judith Anderson, found the discrepancies in math even worse. The "A" students in high-poverty schools received test scores similar to those of the "D" students in the most affluent schools. Neither Anderson nor the College Board's Camara would speculate on why there is the discrepancy.

The Trouble with Grades

Teachers, it turns out, are using one blunt instrument-grades-to do the job of many tools. Consequently, grades may create misunderstanding. Parents and students may read a student's A or a B as high achievement, when the teacher may mean solid effort and success relative to his low-achieving peers. As a result, that student may never get the help he needs.

Some believe that the trouble with grades is deeper, more insidious. "When students are focused on getting good grades, three things tend to happen: their interest in what they are learning declines, the quality of their thinking drops, and they tend to prefer the easiest possible task," says education writer Alfie Kohn, a critic of the carrot-and-stick approach to grading. "We shouldn't be worried that too many kids are getting A's," says Kohn. "We should be worried that too many kids think that the point of school is to get A's."

Blount lays some of the blame for this inflated grade economy on extra-credit assignments that routinely allow students to raise their grades. "[E]xtra credit raises grades but generally does not augment learning," he writes. The result: "Learning is not the fundamental goal; improving grades seems to be the main objective."

Kohn believes that many if not all of the pitfalls of grading can be avoided by replacing grades with qualitative assessments such as narrative descriptions of students' work, parent-teacher conferences, etc. Qualitative assessments offer some advantages: they allow teachers to describe, with complexity and nuance, a student's learning process, and therefore offer parents and students more insight into the student's progress. Of course, there is a downside. Writing narrative descriptions for 100 or 150 students is a time-consuming proposition. And, for better or worse, college admissions boards and employers often prefer grades and numbers over narratives.

What to Do?

Any solution to grade inflation will be, like the problem, multifaceted. The first step is to define the problem. The standards-based reform movement has no doubt created some urgency to clarify exactly what grades mean-a discussion that has been happening in higher education for years. With state-mandated tests and curricula, grading may now need to fit into a system that includes other measures of performance. In New York, for instance, some schools are displaying scores from the state Regents Exams on report cards next to the grades in corresponding courses.

Anderson of the Department of Education suggests that schools provide an annual report card with data including drop out rates, average SAT and AP scores, and percentage of seniors matriculating to post-secondary schools. She believes that kind of information will help parents and students of high-poverty schools make better sense of grades.

Clearly, conveying an accurate portrait of students as learners is a complex task. Perhaps the most promising approaches are those that separate achievement from effort from ranking. The Boston Arts Academy, a pilot school in Boston, MA, has done just that. Twice a year, teachers evaluate student achievement with a grade and every other aspect of the learner with a narrative. Headmaster Linda Nathan describes how a narrative for "Kelly," who will never get A's but works hard, might read: "There have been 16 assignments, and Kelly has completed 10, four of high quality. She worked really hard on this particular piece, and she's just beginning to grapple with this year's question: What makes us human?"

This system allows teachers to communicate student achievement, effort, and conduct without diluting the grade or quashing student self-esteem, says Nathan. "Teaching is both an art and a science," she says. "It's the science that grades and compares. It's the art that looks at the human side."

Lisa Birk is a freelance writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

For further information

J. Anderson. U.S. Department of Education, Room 5W119, 400 Maryland Ave., SW, Washington, DC 20202; 202-401-3944.

H.P. Blount. "The Keepers of Numbers: Teachers' Perspectives on Grades." The Educational Forum 61, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 329-334.

Wayne Camara, College Board, 45 Columbus Ave., New York, NY 10023; 212-713-8069.

J.H. Hubelbank and P.W. Airasian. "Teachers Say Grades Aren't Enough." American School Board Journal 184, no. 12 (December 1997): 31.

Alfie Kohn. The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards." Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

Dennis Munk, Department of Teacher Education, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115; 815-753-8443.

Linda Nathan, Headmaster, Boston Arts Academy, 174 Ipswich St., Boston, MA 02215; 617-635-6470.

National Center for Educational Statistics, 555 New Jersey Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20208; 202-219-1777.

"What Do Grades Mean?" A report by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, 555 New Jersey Ave., NW, Room 610e, Washington, DC 20208-5648.