Grading Equity
I’d like to open with some thoughts I had on grading that were formed early in my teaching career, then branch out into how my feelings on a more traditional way of assigning grades have changed.
Old-School Mentality
I’d always felt the letter grade with the plus or minus which you might circle at the end of an essay represents where students are at in relation to the course standards, and that the written comments next to that letter represented a more personalized feedback. A grade of C, for instance, could represent a major leap forward for one student and serious backsliding for another. So the letter inside the circle is the same, but the comments are much different.
Often I’d hear debates about the holistic versus numeric rubric. You know, the first might be a mystical, existential, “this is what the grade seems like,” and the second a process in which where they “get” 1-10 points on the introduction, the formatting, the analysis paragraphs, the conclusion, the research, etc, and you add up the points to get the grade. Proponents of the numeric rubric say it can let the students know more precisely where they need to improve; in his essay “Resisting Entropy” English Professor Geoffrey Sirc, on the other hand, is in the camp of framing these as formulaic, a little disemboweled. He claims the numeric rubric acts as “the genetic code to manufacture the simulation text.” I’ve always been more of a holistic person. The numeric rubric strikes me as a document that protects teachers by justifying the grade through quantifying mechanics. I think it directs students away from ideas, concepts, risk-taking, and creativity and more toward a system-gaming “how can I get points” ethos. Maybe on some level it leads students to see how a piece of writing is a sum of many parts, each with its own criteria, but generally I avoid it.
When it comes to grading as a byproduct of a teacher’s good judgment, problems of difference can arise. I’ve been in plenty of norming sessions where teachers assigned different grades to a common final. Bickering ensues. Different value judgments and graderly ticks emerge. I’d say, based on my experience, it’s more likely two teachers would assign a different grade than the same one for any given piece of writing. In one study mentioned in the book Measuring Growth in English researchers gave 300 college essays to 53 readers, and every essay had at least five different grades and 94% had seven grades or more. Seems inevitable: Sonia Nieto claims on average teachers spend less than three hours a week in structured collaboration with other teachers. I think faculty should do norming sessions routinely to discuss what they think an A paper is, a B paper, etc, but that won’t remedy the problem: students inevitably will have teachers grading their essays in various ways, marking them down for different reasons.
So how hard do you grade? What’s appropriate? What’s assessed? As for me, I tend to be an easy grader. I reward improvement by making essays worth more of the overall grade as the course goes on, and I allow students to revise most of the papers they submit. What’s the point of giving them feedback if they’re not working with it? And shouldn’t they be rewarded for considering your comments thoughtfully? Often students can submit a “portfolio” of what they consider their best work, or of their revised essays, maybe with a reflection that discusses questions about the course, the essays, their revision process. In my first-ever semester teaching at the University of South Carolina, I was told to make a portfolio 50% of the course grade. Four original essays, plus rewrites, and a two-page reflection as a de facto cover letter.
In class, a common practice is to give free writes. I like doing this, and in grading them I really don’t mark things up, I just respond to their ideas. Other types of writing represent practice for an essay or test, and there, I’ll be more hands-on about what they need to do better. I used to wear myself out correcting every tiny little thing, but 1. This is exhausting, 2. It’s frustrating when they keep making the same mistakes, 3. It can discourage students when you give them something with a ton of red ink on it and 4. Most research shows it’s generally a waste of time, especially at the first-year and “developmental” levels. Zaretta Hammond in Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain talks about how grading every little thing can be overwhelming for students. In Teaching College Composition, William Murdick cites research that shows “Teaching and drilling grammatical concepts and rules for correctness did not reduce error counts in student papers.” He discusses Peter Elbow’s method of putting a wavy line under awkward phrasing and a straight line under grammatical errors, but nothing more (akin to the Zen philosophy of giving the student space to create the answer, instead of having them mindlessly replicate what you say the answer is). In her essay “Teaching Composition: Research on Effective Practices” Kathleen Cotton says when it is for writing that is extremely personal, grammar instruction can stick, but that’s about it.
I limit revision, and previewing – in other words helping a student with an essay before they turn it in. There’s such a thing as too much feedback. After a while, the essay becomes more a reflection of your writing ability than a student’s, and there are definitely students who will come to you asking you to mark up their papers over and over and over. Sometimes they start talking to their friends while you’re doing it, or even ask if they can add it to the writing pile the day’s class generates and have you mark it up and return it to them the next class. This is a writing center / tutoring thing: it’s poor instruction to just give students the red ink that will get the paper a higher grade. You’re there to talk to them about the paper, not merely correct it.
What about plagiarism? There are different types, like copy-pasting other people’s writing into their essays and repping it as their own, or having someone else write the paper and you know it’s not their writing but you can’t bust them. That’s why I always thought there was a certain value to in-class tests as a meaningful part of the grade.
If someone is getting that type of help outside of class, they’re kind of kicking the can down the road. This is a thing in online instruction: a student gets a C or D and then they start turning in A work. What can you do? Maybe tell the student you can’t go through life forever getting people to do your work for you. Or AI. Eventually it’s going to catch up to you. Maybe in my class you can get away with some of that, but as an old teacher of mine used to say, if you don’t do the work, you’re only cheating yourself.
There you have it – a relatively basic primer on my thoughts re: grading. But later in my career, I started to have a different outlook.
Different Outlook
One book I’d like to reference and play off of a couple other texts is educator Joe Feldman’s ginormous Grading for Equity. This book in its opening pages gives a primer on the presence of education, or to the point school, in American history. “[I]n the first half of the nineteenth century,” he writes, “the family was primarily responsible for educating children, with schools serving a relatively small role…In each school students of different ages learned side by side with age-appropriate curricula that often consisted of whatever books or other materials were available.” Students would learn basic grammar, and their times tables, and more often than not how to be good Christians, but it was a limited, localized, community-centric experience that wasn’t about transitioning people into the great world beyond or exposure to a variety of new cultures or subject matter.
The early 1800s saw an increase in the number of factories in America, and this changed substantially how schools operated. Feldman tells us that “Owners of factories needed workers, and they put pressure on school boards and city leaders to create schools that prepared their future employees,” implementing such things as “specializations, chain of command, timed routines, and efficiencies.” School, then, was a place where people, primarily white people, primarily white males, were trained for the workforce. College, as it would be for over 100 more years, was the domain of the wealthy white male.
As the 19th century went on America’s population began to explode, particularly in cities, which acted like drains, drawing in rural Americans and immigrants, who mainly were from Europe, which was experiencing, depending on the region, famine, political infighting, religious intolerance, or economic hardship largely due to crowded cities of its own – but also less demand for labor as local markets were flooded with the growing American industrial output. Desperate, they’d set sail in massive numbers. And guess where to? Feldman writes “While in 1820 there were only four U.S. cities of populations over 25,000 people, four decades later, thirty-five cities had populations of over 25,000, with nine cities of over 100,000.” And again, the role of school in America changed, with the structure dictated largely by the demands of industry, but also, crucially, those of a racist society. By the end of the nineteenth century “schools were expected to ‘Americanize’ the diverse, unruly mass of immigrants, rural transplants, and the poor by preparing them with the discipline and habits that factories prized in its assembly-line laborers.” Keep in mind this is primarily a system for white males; people of color were not allowed to participate, as school, in addition to training good factory workers, functioned to turn new European immigrants and white people already in America into the homogenous identity “white.” Schools therefore played a key role in making “white” and “American” in essence, synonymous terms, and preparing the newly formed “white American” for participation in the workforce and various forms of public life that were off-limits to everyone else. It is also important to note that after the Civil War, when millions of freed slaves were potential participants in school and the workforce, America worked to keep them out of these places, while at the same time welcoming en masse more white immigrants.
Later, when desegregation came via 1954’s Brown v. The Board of Education Supreme Court ruling (which led to the rise of charter schools, initiated largely as an alternative for white children whose parents did not want them to attend desegregated schools), what we could call K-12, or primary and secondary education, became accessible to more people. Later, college too would open up to more and more people, and today, we find ourselves in an era where it is, more than ever, a determinant of nearly every American’s worth, status, and viability in the workforce, or lack thereof. Yet it has a centuries-old legacy as a place set up primarily for whites, which remains true for much of today’s K-12 and postsecondary cultures, practices, attitudes, and standards. So you have the problem of other groups of people forced to participate in this overwhelmingly white system that imposes acclimation-or-else, pulling them out of their cultures, their heritages, their identities, and pushing them into something alien. In his book Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies, Asao Inoue, a Professor of Academic Affairs, Equity and Inclusion at Arizona State University, writes “Tests like the army alpha and beta, the SAT and EPT, often are gateways to educational and economic access, privilege, and jobs.” And these tests are overwhelmingly set up to privilege the privileged, so to speak. In 2021, Diane Ravitch wrote that in K-12 education, “Standardized test scores are highly correlated with family income and education. The students from affluent families get the highest scores. Those from poor families get the lowest scores. This is the case on every standardized test, whether it is state, national, international, SAT, or ACT. Sometimes poor kids get high scores, and sometimes kids from wealthy families get low scores, but they are outliers. The standardized tests confer privilege on the already advantaged and stigmatize those who have the least. They are not and will never be, by their very nature, a means to advance equity.” Inoue writes “Adjusting our assessment systems to favor labor over the gifts of racial habitus sets up assessment ecologies that are by their nature more ethical and fairer to all.”
To back up in time, with all these new white immigrants in society, the workforce, the classroom, and crucially, the military, there arose a need for assessment, for measurement, of human beings. Consider the following, taken from the 2019 article “A Primer on Standardized Testing: History, Measurement, Classical Test Theory, Item Response Theory, and Equating”:
“The field of testing developed rapidly during World War I (1914–1918), when the problem of professional selection for the needs of the army and military production became a priority. During that time, leading psychologists organized the Army Alpha Examination to test army recruits. Their success further inspired psychologists to advocate for civilian testing. During the 20th century, large-scale assessment in the United States became a necessity for college admissions and school accountability. The reliance on standardized tests for college admission was a response to the increasing number of students applying to colleges, and it became a tool to tighten the gates in the face of limited resources.”
The country began to see things like the IQ test (1916), the Scholar Aptitude Test, or SAT (1926), even things like phrenology – a pseudoscience based on measuring skull features that would identify a person’s innate talents and characteristics (largely employed to label nonwhites as inferior).
But what about grading in school? An article titled “Making the Grade: a History of the A–F Marking Scheme,” published in the Journal of Curriculum Studies in 2013, gives a very detailed history. One of the first examples of grading in America comes from Yale, where in 1785 one professor at the end of a term ranked his students as Optimi, second Optimi, Inferiores, or Perjores. In 1837, Yale began implementing grades in individual courses, with a 0-4 scale. Often these were kept secret from students to reduce competition. This idea of reducing competition, to counter education in which students were openly ranked and even assigned different roles in a class, like tutor or monitor, based on what their grades were, would emerge, leading to weekly and monthly “report cards” which were being distributed as early as 1835.
According to the text, “By the end of the Civil War, grades were a relatively normal part of primary, secondary, and higher education in the United States” but “Despite this normalcy, they were still determined in a highly disparate fashion, they were represented in various ways – lettered systems, percentage systems and other numerical systems – and schools modified and refashioned grading systems with considerable frequency.” From 1870-1910, K-12 enrollments almost tripled in size, “and as schools grew to absorb these students, administrators found themselves at the helms of massive institutions … In increasingly massive urban systems, teachers could no longer give detailed accounts of every student’s abilities. Yet this was essential for other parts of the system to work. If students were to move from one grammar school to another, for instance, or from grammar school to high school or high school to college, they would need to be tracked in some systematic way.” We see here the reality that matriculation depended on inadequate assessments that were not holistic. And who gets to decide what they are?
By the 1930s, pressure to create uniformity on a national scale grew, and the A-F system was beginning to prevail as the solution. According to the text, “Although the A-F grading system was still not standard by the 1940s, it had emerged by that point as the dominant grading scheme, along with two other systems that would eventually be fused together with it: the 4.0 scale and the 100 percent system…By the mid-twentieth century, grades in American schools had become largely standardized. Most K-12 schools and colleges issued grades of A, B, C, D and F to students (why no “E” grade? Short answer: because “F” stands for Fail, and a sixth grade was deemed excessive), and those grades generally aligned with numerical values – an A reflecting work between 90 and 100, for instance, and a B reflecting work between 80 and 89. By the 1960s, the A-F system was being called ‘traditional’ and the practice of translating letter grades into numbers – A = 4, B = 3, C = 2, D = 1, F = 0 – was being called ‘familiar.’ According to a National Education Association survey (1974), letter grades were in use in over 80% of schools by 1971.”
The A-F system. Should we get rid of it? Does it still work? Might we modify it to be more equitable, more understandable? How? What should we be measuring? It’s not hard to find articles offering “in favor of,” “against,” or “pros and cons.” One example of the latter comes from the organization ThoughtCo, and is titled “Pros and Cons of Using a Traditional Grading Scale.” The pros, as they state them, are that the A-F system is universally recognized, easy to understand, and allows for teachers to measure one student against the progress of the rest of the class. The cons are that it is subjective in nature and thus prone to bias, that it does not always show what a student is learning or provide an explanation for why they got the grade they did, and that it leads to a culture of testing.
Should we get rid of all grades, or even all classifications? Some people think so. In an article titled “The Case Against Grades,” author and lecturer Alfie Kohn writes “Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning…A ‘grading orientation’ and a ‘learning orientation’ have been shown to be inversely related.” Moreover, they “create a preference for the easiest possible task (and) Impress upon students that what they’re doing will count toward their grade, and their response will likely be to avoid taking any unnecessary intellectual risks…the more students are led to focus on how well they’re doing, the less engaged they tend to be with what they’re doing.” He recommends “Replacing letter and number grades with narrative assessments or conferences – qualitative summaries of student progress offered in writing or as part of a conversation” and claims “Teachers can mitigate considerable harm by replacing grades with authentic assessments.” These might include one-on-one (or at the K-12 level, student-teacher-parent) conferences, where teachers, in Feldman’s words, “share academic and study skills data, identify strengths and weaknesses, and identify goals and plans for improvement.” We might argue for grades’ usefulness in determining who gets scholarships, who is an “honors” student, who is more qualified for what school, but if we look at education purely in terms of student learning, maybe, they do more harm than good.
In a web article titled “Why I Don’t Grade,” teacher Jesse Stommel writes “Grades (and institutional rankings) are currency for a capitalist system that reduces teaching and learning to a mere transaction. Grading is a massive co-ordinated effort to take humans out of the educational process.” He believes “education should be about encouraging and rewarding not knowing more than knowing” and “Something like ‘have an epiphany, communicate an original thought, sit uncomfortably with your not knowing, or build something that’s never been built before’ can’t be motivated by a grade.” Feldman in his book brings up a study that shows “For artists, scientists, inventors, school-children, and the rest of us, intrinsic motivation – the drive to do something because it is interesting, challenging, and absorbing – is essential for high levels of creativity.” Letter grades represent “Extrinsic, contingent rewards” which “narrows people’s focus on the short-term and immediate goal instead of allowing their brains the freedom and flexibility to be creative, original, and to imagine alternative possibilities.” A lot of what goes on in a class should be ungraded, and represent practice, trial-and-error, risk-taking, and the like. According to Feldman, “the classroom is a space to take risks without penalty, to disclose weaknesses without being judged, to simply feel safe knowing that they don’t have to perform perfectly day in and day out” and “With no zones of learning that are ‘grade free,’ it becomes nearly impossible to build an effective teacher-student relationship and positive learning environment in which students try new things, venture into unfamiliar learning territory, or feel comfortable making errors, and grow.” If we do decide to give a letter grade, or some type of classification assessment, “Our grading practices should support a growth mindset, encouraging students to take risks and to recognize the fruits of prolonged practicing through mistakes.”
One of my favorite examples of this is the author Michael Chabon talking about a prolonged experience with failure. After winning the Pulitzer Prize for the novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Chabon set out to write a novel titled The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. The central premise of this novel is that instead of Israel, after World War Two, most of the world’s Jews settled in Alaska. The novel is a murder-mystery set here, the site of the world’s lone Jewish state. In a forward to the book, Chabon, a Jewish-American author, discusses his personal investment in the material, the high bar he set for himself, the risks he took, and most importantly, failing for a year before he reassessed his effort, figured out what was working, what he needed to change, and started over. Think about the nature of the project: risky, creative, personal to the writer. And then think about the failure necessary to get to a place of success. So you see, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer outlined an ambitious project, but needed a year of failure and needed several more years of subsequent work before the project was a success. Why do we deny this process to our students? Shouldn’t they have the freedom to do something like this? What about their growth as writers do we stifle when we pressure them to write a 3-4 page analysis paper in a three-week window that must meet the demands of our prescriptive rubric? It’s a text they don’t want to write, and a text we don’t want to read. Consider the words of Susan Sontag, who wrote in her book Against Interpretation that “Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover – moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality – that they would never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar – if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savor rare emotions and dangerous sensations.” Maybe our educational systems are training students to be husband writers. Maybe more “lover writing” would be a way to foster student engagement, nurture their growth, and even decenter an overreliance on white language practices in classrooms.
When constructing the rationales for a student’s grade, teachers according to Feldman should value “practices that are Mathematically Accurate, that Value Knowledge Over Behavior, that Support Hope and a Growth Mindset, that Lift the Veil (in other words makes assessment measures clear and understandable), and that Build ‘Soft Skills.’” One strategy is to avoid the 0-100 scale, which can bury a student early on with no hopes of getting a good course grade, or even a passing one, especially when they get zeros that can’t be made up – the student loses hope, and disengages. Feldman also discourages teachers from offering extra credit, penalizing late work, and including “participation and effort” in a grade. Extra credit, he believes, reaffirms the “rack up points” mentality that takes away a focus on learning course content, and demonstrating knowledge of it (Christopher Emdin, author of For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…And the Rest of Y’all Too, disagrees. He writes, “we must compensate students…with extra credit…If students are rewarded with good grades only for performing well on written tests and following instructions, they get conditioned into thinking that tests and classroom behavior are the only thing that schools value…not compensating students for taking on special projects in the classroom can be more damaging than their receiving bad grades” and that students “should not only be given extra credit on exams and other classroom assignments, they should be celebrated for the extra effort they are taking in the classroom”).
Feldman thinks late work penalties, or not accepting late work, denies students a chance to practice for a summative assessment, and can be ignorant of problems the student might be having that are preventing them from completing the work. In his emphasis on excluding participation and effort, he favors placing nearly all the emphasis on the student’s ability to show what they have learned; this seems to run contrary to something I’ll take up later – the student labor contract, which places nearly all the emphasis on participation and effort. It should be noted that Feldman’s book is primarily about K-12 education, and the labor contract seems to be a product of higher education, but one might note a lack of continuity for a student who goes from one to the other.
Grades, again, should not be about racking up points. Feldman writes, “when we award points, we teach students that the satisfaction, even joy, of learning is not valued or even expected” and that getting a high grade “isn’t really about what you know, but whether you do what the teacher wants – how much you ‘play the game’ of school.” It also makes students fret over permanently lost points. He points to examples of teachers abandoning the points system in favor of qualitative assessments that prioritized the acquisition of content knowledge, and how in response “Students were less stressed, and grateful to not have everything ‘count’ in their grade; to have flexibility to turn in assignments after a deadline and to be allowed to retake exams. Teachers felt the emphasis in their classrooms had shifted from meeting due dates and earning points to learning.” One English teacher he quotes says the goal is to “assess their learning instead of assessing their efforts; do they really understand the work, as opposed to did they do all of the assignments.”
By the way, a “formative assessment” is “a way for the teacher to check what skills students learned from the day’s lesson and what they haven’t yet learned” while a “summative assessment” is “the test or final task used to evaluate students’ content mastery.” Using an analogy of the formative as equivalent to an athlete practicing so they will be ready for a game, Feldman writes they are “readying themselves for an improved performance” and that the performance is what counts, not the practice. He mentions a California middle school where “Summative assessments are weighted between 90 percent – 100 percent of a student’s grade.” In these assessments, it is better to be “attributing more weight to a student’s more recent performance” because “In most cases when we measure and describe someone’s skill, we describe her most recent performance at that skill.” Formative tasks, in his view, are practice, and should be ungraded.
He also thinks courses should reward improvement and not be too urgent with a student’s pace of learning. A student should not be tested on something until the teacher determines that according to their learning pace, they are ready, which might mean different students taking tests at different times, or being allowed to do retakes, because “where the student is in her learning progression defines whether an assessment is formative or summative.” He recommends against giving a substantial amount of homework, which “requires sufficient time outside of class, and many students find themselves overloaded” and may privilege the student who doesn’t have obstacles in the home, and pose an extra burden for the student who does. This may be slightly different at the college level, where adult learners are expected to be able to create time and space for themselves, but as someone who teaches at a community college in a low-income area, one does get the sense that loading them up with things to do at home creates problems for a lot of people who are no doubt disproportionately low-income.
If we do measure effort, he writes, “The most accurate and non-biased reflection of effort is increased academic performance” and students when being evaluated should be “knowing the truth about where they are in their learning, where they have to go, and that we’re here to support them.” He recommends replacing the A-F letters with something like “Exceeding Standards; Meeting Standards; Approaching Standards; Not Yet Met Standards; Insufficient Evidence.” Kohn disagrees with this, writing, “It’s not enough to replace letters or numbers with labels (‘exceeds expectations,’ ‘meets expectations,’ and so on). If you’re sorting students into four or five piles, you’re still grading them.” Nonetheless, if you do give an assessment, it should be tailored to the student: “The teacher,” Feldman writes, “must decide which assessment strategies or design – project, multiple-choice questions, essay, for example – will yield the most complete evidence of a student’s understanding” in order to create an environment that is “Allowing multiple ways for students to demonstrate understanding.” This is necessary because teachers don’t often see all the different ways for a student to demonstrate mastery of content, and “we often superimpose the behaviors we engaged in that made us successful. In doing so, we often ignore the diversity of learning styles, contexts, cultures, and needs among our students.” One teacher he includes in his book claims to “give students different options for assessments (and) the opportunity to choose whatever assessment method they felt most comfortable with.” Classrooms should value “allowing their brains the freedom and flexibility to be creative, original, and to imagine alternative possibilities” and that the assessment methods should be clear, and not what is called an “omnibus grade” where one letter represents a huge array of separate assessments. Also, make sure you are grading the work, not the person. Too many teachers, and I have experienced this myself as a student, make poor work into a negative referendum on the individual. Feldman cites a study that argues “Too often we fail to absolutely clear the distinction between giving feedback on a specific product which has been produced by a person and judging them as a person.”
But what is the nature, or the substance, of the assessments? What are they? How to get them across to the student? Feldman recommends rubrics, though others don’t. In his opinion, these can clarify course objectives, and assignment objectives, and help students see what is required of them, and why that is. He writes that “With a rubric, the teacher’s considerations and definitions of quality are now made manifest for everyone to access. The students don’t have to guess or infer how to succeed.” Kohn however says “Rubrics typically include numbers as well as labels, which is only one of several reasons they merit our skepticism” and cites several studies that suggest it represents a form of classification that in essence is another manifestation of the A-F grading he wants to get rid of. In “Why I Don’t Grade,” Stommel writes that “when they’re given in advance to students, rubrics are likely to close down possibility by encouraging students to work toward an overly prescribed notion of ‘excellence.’”
How to broaden this “prescription”? One teacher Feldman mentions has a gradebook that assesses students on a document they produce (with sections titled “Goal” and “Score”), the assignment’s purpose, and their organization, elaboration of evidence, language, vocabulary, and skill with conventions, which are all assessed over time with comments and observations that can be revised as the student continues to work on projects, and continues to demonstrate increasing command of the learning objectives and subject matter. One teacher’s gradebook has Standards (language, grammar, text structure, central idea: the formative) versus Assignments (submitted writing assignments: the summative); in another’s “With subsequent additional evidence (tests, quizzes, projects) of students’ achievement, she manually updates the grade on each standard when the evidence persuades her that the student’s level of mastery has changed.” And how to do well in all of these areas would be signaled in advance by a rubric.
Grading in Feldman’s view should reinforce that education is a pathway to success, to self-regulation, self-improvement, professionalism, respect, and good public citizenship, and one of the most important means to these ends is known as “soft skills.” Feldman says that soft skills include such things as working collaboratively with peers, time management, planning, responsibility, deadlines, attendance, punctuality, negotiating conflict, problem-solving, creativity, perseverance, respect, following directions; he says these are basically formative practices, preparing a student for a summative assessment, writing “we want them to learn that soft skills, just like homework, are valuable because they lead to better outcomes.” He references one study that asserts “Teachers can structure learning environments that build students’ learning processes and soft skills through meta-cognitive training (reflections), self-monitoring (trackers), and by providing opportunities to practice self-regulation (goal-setting and planning)” and that teachers should think about how to scaffold teaching of a soft skill. Some teachers argue that this will be subjective in nature, in other words dependent on the teacher (which soft skills should be emphasized), and that a variance from teacher to teacher, class to class, might confuse students. Others argue it is hard to assess something like “creativity,” “collaboration,” or “respect” in ways that make clear to students why they got the “score” they did.
One cardinal sin, he thinks, is to use grades as a motivational threat, or as a punitive measure designed to inspire a better, post-punishment effort. He writes, “low grades or the threat of low grades, do nothing for the student who has low confidence in their academic abilities or limited experience with academic success – the majority of students who receive Fs.” It can lead to permanent estrangement from a school setting: “Students who haven’t been successful in school, and who have experienced school as an antagonistic place where they have been tracked, disproportionately suspended, and then told they are failing, are less likely to engage and invest in that very institution than the students who have had a pattern of success.” Teachers “need to show them that no matter where they start, and however many times they fail, success is possible. Otherwise we take away hope.”
A lot of college instructors might be asking, what of this is appropriate for K-12, and what should be employed at the college level?
One emerging form of grading, especially in postsecondary writing courses, is the “contract grade.” In the article “Contracting English Composition: It Only Sounds Like an Illness,” published by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), Professor of English John Smith describes how he sets his grading up. In his courses, “All students sign a contract for a course grade of B.” To maintain their agreed-upon B grade, the students must
• attend and participate regularly;
• keep a journal throughout the course;
• pass nine of ten content quizzes on their assigned readings;
• prepare drafts for class peer review;
• satisfactorily write three of four preliminary papers;
• respond in writing to my comments when each paper is returned (with grades of S or U, meaning Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory);
• submit a satisfactory evaluation of one of those papers and a revision;
• pass a midterm and final exam; and
• submit a satisfactory final documented argument essay
He says “Students can raise their grade to an A by submitting an extra writing project. Their grades may be reduced for failing to fulfill contract items satisfactorily.” As part of the class, he gives ten true or false quizzes; students must get 7 out of 10 right on 9 out of 10 quizzes, and for each quiz that falls short of this, the grade is reduced by 1/3.
The NCTE has a “Committee on Alternatives to Grading Student Writing,” which published an article titled “Contract Grades: An Agreement between Students and Their Teachers” written by Lynda S. Radican, a teacher who specializes in working with students who experience learning difficulties in their reading and writing. Radican writes that in one of her courses, she had “students maintain a portfolio, and if their portfolio contained the core assignments to satisfy basic course requirements, they were guaranteed a C, provided they had attended class and participated actively. Students were then allowed to contract for a B or an A on the basis of their willingness to add high-quality work to their portfolios, work such as additional readings and writings, with a range of possibilities that I outlined in class…Students needed to turn in their contract proposals for their chosen project by the fifth week of the semester and complete drafts by the twelfth week.” Radican also “included a statement in the contract that established my right to ask students to revise assignments that did not demonstrate competent writing skills, including originality of thought, clarity of focus, depth and detail of development, precision of language, and control of mechanics and usage.”
One example from the two-year level comes from a book excerpt titled “My Labor-Based Assessment Agreement With You” written by David Buck, a Professor of English at Howard Community College in Maryland. Buck, advocating a specific type of contract called the “labor contract,” writes that his philosophy is that “Learning is a product of trying, being assessed, receiving feedback, and then trying once again. Instead, grades/points tend to signal to the student that the learning opportunity has ended.” In his contract he tells students “the grade will be a reflection of the quantity of labor that you exhibit throughout the semester” and that “Part of your labor expectation is that you will be an engaged, present participant in our learning community, one who regularly contributes to the growth of others.”
Asao Inoue, a leading proponent of this type of contract, posted an article to his website titled “A Q&A on Labor-Based Grading Contracts.” He describes this contract as “a set of social agreements among everyone in a classroom that determine how much labor (time and work) it will take for any student to get an agreed upon grade (usually a B grade in my courses), with no attention to judgments of quality of writing; however, quality and how various readers understand and respond to writing is central to all of the work in the course.” Like Buck; the contracts have “a default grade of B in the course – that is, we negotiated the B grade primarily, with an A final grade determined by more work, which is also negotiated. I negotiate these contracts in the first week and at midpoint. Then they are firm. There is only one contract for the entire class.” He values “noncognitive traits in students, such as labor, persistence, reflection, compassion,” and in another article writes that he tells students “conventional grading may cause you to be reluctant to take risks with your writing or ideas. It doesn’t allow you to fail at writing, which many suggest is a primary way in which people learn from their practices.”
Here are some sample materials Inoue provides for other instructors:
The labor demands in one course are
– Four projects and one revision OR Three projects, and two revisions
– Invention, drafting, and reflection are required for all projects (design plan, peer feedback, conferences, final draft, reflections)
– Students must complete all in-class activities, homework, and a final reflection
This is an A grade; rubrics for a B, C, D, or F grade show that basically less and less of this work has been completed.
In another course, the demands are
– Complete 20 service learning hours
– Complete the course’s required readings
– Produce an autobiography, lead two discussions, complete a reflection journal, give a presentation, and revise the autobiography
– Complete a project that requires a proposal, and a presentation
And again, the less of this work that has been completed, the lower the grade. It is important to note that the work itself does not impact the overall grade. The overall grade is determined by how much of the work has been completed. In his book Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies, he elaborates, stating students “keep labor journals that keep track of labor sessions for the class in terms of day, location, duration, and even their level of engagement.” The prompts are assessed based on “time spent on the activity, length of the document, and whether the writing addressed the prompt or instructions in the spirit that the work was given,” including reading, writing, journaling, assessing, reflecting, with such things as free writes, reader responses posted online, and students responding to responses. Students reflect on “the nature and intensity” of their labor, which includes drafting, revising, research, continuous feedback, with the understanding that “your labor will be rewarded and not the quality of your work.”
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