Grades That Show What Students Know

Standards-based grading and reporting have been topics of discussion for years, primarily because of the current system's shortcomings (Brookhart & Nitko, 2008; Guskey & Bailey, 2001; Reeves, 2011). In the traditional system, students acquire points for various activities, assignments, and behaviors, which accrue throughout a grading period. The teacher adds up the points and assigns a letter grade.

A variation on this theme is to keep track of percentage scores across various categories of performance and behavior and then translate the average percentage score into a letter grade or simply report the average percentage score (for example, 62.9 percent).