As the school reform movement unfolds and many aspects of schooling are being overhauled, one element remains frozen in time: the report card. The practice of assigning students a single letter grade in each subject has remained virtually unchanged for generations.
But today, as teaching practices change, dissatisfaction with the limitations of letter grades is growing, experts say. Innovations in instruction—such as whole language, cooperative learning, and outcome-based education—call for a more flexible approach to reporting achievement, many believe. In response, some educators are seeking better ways to report what their students have accomplished.
According to critics, traditional letter grades have many drawbacks. Grades are symbols, but what they represent is unclear. Because they are not keyed to any common standard, letter grades do not indicate—except in the most general way—what students know and can do in a subject area.
Letter grades are norm-referenced, notes Grant Wiggins, director of programs for the Center on Learning, Assessment, and School Structure (CLASS). Most teachers grade students relative to their classmates, not against an absolute standard: "They give A's to their best students and work down from there."
Grade distribution is typically determined by the bell curve or by school norms, experts say. Teachers new to a school are told (at least implicitly), "We give 10 percent of our students A's, 30 percent B's, 40 percent C's, and so on," says Gene Glass, a professor of education at Arizona State University. Thus letter grades orient educators toward a system that sorts students rather than one that helps them all succeed, says Howard Kirschenbaum, an adjunct faculty member at the State University of New York—Brockport, who has written about grading practices.
Under such a system, it is a foregone conclusion that only a minority of students will do well. Some educators are questioning this artificial scarcity of success. "Why should only a handful of students get an A," wonders Ruth Blynt, a high school English teacher from Holland Patent, N.Y., "if you're really doing your job and they're [all] really doing the work?"
Educators are also questioning the reductiveness of letter grades. "The biggest problem with report cards is that everything is reduced to one grade," says Wiggins. Although a student's performance has many facets—including effort, progress, and achievement—teachers assign one grade out of expediency. "A single letter grade is a travesty," Wiggins says. "It doesn't tell you anything."
Letter grades don't carry much information about a student's strengths and weaknesses, agrees Joan Herman, associate director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST). Hence, they don't give parents or future teachers insight into how to help students improve.
Another drawback to letter grades, critics say, is their lack of objectivity. Grades are "essentially arbitrary," Glass says. For example, there is no way to make meaningful "break points" between the different grades: What distinguishes a low A from a high B? To disguise this arbitrariness, teachers must create complex grading systems that seem objective and fair. This "sleight of hand" leads to inauthentic relationships with students, Glass believes. "Teachers know grading is a scam," he says. "They feel ashamed and guilty."
Old-style grading can also undermine new teaching practices, experts say. When Blynt adopted a writing workshop approach in her English classroom, she wanted to create an environment where it was "okay to take risks," to encourage her students to experiment and help them build confidence. But after 10 weeks—just when her students were beginning to feel comfortable with the new approach—she was "required to paste a grade on them," she says. Grading her fledgling writers was "unfair to the kids and to the program," she asserts.
Another common argument against letter grades is that they demoralize slower students, whose motivation to learn is extinguished by the constant rain of negative feedback. Grades can also create a ceiling for high achievers, who have little incentive to do more than what's necessary to snag an A. Critics also deplore the competition among students that letter grades engender.
Some experts dispute these criticisms of letter grades, however. For example, Monte Dawson, director of testing for the Alexandria, Va., public schools, rejects the notion that grades cause slower learners to expect to fail. "There are lots of components of that self-fulfilling prophecy besides grades," he says, including how teachers interact with students (the number and type of questions teachers ask them, for example). Dawson is not willing to assign the lion's share of blame to grades alone.
"Labeling is certainly an issue," Herman says, "but I worry about the opposite extreme"—namely, that without grading, schools would have no clear standards, and the system would be under no obligation to help students improve. "The grade represents a combination of the [work of the] child, teacher, and system," who have joint responsibility for student success, she says.
Some Alternatives
Do better alternatives to letter grading exist? The alternatives most commonly cited by experts are (1) narrative reports, in which teachers describe and comment on students' learning, and (2) a mastery approach, in which the report card—a list of objectives—indicates whether the student has mastered each competency.
Narratives, experts agree, provide much more information than letter grades, including diagnostic information. Narrative reports also "challenge teachers to think more deeply about how to reach students," says Glass. But most experts concede that they are very time-consuming, especially for secondary teachers.
Narrative reporting "has possibilities," but a checklist of competencies is easier and just as good, says Lynn Canady, an education professor at the University of Virginia. However, as Dawson notes, a checklist of objectives does not indicate a level of mastery. Nor does it answer a question parents commonly ask: "Is this good enough?"
In each broad skill area, schools should report where a student's performance lies on a continuum, advises Rick Lear of the Sedona-Oak Creek (Ariz.) Unified School District. Doing so would encourage students to focus, not on what grade they received, but on what they know and can do, he believes.
Letter grades should become "more formalized" around a standard set of performance tasks, Dawson proposes. Such an approach would yield "a degree of reliability across teachers," he says, as well as information that could "feed back into the curriculum development cycle" and help teachers refine their instruction.
Schools should provide both criterion and norm-referenced evaluation, says Wiggins. Letter grades can be a good thing, he believes, if parents and others can "translate the code"—if they know what level of performance the grades represent, through familiarity with rubrics and anchor papers. Grades should also chart progress, to motivate students to improve. Moreover, longitudinal reporting, keyed to an absolute scale of performance, will "force the issue" if students are not improving, he predicts.
Given the political and parental pressure for grades, can another system work in practice? Based on their own experiences, some educators say "yes."
At School Without Walls, a four-year high school in Rochester, N.Y., teachers write narrative reports in a number of skill areas for each student, says Principal Dan Drmacich. They also rate students' progress and effort (using the scale "high/growing/beginning/none"), and write recommendations about what students should work on in the next marking period. In the past, teachers also assigned letter grades, but the school eliminated them because students focused on them too exclusively.
The school's approach to reporting is "an awful lot of work" for teachers, Drmacich says, but "there's no question it makes learning more meaningful for students." Parents also find it helpful. (Parents have accepted the system, in part, because School Without Walls is a school of choice, Drmacich says.)
Although college admissions requirements are often cited as an obstacle to new reporting practices, students from School Without Walls have gone to "virtually every college in the country," says Drmacich. When students applying to college submit a portfolio of reviews rather than a grade point average, they are seen as individuals, not as numbers, he says. "It's to our kids' advantage."
Despite signs that colleges are becoming more flexible, experts are not, on the whole, sanguine that change in grading practices is coming soon. "I'm cynical about this," says Kirschenbaum. "History has shown that grading reform just doesn't stick."
This dour outlook is borne out by stories of past efforts to replace letter grades. As a middle school principal in Richmond, Va., in the early 1970s, C. Fred Bateman (now superintendent of the Chesapeake, Va., public schools) spearheaded a no-grading policy that "worked fine" after the school convinced parents they were still going to get information about their children's achievement. Instead of letter grades, the school provided a checklist of what students could do, coupled with narrative descriptions. (Parents who also wanted a class ranking were given standardized test results, which showed percentile rankings.) "We thrived in that environment," Bateman recalls. Nevertheless, only a few years after he left the school in 1976, letter grades had made a comeback.
This resistance to change concerns some educators, who believe more is at stake than report cards. Given the intertwined nature of curriculum, instruction, and assessment, letter grades may act as a brake on systemic reform. Reporting practices must be rethought for any real transformation of schools to take place, says Lear. "Now, grades and credit drive everything," he says. "Reporting should serve the learning."