For various reasons, I’ve been re-thinking the building of grading systems.
I’m not in love with the 0-59, 60-69, 70-79, 80-89, 90+ F-A system we almost always adopt.
It doesn’t align student education incentives properly.
In building a system that properly aligns incentives, you have to think of a lot of things.
- Why is a student in the class?
- What are they trying to learn?
- What do they need to know?
- Does the topic affect more than simply that class?
- Are they building a basis for other life skills?
- Do you think you (as the teacher) have an obligation to help them in other areas?
Let’s take a few examples.
Example 1: High school business courses
I taught high school for a short time. I taught Financial Literacy, Entrepreneurship, and Introductory Computer Science.
Because it was high school, the students couldn’t always define why they were in my class. I had to provide a lot of guidance for them. My goals were simple
- Prepare them for independence and adulthood
- Teach them the subject
- Encourage them to try things and to learn from every attempt
For these reasons, I built the grading system as follows
0-20% F
20-40% D
40-60% C
60-80% B
80-100% A
50% of all points were based on mastery (demonstrating understanding of the material).
50% of all points were based on professionalism. This was broadly defined, but we can think of it as being on time. Students lost 10% of professionalism points for every day the assignment was late. Assignments could be turned in until the last day of class. (At that point the max points they could get were the 50% for mastery.)
This does two things:
- Students are incentivized to optimize good work and on-time delivery. If they know they’ve procrastinated, they can still spend time in focused learning to understand the topic and demonstrate mastery of it by taking an extra day or two.
- It allows the teacher to be far more strict in grading mastery. Mastery is simply that. Finished work has to be be good, deep, thoughtful, and/or correct. Technical, logical, or other errors are appropriately graded without thought of whether the student may eventually have a “my GPA is too low” complaint.
- There is a bit of “does their grade get inflated if they are doing shite work but turn it in on time?”
- Yes, if they earn 10% mastery but get the full 50% for professionalism, that is possible. However, I rarely found students could get full professionalism points without having at least average mastery of the topics.
As an aside, I did not give out +/- grades. You got the full letter based on where your percentage came out. No exceptions.
This mimics adulthood. Things are generally cut and dry. You can argue otherwise, but what you do is acceptable or it is not. It is on time or it is not. You’re better learning in a relatively safe environment (school) than in the real world.
Oh, you didn’t pay your mortgage this month…? Well…
Example 2: Theoretical university course
If you have to account for +/- because a university requires it. (You can probably get away without doing so.)
Assignments fall into three categories:
- Course mastery: Coursework, tests, quizzes, etc.
- Personal development (skills)
- Personal development (mind)
The two personal development assignments are worth a + to each grade.
So regardless of how you set up your percentages, full points is only worth a high B.
For an A, they must get a B and complete both the personal development assignments. (Two +, which would raise to an A- (B, B+, A-) and then you give them an A for “synergy” which is the hand-wavy way to placate the anal students.)
But you don’t give synergy credit for grades lower than B. Because life isn’t always fair, and there must be consequences for choices that led to that C/D. Also because you can’t have a student with a D mastery who gets a C only because they spent time on personal development. A C- is generous enough for that student.
Conclusion
Neither of these is perfect. But if the goal is to focus on learning and think a bit less about education and to prepare people for independence, this does a lot better than the normal method of grading.