The Meaning of Grades

The Wake County Board of Education recently considered instituting a minimum grade of 50 (out of 100) for assignments that students failed to turn in, and limiting the penalty for work turned in late to 10% of the grade. They were concerned about the practice of teachers giving zeros for missing assignments and taking significant points off of late assignments. Wake County Public Schools is the largest school district in North Carolina, so this policy change would affect a lot of students. Some of the teachers in the county didn’t like the idea of the Board dictating their grading procedures, so the Board has dropped the idea of a mandate and has switched to making these ideas their “suggestions." While I understand and sympathize with the teachers’ discomfort with such specific grading requirements from the Board, I share the Board’s concerns when it comes to grading.

I am totally opposed to giving students zeros. I am also opposed to automatically subtracting points for late work. Allow me to explain.

I believe that, as teachers, we should be concerned with helping all of our students learn what we are trying to teach them. I don’t believe we should be concerned with making sure that they all learn it at the same speed. We know that people are individuals and learn at individual rates, in individual ways, and require individual supports at times. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, we insist on assigning grades to everything and we base our education system on the assumption that all students require one year or one semester to master whatever content we decide to throw at them. Does anyone else see a disconnect there?

First of all, grades are unnecessary and dehumanizing. No, that is not an exaggeration. We can determine whether a student has learned what we wanted him to learn without assigning an A, B, C, D, or F to him. We can simply say “Yes” or “No.” Why do we insist on this obsession with categorizing people, ordering them from best to worst, over and over again? We don’t need grade point averages or class rankings, either. We can eliminate the whole idea of the high-school class valedictorian without causing any harm to the well-being of anyone. Some school districts have already done this, and their students are doing just fine. In fact, I’m guessing it would help us all much more than it would hurt us to stop grading everything. It would put the focus where it ought to be — on the learning, on the skills, on whether students can do things with what they know.

When a student gets a zero, whether because he does a very poor job on an assignment or because he doesn’t do an assignment, what purpose does it serve? If the student’s grade for the course is based on cumulative points or weighted points, which most grades are, a zero can create a situation where, no matter how well he performs on every task remaining in that course, he will be unable to earn a grade that accurately reflects his level of knowledge and skill. Teachers who use 100-point grading scales should never give grades lower than 50, logically speaking. After all, the difference between an A and a B is 10 points. The same holds true for the difference between a B and a C, and between a C and a D. It is nothing more than excessive punishment when a teacher gives a student a zero for a missed assignment. Douglas Reeves wrote an excellent explanation of this in his article The Case Against the Zero.

Regarding penalties for late work, I can only ask again, why? What is the purpose in taking points off of a grade because the student turned it in late? What does this accomplish, other than punishment? If a grade is meant to communicate something about a student’s skills and knowledge, what does it communicate when you lower the grade for tardiness? That he learned too slowly? That, no matter what his work actually showed, he only learned, at most, 90% of what he needed to learn? The most common argument I hear from teachers about this issue is that they are using the late penalties to teach students the importance of respecting deadlines and of responsibility. To which I always want to reply, “Do you meet every deadline you’re given? When you’re late turning something in to your principal, are you penalized 10% of your salary? Or, are your evaluation ratings dropped by 10%?” Just because banks and libraries charge late fees doesn’t mean we have to do it, too. As educators, we should be more reasonable than that.

If grades are supposed to communicate accurate information about how well the students mastered the content, then that’s all they should be about. And, if grades don’t actually communicate accurate information about how well the students have mastered the content, because we have lowered the grades for late or missing assignments, then we need to stop giving them at all. This is where it becomes obvious that, although most teachers are trying to educate their students, a few of them are more interested in wielding power and doling out punishments than they are in pedagogy. They cling to the ideas of the zero and late penalties because they grew up with them and because they like having that power. They will claim it’s about integrity and life lessons, but it’s really just about power and hierarchy. The way our schools are structured only reinforces these dysfunctional power relationships and it is up to us, as the adults in the room, to be the voices of reason. We need to refocus the entire endeavor on the students and their learning, not on ranking and punishing them.