Unit 10 Grading and Reporting Laura Sosnowski

I teach developmental math courses (that is arithmetic, algebra and geometry) to college age students. Grading math tests and quizzes can be long tedious work because the students have terrible handwriting, yet I feel compelled to not only award points for correct answers, but to assess procedure. Assess doesnt have to mean grade. In math it is quite possible to come up with a wrong answer due to one tiny mistake, even though the student completely understands the material and follows all correct procedure. It is also quite possible to find the correct answer even though the work is misguided, or due to copying from ones neighbor. Which student deserves the higher grade? I believe this demonstrates why I must read through their work. No credit for a lucky-and-magical correct answer using a totally incorrect procedure, but almost full credit for good math and one tiny silly arithmetic mistake (such as 1+2 = 2) on a high level algebra solution. Further, my observations of whether the students are using efficient methods, or wasting time doing everything the hard way either because they refuse to assimilate new information or because they just have not learned it correctly, will guide my feedback for them the next day, as well as guide my teaching for the future. In my developmental courses I feel compelled to give them a solid foundation with which to move on to their college level courses. Due to the above mentioned terrible handwriting, I encourage students to adopt consistent, clear form by randomly selecting students, with partners, to solve a problem on the board. As a class we then pretend to be Ms. S, and nit-pick about their form. The improvement on the readability of their tests is testament to the effectiveness of this exercise! This is an example of an assessment that does not produce a grade but does guide student learning. The major reasons I grade papers and report grades are two: 1. As a student, my papers were always graded, and from grade K University Masters I received report cards. In fact, the course I am taking now, this one, I am receiving grades for everything I turn in. In other words, this is how it has always been done. 2. As an instructor, the schools I have worked for have always required us to grade papers, and assign and report grades. In other words it is a requirement of my job. Other reasons I grade papers are: 1. I enjoy it! I love seeing how the students are doing - who gets it and who does not. Who obviously does not even do the homework because they have no idea where to start, and then I can talk to them about that. 2. It provides feedback for me on the effectiveness of my teaching what I am communicating well, and what I need to spend more time on or approach a different way. While the purposes of ongoing assessment are clear, the purpose of assigning and reporting grades are not always agreed upon. In the lower grades, say K 6, the parents want feedback on how their youngster is doing. In 9-12, colleges want to see whether a student is college ready. In the college years, grades state whether the student can move on to the next course, or next degree program. People at all levels are putting a lot of stock in that one-character-letter-grade!

Of course those who do not learn and do not earn passing grades are weeded out from programs they are not qualified for, somewhat providing us with a bit of assurance that graduating doctors, lawyers, teachers and other professionals are qualified for their important duties, or at least willing to work hard enough to achieve the necessary credentials. This would seem a positive outcome. As an instructor, I sometimes find that once a student earns a poor grade on a test, that student will take it as a warning, buckle down and study harder, bringing in a higher grade on the next test. Maybe that is the purpose of grading? The motivation caused by a low score would seem a positive outcome. Earning grades can be like dieting or saving money. Once you lose a few pounds, or save a few hundred dollars, one is encouraged by a can-do self image that propels one toward more success. A documented GPA can do the same for the student who starts on a strong course. A self-imposed goal to achieve or maintain a certain level of success can be a positive outcome to reporting grades. However, this self-competition, or the requirements to earn certain grades to enter a degree program can encourage cheating. I have read the tutor advertisements on Craigslist.com to learn who my competition was. I am horrified to report the number of people claiming to hold a PhD in mathematics who offer to take your online tests for you for a fee. A student feeling so pressured to make a certain mark they will use such a service is clearly a negative outcome to grades. Other students seem to aim for the lowest possible passing grade, (especially in developmental courses that do not impact the GPA and all they need is a C). I have seen strong students get lazy, miss class, and allow their grades to fall as soon as they feel they have a good cushion. Some play a game with it, a balancing act, let it drop, bring it up, let it drop and so on. While they learn to perfect the balancing act, the benefit of learning course content is compromised. This would seem a negative outcome. I tutor high school students who need help with their math. Parents are sometimes perplexed that their child gets As for homework but struggles with tests to the point of failing the class! How can this be, they ask me. Im sorry to report that I know the answer to this question: While subbing at a local high school one day, the classroom aid and I were checking homework, basically just putting a check mark in a box on the homework sheet if written on homework page was presented. In my innocence, I was looking at the students work. After looking at the first 4 students work and explaining their mistakes to them, I called out the aid (who I knew fairly well), These students do not know how to factor! She quickly corrected me. Its OK! They get a checkmark for completion only! Students and parents are being misled. This would be an example of a negative outcome. Schools compete for state rankings, and reporting is used for this purpose. This causes schools to find ways to increase their ranking by what I call cheating! Students are given calculators to mask the fact they cannot subtract because they do not understand borrowing, have not learned their multiplication tables, and have no idea how to find the vertex of a parabola, or work the quadratic formula other than using a graphing calculator. Many students are categorized as LD so their test scores will not be counted, or students might not even be tested. I know from personal experience: my own son was not tested because he was difficult to teach! Naturally this is a very negative outcome, misleading to communities who use those school rankings from everything from where to live, to real estate value! What purposes should grades and report cards serve?

1. Ongoing grading and reporting during the course should provide students with feedback on their progress. I especially like two ideas presented by Particia L. Scriffiny in her article Seven Reasons for Standards-Based Grading. While I decided to never grade homework again, after experimenting with it in college classes, because of the stress on the students and the inappropriate way it impacted grades, Scriffiny presents a different idea. It would be helpful to me and to my students if I look at the homework, write feedback comments on it, take mental notes about what I need to address better, but do not record points or grades for it. The purpose here is ongoing assessment and feedback for students and instructor, without the inappropriate impact on grades. Students who dont feel they need to do homework that is too easy will not be penalized for not turning in the homework and students who have no idea what they are doing will not earn enough points to pass the course simply because they scribbled some semblance of numbers and math symbols on paper. 2. Final grading and reporting should reflect what the student has mastered by the end of the semester or course. For students who struggle in the beginning, earning low scores, but who knuckle down and learn the material by the end should not be held back by those low, early scores. Because I believe in this and because many of my arithmetic students come in with unrealistic expectations from high schools where they were not really expected to perform in order to pass, and because many of them will come to grips with college expectations by the end of a semester, I have adopted a policy that I do not communicate with the students until the very end. It is this: If they earn a passing grade (70% or better) on the final exam, they will pass the course, regardless of previous test scores or averages in my class.

Every class is different and the final grades can vary widely. Twice, everyone passed except one student. In one particularly awful class of 35, only 7 passed. Those are the extremes. If I had to generalize the patterns though, I would say: Grades in my classes at the college, at the MID-TERM are distributed approximately: A B C D F 15% 25% 25% 25% 10%

After the midterm the grades start to sort themselves into a different pattern. By the SEMESTER END grades are distributed approximately: A B C D F 15% 30% 5% 20% 30%

You will notice how they start out clustered around the middle, but by the end the class seems to split into high and low grades. This is a phenomenon I observe at the college, I believe caused student choice of adrenalin or giving up to the point of not even attending class anymore.

An ideal grade distribution is open to many interpretations depending on the interpreter. Ideal and realistic are not the same thing! I would love to see all of my students learn everything I teach and earn all A, but it is not realistic. Ideal to a statistician might be a bell curve where an average grade of C is earned by most of the students, with a few stragglers and a few at the very top. This sounds realistic, but might not be acceptable to students. Maybe a statistician would like to see 50% at the top of the bell curve, but this would not be acceptable to administration if most students fell between 25% and 75%! In college since a C is the minimum passing grade, it seems ideal and realistic to expect most students to earn a B, with a some just making it with a C, some at the very top of excellence earning As, and very few earning D or F.

This is a reasonable segue into the question: What letter grades and percentages mean and do all teachers and schools use them consistently? The obvious answer is: Of course not. Some use a simple scale of 90-80-70-60-below 60 for A-B-C-D-F (or E). Some use the scale 93-83-74-65below 65 of A-B-C-D-F. Some honors courses in high schools assign different weights. Were an A might carry a weight of 4 grade points, an A in an honors course carries a weights of 5 on a 4-point scale. Students know they can earn a B in an honors course and earn the same grade point as an A in a regular course. Then again, even on a school or district-wide grading scale, not every instructor grades exactly the same way. Not everything is black or white so teachers, even using a rubric, will not all assign the same letter grade or percent to an assignment. The same teacher might even assign differing grades depending on whether the students paper was graded first or last! For this reason I usually round up a final grade that misses by a fraction of a percentage point at the end of the semester, because how do I know for sure I graded every assignment 100% accurately? Maybe I took off a whole point where one-half point would have been perfectly fair. If asked to decide what percent each of the following should contribute to the final grade: major exams, major compositions, classroom quiz, blackboard quiz, class discussion, research paper, presentation, participation, assignment completion, effort, attendance, progress - my first response is How do I know? My next, better thought out, response is: Here is where teachers and instructors must be allowed subjective grading. Not every course includes all of the above. If included, some require assessment but not a grade for the grade book (ie. homework). Some are the main point of one course, but peripheral for another. Weights need to vary with type of course, grade level, and usefulness of type of task for the particular content area (writing a paper for math is not as heavy weight as writing a paper is for a writing course). Basically there is no one-size-fits-all percent distribution of weights per type-of-task. Although I dont doubt money could be made by coming up with a book of guidelines and selling it to administrators as the latest fad for fixing our schools! Another way to look at it may be to help instructors assign weights on a course-by-course application is to rank the following in importance with 1 being the most important and 6 being the least important,

with added columns to differentiate formative and summative assessment, and user perception. The formative assessments are most important for students and instructors, summative for others such as parents and universities.

Most and Least Important Purposes of GRADES & REPORTING GRADES

Item Formative (For Student) Formative (For Instructor) Summative My Comments Average / Final Ranking

Communicate the achievement status of students Provide information to student for self evaluation Select, identify, or group students for certain educational programs

0 6 0

5 4
Graduate schools need to know who to select. K-12 students should be grouped by ability, although one-size-fits-all courses are being experimented with. (Instead of holding back the few, we now allow the few to hold back all.)

3.6 / 5 3.3 / 4

2.6 / 2

Provide incentives for students to learn Document student performance to evaluate the effectiveness of instructional programs Provide evidence of students lack of effort of inappropriate responsibility

3 4.3 / 6

2.3 / 1

3.3 / 4

Summary: Grading impacts different users of grades in different ways. It is interesting to see that when evaluating it this way, giving three different users of grades equal weight, evaluating Effectiveness of Instructional Programs received the lowest ranking of 1, when actually this is where it all begins and so logically should be the most important!

There is so much talk about holding teachers accountable, but no talks about holding students accountable. If I could make any changes to the grading and reporting system it would be this: Final grades would report the percent of the curriculum that was mastered. When tests are graded, students would be given feedback itemizing which curriculum areas they have mastered and which require improvement. If a C means 70% of the curriculum is mastered we need to track it by topic, not an average of scores. This would require instructors to have that kind of rubric prepared for each assessment, and students to track their progress and work towards mastery of the entire curriculum, rather than moving on whether they learned the last chapter or not. Students would be given a chance to take new test questions on the topics they did not previously master to try and achieve the necessary score. Curriculums would not list every detail, but rather outcomes. For example, on a Final Arithmetic Exam, why should a simple subtraction problem carry equal weight with solving a Profit or Loss application? Final Exams should require 70% mastery of the end goals, not the basic review and fill-in-the-missing-learning gaps and the end goals. Rubrics would make it clear what is Meeting expectations and what is above or below, and focus on curriculum items, not how far away a poster heading can be read, for example (unless it is a Poster Creation class). Meeting expectations would earn a B for that topic. A would be reserved for Outstanding, Excellent, or Quite a bit above expectations, rather than the norm that an A is the expected acceptable grade. Lets face it, we are not all Extraordinary at everything! C would be at least 75% expectations met. Lets face it, do you want a doctor who only gets 70% of what he is doing?

Like the song says, Id love to change the world, but I dont know what to do. Actually, I know what I would like to change, but I dont know how to change it. But I believe that word of mouth can be our strongest tool toward change. Lets use it.