Making Grades Meaningful

While all conversations about equity can be challenging, redefining our grading practices to be more accurate and fair may be the most important kind of equity work to accomplish. Instructors throughout the country are beginning to acknowledge and confront inequitable grading practices and are learning the "benefits of grading on a 1-4 scale instead of a 100-point scale, not awarding extra credit, considering the most recent performance as opposed to averaging scores, and separating academic mastery from behaviors and subjective judgments." ¹

Confronting current grading practices may help overcome deeply ingrained biases in our education system and create a paradigm shift from perpetuating inequity to supporting success for every student. Consider the following strategies for your own course.

Apply mathematically sound approaches.

Use a 0-4 instead of a 0-100 point scale. Using a 0-4 scale helps to eliminate the hairsplitting over a few points to get from a B to an A. Students either meet the requirement of the assessment or they don't. The gradations in-between may be unnecessary remnants from a point-based system that only teach students to play a points game rather than being motivated to achieve the desired skills.

Avoid giving students scores of zero. Thomas Guskey (author of several books, chapters, articles, and professional papers on educational measurement, evaluation, and assessment) writes, "To recover from a single zero percentage grade, a student must achieve a minimum of nine perfect papers. Attaining that level of performance would challenge the most talented students and may be impossible for most others, especially those who struggle in learning. A singe zero can doom a student to failure, regardless of what dedicated effort or level of performance might follow." If a student does nothing on an assignment, consider that a score of 50 or 55 is still an F, and ask yourself what value would be achieved by issuing the most severe F possible.

Value knowledge, not environment or behavior.

Grades cannot encompass everything. They reflect what students know and can do, not how teachers perceive or interpret their behavior. Grades are not used to reward compliance. Jennifer Gunn of the Resilient Educator ² suggests the following based on Feldman's work:

If the work is important, require it. If not, don't grade it
Grade the work - the learning mastery - not the timing or compliance
Grades are not for control. They're for teaching and monitoring growth
Allow for mistakes and allow for revision

Support a growth mindset.

Encourage mistakes as a necessary component for learning and building students’ persistence. Teachers should allow assessment retakes and replace previous scores with current scores. Many students will take a test, get their score, then move on, indicating a halt in the learning process. If a student receives a low score without the opportunity to reflect and retry, they may just give up knowing that it's mathematically impossible for them to pass after one attempt. This may be especially true if the grading policy more accurately reflects a points system rather than being a reflection of growth or learning.

Teachers can place boundaries around retakes, such as not allowing the retake until the student demonstrates progress on the missed skills, or requiring that the student repeat formative assessments related to the missed skills. After the retake the instructor should enter the best score for the student and not the average. Feldman writes that this process "requires students to reflect on mistakes... reinforces the value of homework for learning, [and sends] 'no clearer message that your teacher cares about you than that they won't let you fail.'" ³A gradebook should weigh a student's more recent performance and growth instead of averaging performance over time.

Make grades simpler to understand and more transparent.

Students benefit when instructors provide personalized feedback on assignments which can be incorporated prior to the next learning opportunity. Additionally, providing feedback using the Canvas Gradebook and SpeedGrader allows students to collect important feedback in one central repository thereby increasing organization and decreasing the cognitive load required for students to access basic course elements.

There are advantages for students and instructors alike when this feedback is returned in a timely manner. When students receive timely feedback they can immediately integrate the feedback on upcoming assessments or retakes, as well as ask questions of their instructors which promotes an important reciprocal learning process. When instructors provide timely feedback they avoid building up large amounts of grading which can lead to grading fatigue and more generic feedback statements such as "good work" or "thank you for your post."

Any instructor who is dedicated to providing personalized and authentic feedback recognizes how much time this process takes and that it can be overwhelming to keep up with. Tools that can assist in managing large volumes of feedback are the Canvas SpeedGrader's video, audio, and dictation features. The Anonymous grading feature also contributes to objective grading practices along with creating detailed rubrics to evaluate student performance. It is also recommended to use simplified grade calculations (which don't make understanding one's grade feel like a math class in and of itself!), and standards-based scales and gradebooks. To read more about the value of developing rubrics please navigate to the next page, "Authentic Assessment."

Canvas Grading Resources

Additional Strategies

Feldman suggests additional strategies ³such as eliminating extra credit opportunities and grading group work individually to assist with redefining equitable grading practices. Feldman invested in an external evaluation of grade distribution among educators who were changing their grading practices to evaluate the effectiveness of such strategies. The results showed that the rates of D's and F's went down, but the number of A's went down as well.

The decreases in D's and F's were clustered among Latinx, African-American, low-income, and students with Individualized Education Programs (IEPs). Meanwhile the decrease in A's most affected white students. 'It reflects how the current system has been benefitting and punishing certain students disproportionately,' Feldman said. ³

Works Cited

"How our grading supports inequity, and what we can do about it." SmartBrief. 16 July 2015. Accessed 7 January 2022.
Gunn, J. "How Teachers Can Create an Equitable Grading System." Resilient Educator. Accessed 8 January 2022.
Schwartz, K. "How Teachers Are Changing Grading Practices With An Eye on Equity." KQED. 10 February 2019. Accessed 8 January 2022.

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