Standards Based Grading

I have very mixed feelings about assigning grades.  Students need feedback on their work and need to know if they are meeting the standards and expectations in the class.  However, if a student just completes something according to the instructions, do they really deserve 100%?  Should tests at the start of the grading term count the same as tests at the end of the term?  Should an average student receive an A or a C?  Do I need to grade assignments that are just intended to cushion student’s grades from their poorer test scores?  Should work completion even be included in grades?

At my school, the expectation is that students who are putting forth effort will receive A’s or B’s and students with low test scores or missing work will fall into C’s, D’s, or F’s.  Getting a C for most students is considered failing and is a cause for concern for parents and administrators.  This expectation has been conflicting for me recently because traditional ideas of average are in the C range, with a score of 75% being considered proficient work.  This makes a lot more sense than having just the top 10% of scores be considered the expected range because statistically you shouldn’t have your entire population in the top 10% or else it wouldn’t be that.  So my dilemma as a teacher has become how to tell students their work is average and could be improved without dealing them a perceived blow to their GPA.

One of the major obstacles to making any sort of change to the grading expectations is the online gradebook provided by the district.  The gradebook is set up to track scores and calculate grades based on standardized percentage thresholds for scores.  Being part of a middle school where the students visit multiple teachers, I would cause a great deal of confusion and upheaval if I set my A- score at 75% while all the other teachers held theirs at 90%.  The gradebook also requires you to enter in point values for assignments, displaying both 1/1 and 100/100 the same 100% score without considering that the 100 point assignment may have been significantly more challenging than the 1 points assignment.  Assessments are also mandated to be counted as 50% of the overall score, with 40% for projects and classwork, and 10% for homework.  What if I didn’t want to assign homework?

This year with my transition to a blended learning classroom, I decided that I couldn’t have a student directed classroom where I encouraged growth if the grades for everything were etched in stone.  Yes the scores in gradebook can be changed, but they are also immediately viewable to parents which gives many students the mentality that they are permanent and aren’t worth revisiting.  At our school too, not all students have their parent’s login and cannot access their online gradebook so the ability to see scores is not equitable for all students.  To improve this whole system, I decided I needed an efficient method that all students could use to track their own progress, was easy for me to use and update (the gradebook is not), and that would capture their understanding and mastery rather than arbitrary point values.

The first challenge was finding a logistical way to keep students informed of their grades.  I am a super fan of Google Sheets and the discovery of a few key formulas made this possible.  I created a master grade book spreadsheet that I could use to keep track of the work for all my students, with multiple pages for different metrics for their scores.  Each student had their own Progress Monitoring document that was linked to one of the rows on my master spreadsheet, and then displayed nicely using the Transpose formula.  Being able to share the information in a visually appealing manner made this entire process possible.  The students would then be able to constantly check on their scores, write comments to themselves about the assignments, and to keep track of what still needed to be done.  Sample student Progresss Monitoring document: goo.gl/j3MmWB 

With Google Sheets, one of the features I use the most is conditional formatting.  This allows me to change the color of the cells based upon the text or score inside.  With this I was able to show that all proficient scores were green, exceeds were blue, and the ones below proficient were a scale of yellow, orange, and red.  The student Progress Monitoring also had the same color conditioning built in, so that they would also know at a glance what their general trend was and the assignments to fix would stick out.  I maintained the same color scheme throughout the whole year and intend to continue this going forward.

The next challenge was the actual grading and scoring, which evolved over all three trimesters this year.  I knew that I wanted the scores to be standards/mastery based, really thinking about if students understood the assignment or if they went beyond and showed a deep understanding.  After doing a bit of research, here is the initial scoring method that I came up with:

  • 4- Exceeding expectations, all directions followed.  Answer shows a deep understanding
  • 3- Proficient, meets expectations, all directions followed.  Answer shows that you get it
  • 2- Beginning, partially meets expectations, some directions not met or answer is partly incorrect
  • 1- Below, directions not met or answer shows that you do not understand
  • 0- Missing, no work submitted

My grading for the first trimester all centered around point totals out of multiples of 4.  Small check box assignments were worth 1 point (done or not done),  larger assignments were worth 4 or 8 points, and big projects and tests may be worth 12-40 points.  Immediately I found some pros and cons to this system.  A score of 3/4 was considered proficient so students did not need to go back and redo the assignment with this score or higher.  However, the small assignments that were completed received a score of 1/1 which would be 100% but I didn’t feel that students were really exceeding my expectations on small assignments that just required following directions.  Also, I felt that I really needed to justify my specific scores.  For example, a student did not answer 3 out of 10 questions correctly and generally understood and completed the assignment, but I would still like them to go back and fix their work.  If I give them 5/8 they are Beginning and have to fix it but if I give them 6/8 they’ll see the score as Proficient and never revisit the assignment, even if I really wanted them to.  Also, my overall grade sheet was very blue, showing that the majority of students receiving exceeds on assignments even though they really didn’t deserve it.  The image below does show that most of the students did work to improve any work that was not completed or needed to be fixed so in that way this grading system was a success.

Trimester 1 Grades

For second trimester, I decided to do away with all the point values entirely and switch to only mastery language.  Too many students continued to be preoccupied with their points score rather than if they mastered the content or not and I didn’t feel like my scoring was separated enough from the trap of everyone gets an A.  Students first trimester were also confused as to whether something was proficient or what the actual words meant so I shifted to only use these words and nothing else.  As you can see in the image below, the overall tone of the trimester is quite different.  Most students were proficient on their assignments, with a few specific creative assignments where many students did truly exceed my expectations and earned it.  It’s also noticeable that most of the early assignments were indeed made up as proficient but the students who received partial credit later in the term did not have as much time to revisit and improve their scores.   The one problem I had with this system is that there is no way to tell from looking at this how different the assignments were in terms of complexity and rigor.   First trimester I could tell based on the point values but here all assignments appeared the same, which didn’t seem fair either

Trimester 2 Grades

I did another adjustment when it came time to set up trimester 3.  The proficiency terms such as partial and below were meaningful to me but were a bit abstract for the students.  Partial also became a huge category from little tiny fixes to large fixes because I had a mental block from giving students a score of below unless they really messed up.  Therefore, I devised a new student-friendly rubric for trimester 3:

  • Proficient – This assignment is proficient and does not need to be fixed
  • Minor Fix – You have something minor to fix before this is considered Proficient
  • Major Fix – You have something major to fix before this is considered Proficient
  • Submission Error – Assignment was turned in without work, document blank, etc.
  • Missing – Nothing submitted
  • Exceeds – Your work is above and beyond my expectations

In this system, I only gave students Proficient if their work demonstrated they had a general mastery of the concept and did not need to revisit their work.  I learned from the earlier in the year and from talking with other teachers that middle school students on the whole don’t look at your feedback unless they have a specific reason to.  They’ll look at the score first and then decide if they need to open the document again to see your comments.  Therefore, if I wanted a student to revisit their work, they either got a score of Minor Fix or Major Fix.  These were terms that the student could understand and that actually helped them budget their time.  A Minor Fix would be a quick change to resubmit and a Major Fix was something that they’d have to take some time on to redo, rather than a seemingly arbitrary score of Below.  This generally put less pressure on me to subconsciously inflate their grades because I was giving them feedback of what action I wanted them to take.  The one area where this fell down was with the higher achieving GATE students.  Many of them could have exceeded my expectations on more assignments but would choose the easy road and stop at Proficient.  My definition of Proficient was able to slide a bit to match individual student needs but the one group that I did not adequately address was these high achieving students who could have been pushed further or should have had a much higher proficient threshold.  However, how do I show that on the grade sheet?  Here’s the image for trimester 3’s grades:

Trimester 3 Grades

Throughout the whole year, I maintained these spreadsheet gradebooks and did not post anything in the online gradebook until the grading deadline.  I was a bit fearful of concerns from parents or administrators, but I did my best to make it clear that the students had access to their grades and could share them at any time.  Students were definitely much more willing to make changes and redo assignments when they were recorded on the flexible document.  I also made sure to never assign letter grades to tasks during class.  My guarantee to the students was similar to grad school: if they were doing their work they would get an A and anything lower was considered below expectations.  To do this, I established that a student who was proficient on every assignment would receive a 95% in the class and then raised or lowered the score based on their ratios of Exceeds or Fixes in the categories for classwork and tests.  I did not assign any homework assignments for the whole year but to keep the mandated percentage scores fair gave everyone a 1/1 score each trimester for no homework.  Fortunately, the vast majority of the students did rise to the occasion and completed the majority of their work so I really didn’t have any complaints.  Students got both A’s and meaningful and honest feedback.

After testing this out and refining my system for a whole year, I still feel like there are some improvements to be made.  On larger projects and assignments during trimester 3 that had a fixed deadline, I did end up reverting back to the initial grading scale because in those cases Partial made more sense than Minor Fix.  I also still didn’t have a good way to distinguish tests and larger projects from smaller assignments.  I did have many fewer assignments trimester 3, as I cut out a lot of the busy work from the first trimester.  Ideally, I need to find some sort of combination scores and mastery scoring but I still have to consider the bugs with that.  My main takeaway would be do to what is in the best interest of students and what gives the students the most meaningful data about their work.