Standards-Based Grading Sounds Great — Until You Realize Most Courses Don't Have Clear Standards

There are a lot of things I don't like about standards-based grading, but one of the biggest things is there simply aren't standards for a lot of the courses that are being taught in our schools, especially in secondary schools.

And it seems like standards-based grading principles have been designed with the assumption that every subject is like math.

Every subject has all of these standards, and if you just report how students are doing in mastering those standards, then that's everything you need to know.

Or if we need to know anything about behavior, we can report a separate behavior grade and shouldn't include any kind of behavioral components in the the grades that tell us how students are doing academically and that just does not make sense to me because as a parent I want to know how my kid is doing in this class, even if that class doesn't have any standards, right?

Like one of my kids is taking typing right now.

I don't think there are any content standards for typing, but I do want to know how my kid is doing in that class.

And I don't necessarily want a separate behavior grade.

And like sometimes what people call behavior, like turning in your work on time is considered a behavior.

I think that is a perfectly legitimate thing to factor into a regular grade.

And people will always point to ridiculous examples like, getting extra credit for bringing in a box of Kleenex.

Like, of course, we don't need to be giving points for things that have nothing to do with learning.

I think generally teachers should be able to make their own grading decisions, and people should use good practices like don't give points for irrelevant things, don't give stupid extra credit.

Yeah.

But this idea that everything has to be about mastering content standards, like that that's all grades should reflect, doesn't make any sense.

Like, think about a kid who is so far below grade level that they're not going to master any of the standards.

what are you going to communicate with the standards-based grade on that kid's report card?

I would like to know how well that kid is doing, how well they are trying, how diligently they're doing their work, what they are learning, what kind of work they're producing.

Traditional grades can capture a lot of that, even if the student never masters the standards.

And the same is true at the opposite end of the scale.

What if the kid comes in knowing everything in the standards from day one, and the report card just has like all fours or whatever, you know, all 100% mastery.

We learn nothing from that.

I don't know how my kid is doing if they get perfect marks on all of that because the teacher is not allowed to tell me how well are they participating in class.

How is the quality of their work?

How hard are they trying?

How...

Are they getting their work in on time?

See, there are lots of things that we care about in education other than mastering the content standards.

And this attempt to bring in standards-based grading, I think in a lot of cases, it's just a way of masking failure, where we have kids who are not doing anything at all, and we want to give them credit for stuff they already know, even though they're not doing anything.

What kind of terrible habits are we teaching kids by saying, all that matters is how much you know.

All that matters is how much you have mastered the standards.

Well, what about the kids who are at either extreme?

And what about the kids who maybe are somewhere in the middle?

and need grades as their motivator, who need grades to hold them accountable, I think the accountability works in traditional grading because you get points for the stuff that produces the learning, even if we can't assess that learning yet, right?

Like if we do practice problems, you might not have mastered the standard yet, so you're not gonna get a four on a standards-based report card.

But if you're getting points for doing the practice, that's sending things in the right direction.

So I think traditional grading does a much better job than we give it credit for.

And I think standards-based grading has a lot of flaws that we're only now beginning to appreciate.

Let me know what you think.