2/13/2024 0 Comments Moves at a relaxed pace say![]() Students become less consumed with point accumulation. There’s no more bartering and bargaining to get points. There’s no more of that haggling (‘Can I get extra credit for bringing cupcakes to the end-of-year party?’). You can’t get an A jumping through hoops, so it reduces grade inflation, makes it more rigorous. “People mistakenly assume that grading for equity lowers standards or rigor, but it increases them. “The grade is only reflective of content mastery,” said Feldman. Learners are afforded extra time and can retake tests or other assessments to demonstrate mastery or raise a grade. With this approach, teachers base grades on a student’s end-of-course command of material, without consideration of attendant factors such as homework, extra credit, or “soft-skill” behaviors such as punctuality, attendance, handing in assignments on time, and class participation. ![]() Guskey refers to the current grading system as a “hodgepodge” of measures.įeldman’s plan in Grading for Equity is a recent iteration of so-called mastery-based or standards-based assessment. “If your expectations are lower in terms of behavior and grading, that’s probably what you’re going to get.” Education researcher Thomas R. Many students, he said, are habitually late on assignments. “They rushed out the new policy just when we got back to school,” said Hwang, who serves as a peer tutor. The 360,000-student Clark County, Nevada, district, which encompasses Las Vegas, began implementing the policy in the 2021–22 school year, on the heels of the pandemic learning disruptions. “In a lot of ways, things have gotten worse.” Clark High School in Las Vegas, a school that has introduced equitable grading. Much has been left open to interpretation,” said Samuel Hwang, a junior at Ed W. “Because of the way it was implemented, nothing has been standard about it at all. But moves toward equitable grading seem to be rolling out in a patchwork fashion, and not without pushback and confusion. “As schools reopen, there is a desire for normalcy, but we shouldn’t rubber-band back” to outdated practices, Feldman argues.Įquitable grading involves eliminating the 100-point grade scale and not penalizing students for late work and missed assignments if they can demonstrate subject mastery and even if they must retake tests or redo other assessments along the way.įeldman says these assessment practices can help address stubborn achievement gaps and streamline the grading hodgepodge. “Inherited grading practices have always hurt underserved students,” said Joe Feldman, a former teacher and author of Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms. Several models exist, but so-called equitable grading is gaining momentum. Now the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic-remote learning and more failing students-twinned with renewed concerns over equity have many educators taking another look at grading. Reform efforts made over the past two generations-such as the push for portfolio grading that gained traction in the 1980s-largely foundered, as they were viewed as too cumbersome to scale up to large districts and schools. The process is inconsistent at best, inequitable at worst, critics argue. Guskey calls a “hodgepodge” of measures-quizzes, tests, homework, conduct, participation, extra credit, and more-rather than gauging actual student learning. Generally, grading attempts to distill students’ performance on what education researcher Thomas R. Today, protocols for handing out grades of A–F on a 100-point scale vary from district to district and classroom to classroom. Letter-based grading became universal in U.S. Grading remains idiosyncratic in most places-largely dependent on rubrics devised by individual teachers and usually rooted in century-old practices, even if they are calibrated using new technologies and software. The practice of grading student work has mostly been an afterthought in teacher training and professional development.
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