Experienced educators made their cases for the best forms of grading in a series of Fox News Digital conversations.
The debate over grading has swept institutions in recent years as schools adopt new policies that in some cases have given students more opportunities to make up or avoid poor grades. It's important schools get scoring right, teachers argued, because in many ways grades are the stepping stone to students' futures.
"To summarize, grades remain high stakes for students," educational author and consultant Jay McTighe told Fox News Digital. "Parents care about them. Colleges use them for admissions. And in some cases, employers look at them for employment consideration decisions. So high stakes on all fronts."
McTighe gave the baton to his friend Dr. Tom Guskey, Professor Emeritus at the University of Kentucky, who has been studying grading since 1994. In his years of research, Guskey found that in many cases "we are behind the rest of the world in terms of what we do in regard to grading," saying too much of the American system relies on "tradition."
Teachers, he said, typically use three kinds of criteria when determining grades. Product criteria, which is a demonstration of student learning. Process criteria, behaviors that enable learning - homework, classroom effort, participation, punctuality, for example. And, thirdly, progress criteria, which focuses on how far students have come, sometimes referred to as improvement or value added grading.
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"The problem becomes that we combine all those in our country into a single, what researchers call a hodge podge grade which makes it very difficult to interpret," Guskey said. "So the highly responsible low achiever gets exactly the same grade as the irresponsible, high achiever. If you go to other places around the world, they don't do that."
"They give multiple grades or a band of grades," Guskey said of other nations. "So they'll have an achievement grade, and they can still use that for GPA…but then a separate grade for homework, a separate grade for class participation. It's really a band of grades, or a profile. Some call it a grading dashboard that separates those so that way the grade itself represents achievement, and then you have a very strong correlation between… achievement and then how they score on external exams."
Experts separated U.S. grading systems into some of the following categories, a few of which are considered more controversial than others.
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Traditional A-F Grading
A 100-point scale, A to F grades with 9–10-point ranges, or the threshold between a satisfactory/unsatisfactory or pass/fail mark. A score in the range of 0–59 is generally recognized as an F, 60–69 a D, 70–79 a C, etc.
Comparative or Relative Grading
Typically used in college settings, relative grading is the practice of some professors of determining student grades by comparing them against those of their peers.
Standards-based Grading
Standards-based grading is based on students showing signs of mastery or understanding various lessons and skills.
"You have clear learning goals, well-developed assessments that teachers use together, so the measures are comparable," McTighe explained. "And then you actually grade or report on how well students have achieved the designated goals based on their performance."
The "No-Zero" Grading Policy
The "no-zero" grading policy bans teachers from giving students grades below 50%. Proponents of the policy argue that giving students too many zeroes can make it near impossible for them to pass. The system has been catching fire in schools and raking up controversy along the way.
No-zero policy supporters say that such a low mark on a 100-point scale doesn't accurately measure what a student knows and often results in students giving up halfway through the semester.
"If the grade is to represent how well students have learned mastered established learning standards, or achieved specified learning goals, then the practice of assigning zeros clearly misses the mark," Guskey has said of zero grading.
But the policy has plenty of opponents. Daniel Buck, an English teacher and editor-in-chief of the Chalkboard Review, argued that the "no-zero" rule takes incentive away from his students by offering an example.
"Last year, on our first essay, one student finished far too quickly, he ignored my feedback, and ultimately earned an F," Buck told Fox News Digital. "Later that year, during our second essay, he sought out my feedback, got extra help outside of class, and constantly asked me questions because that grade incentivized him towards harder work. The A-F scale provides both carrots (good grades) and sticks (zeros)."
For former U.S. history teacher Diane Tirado, the controversial policy was career-ending. Tirado taught at a Port St. Lucie public school in Florida. In 2018, she had assigned an explorer notebook project at the time, giving students two weeks to complete it. When several students didn’t turn it in, Tirado found out about what she calls a "no zero" policy, which is reflected in the West Gate student and parent handbook. When she refused to comply with the school policy, which required her to give out no less than a 50 percent on assignments, she wrote a note on the chalkboard informing her students she had been fired. She said it still weighs on her to this day.
"Bye Kids, Mrs. Tirado loves you and wishes you the best in life! I have been fired for refusing to give you a 50% for not handing anything in," Tirado wrote, signing off with a heart.
"It's very hard to put it into words," Tirado told Fox News Digital. "When your career is taken away from you and something that you loved doing that you thought had a purpose in life. So it was very hard for me for quite a long time. I've kind of got adjusted to it now, but I'm still - it makes me sad to talk about it, but it's more sad that it's like an epidemic across the world. I found out a whole lot about our education system during this experience. And it's not just here. It's everywhere."
"When you don't turn in any work, you don't get a grade for nothing," she said. "Because that's fraud."
Since her firing, Tirado told Fox News Digital that she has been working for her husband's air conditioning company and honing her art skills. She said she was an advocate for the "old school" A-F grading system.
Buck called the no-zero grading system a "patently idiotic idea."
"There are two trends undergirding the move towards no-zero grading," he said. "First, appeals to equity are often used to justify lowered expectations of all sorts, from grading and curriculum to assessment and gifted classes. Second, education loves fads. Some trendy new ideas pop (sic) up and schools across the country will adopt it without ever pausing to ask if it's actually effective."
"There is no perfect approach to grading; --all systems carry their own trade-offs -- but this idea that we're going to just cut off the grading scale half way is a patently idiotic idea," he later added.
