How Grading
Reform Changed
At a suburban high school in Minnesota, grading reform has resulted
in a fundamentally new way to approach learning.
Jeffrey A. Erickson
The Guiding Question
answer: Grades should reflect only
At Minnetonka High School, a suburban what a student knows and is able to do.
Last summer, I took great joy in watching my daughter take swimming lessons. One of the most difficult tasks for her was swimming the school serving nearly 2,900 students in Minnetonka, Minnesota, the need the early 2000s. Parents were calling
This principle became the impetus for
our work. As we analyzed our policies
for grading reform became evident in
and procedures, we discovered many
practices that were either inflating or
for more transparency and consistency. deflating grades.
front crawl 50 feet to the other side of
Teacher surveys revealed that the pur-
the pool. During the three-week course, pose for grading varied from classroom Inflating Grades
with ongoing guidance and feedback
from her teacher, she relentlessly practiced this task every day. Only during
The philosophy teach,
the last class did she finally reach her
goal and swim across the pool. Her final test, and move on
Is there a connection between a strong
bladder and grades? Amazingly, in
some cases there is. A substitute teacher
was covering a colleague’s classes for
the day. The regular teacher instructed
report for the class recommended that
she move to the next level.
should be replaced
him that if a student asked to go to the
bathroom, he should ask that student
How shocked I would have been
if her teacher had informed me that
my daughter’s final mark in the swim-
ming course would be determined
with teach, test,
and now what?
for his or her pink pass because the stu-
dent might decide to keep the pass and
remain in the room. Why? At the end of
the quarter, students could submit their
by the average of her performance
unused pink passes for extra points to
over the entire course—that even
to classroom and that teachers were
be added to their final grade.
though she had mastered the front
using a wide range of factors to deter-
This may seem like an extreme exam-
crawl at the end of the class, she failed
mine grades. Attendance, behavior,
because the teacher had included all
effort, extra credit, and participation
her unsuccessful attempts in calculating were all in the mix along with actual
the grade.
achievement of curriculum standards.
ple, but it’s common practice for teach-
ers to award extra points for bringing
in tissue boxes, completing extra-credit
assignments, returning permission slips,
Perhaps this scenario seems out-
landish. But in the world of schooling,
averaging is just one of many common
but questionable practices that can
significantly distort the accuracy of
grades.
We needed to articulate a clear focus
for grading.
Changing our school’s grading prac-
tices required that we take a funda-
mental look at one guiding question:
What should go into a grade? Our
contributing canned food to the food
drive, and so on. Such practices inflate
grades and distort their meaning. The
whole grading process becomes a game
rather than a reflection of learning.
