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How is it supposed to do that? Which grades are supposed to drop? Just the A students or across the board? Or is it really just a version of forced ranking which adds points for the bottom and takes points from the top to force everyone toward a C? That would sure make grading a lot easier of everyone just got a C the first day of class and didn't have to do anything the rest of the year.
Let me start by saying that I have issues with equitable grading and am not trying to be the guy tasked with defending it. That being said It's not forced ranking.
I was forced to read the book so here is my report on what constitutes equitable grading:
1. No penalty for late work and students should be allowed to complete it up until the end of a unit but ideally the end of a class. They also should be allowed to redo or fix assignments they did bad on to show growth.
2. Missing work should be marked as a 40 or 50% not as a 0%
3. Homework should be avoided and most in-class assignments are for practice and can be graded to give feedback but generally don't go in the gradebook or effect the overall class grade.
4. Extra credit may never be given for any reason or under any circumstance.
5. Completion grades should never be given. Students should not be rewarded for doing the bare minimum level of effort plus completion grading artificially inflates grades.
6. Grades must never be bumped, curved, or rounded. You must grade to a standard so that decisions can be made based on mastery of skills and content.
7. The grade should be 100% based on mastery of standards. This means tests, projects, essays etc. These can be reattempted but should be graded to see strict standard.
8. Grades should never be given as a reward for good behavior. This means no professionalism grades, participation grades, note check grades etc. Being nice, or good, or hardworking are not things that should be rewarded with grades because grades are meant to communicate ability.
9. In general teachers give too many grades and lots of those grades are fluff that boosts the scores of certain demographic groups while students from disadvantaged groups tend to do worse in those areas (homework, completion grades, behavior, participation etc.)
10. Instead students should only get a few grades on the big things and those things should be relatively difficult. The grade in your English class should represent how good you are at writing an essay (or whatever) not how good you are at filling out reading logs, raising your hand, or sitting quietly during reading time.
So it's liberal and hippy drippy in some ways but in other ways might appeal to old school types who think we have gone too soft.
Last edited by history nerd; 05-12-2023 at 09:36 PM..
Let me start by saying that I have issues with equitable grading and am not trying to be the guy tasked with defending it. That being said It's not forced ranking.
I was forced to read the book so here is my report on what constitutes equitable grading:
1. No penalty for late work and students should be allowed to complete it up until the end of a unit but ideally the end of a class. They also should be allowed to redo or fix assignments they did bad on to show growth.
2. Missing work should be marked as a 40 or 50% not as a 0%
3. Homework should be avoided and most in-class assignments are for practice and can be graded to give feedback but generally don't go in the gradebook or effect the overall class grade.
4. Extra credit may never be given for any reason or under any circumstance.
5. Completion grades should never be given. Students should not be rewarded for doing the bare minimum level of effort plus completion grading artificially inflates grades.
6. Grades must never be bumped, curved, or rounded. You must grade to a standard so that decisions can be made based on mastery of skills and content.
7. The grade should be 100% based on mastery of standards. This means tests, projects, essays etc. These can be reattempted but should be graded to see strict standard.
8. Grades should never be given as a reward for good behavior. This means no professionalism grades, participation grades, note check grades etc. Being nice, or good, or hardworking are not things that should be rewarded with grades because grades are meant to communicate ability.
9. In general teachers give too many grades and lots of those grades are fluff that boosts the scores of certain demographic groups while students from disadvantaged groups tend to do worse in those areas (homework, completion grades, behavior, participation etc.)
10. Instead students should only get a few grades on the big things and those things should be relatively difficult. The grade in your English class should represent how good you are at writing an essay (or whatever) not how good you are at filling out reading logs, raising your hand, or sitting quietly during reading time.
So it's liberal and hippy drippy in some ways but in other ways might appeal to old school types who think we have gone too soft.
Lots of schools have tried strictly grading on mastery and I have yet to see one keep it in its purest form - some even dropping it after the first report cards went out. In one system I know for a fact that it meant less than a handful of certain demographics got above a C, including a staggering number of failures, and almost every middle class white kid not in special ed got at least a B, whether they did a lick of work or not. It was not good for anyone.
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Let me start by saying that I have issues with equitable grading and am not trying to be the guy tasked with defending it. That being said It's not forced ranking.
I was forced to read the book so here is my report on what constitutes equitable grading:
1. No penalty for late work and students should be allowed to complete it up until the end of a unit but ideally the end of a class. They also should be allowed to redo or fix assignments they did bad on to show growth.
2. Missing work should be marked as a 40 or 50% not as a 0%
3. Homework should be avoided and most in-class assignments are for practice and can be graded to give feedback but generally don't go in the gradebook or effect the overall class grade.
4. Extra credit may never be given for any reason or under any circumstance.
5. Completion grades should never be given. Students should not be rewarded for doing the bare minimum level of effort plus completion grading artificially inflates grades.
6. Grades must never be bumped, curved, or rounded. You must grade to a standard so that decisions can be made based on mastery of skills and content.
7. The grade should be 100% based on mastery of standards. This means tests, projects, essays etc. These can be reattempted but should be graded to see strict standard.
8. Grades should never be given as a reward for good behavior. This means no professionalism grades, participation grades, note check grades etc. Being nice, or good, or hardworking are not things that should be rewarded with grades because grades are meant to communicate ability.
9. In general teachers give too many grades and lots of those grades are fluff that boosts the scores of certain demographic groups while students from disadvantaged groups tend to do worse in those areas (homework, completion grades, behavior, participation etc.)
10. Instead students should only get a few grades on the big things and those things should be relatively difficult. The grade in your English class should represent how good you are at writing an essay (or whatever) not how good you are at filling out reading logs, raising your hand, or sitting quietly during reading time.
So it's liberal and hippy drippy in some ways but in other ways might appeal to old school types who think we have gone too soft.
Thank you. Sounds very mixed up and even self-contradictory. Some thoughts.
1. If students are allowed to turn in work right up to the last minute, how do you assess their performance going along and how can the work build on previous work during the semester? How can a student do B if B depends on mastering A and they haven't done A?
2. Compressing the grading scale or just giving extra credit? Doesn't this directly contradict items 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9?
3. Ok, isn't that what homework was for anyway, to get a sense of how the student was doing without making the stakes too high? This one I can live with, but I don't know how practical it was at the higher grades.
4. I could live with this one, but doesn't it contradict #2 by giving 50 points for nothing?
5. Wow. This one is absolutely in contradiction to #2. This one says students shouldn't be rewarded for the minimum yet 2 is rewarding the student for doing nothing AND is specifically intended to artificially raise grades.
6. I can agree on grading to a standard. Do we have one?
7. Seems like a repeat of 6, but ok.
8. I'm afraid I can't translate this one in a way that makes sense. Are not most of those things that shouldn't be graded a facet of ability? To me this one seems to be saying only count part of the ability and not all the parts that make up ability.
9. This could be interpreted as give just a midterm and final like in college. That basically turns every test into a high stakes test since there's not enough data to compute a valid overall performance level. Two data points is insufficient to project a curve.
10. Seems like a restatement of 8 and 9.
It does seem like they just grabbed some ideas from different schools of thought and tossed them all together like a salad. Thank you for the explanation.
This is perhaps the most controversial aspect of it. What kind of a precedent is set by this?
If a student gets into a university, will they expect a professor to give them 50% for missing work and just showing up?
This sounds like an overhaul of the educational system.
They won't get into a university, except maybe some of the degree-for-cash ones. It just provides justification for the education system to give them the high school diploma since it makes it much easier to just go ahead and give them a D=Diploma.
3. Ok, isn't that what homework was for anyway, to get a sense of how the student was doing without making the stakes too high? This one I can live with, but I don't know how practical it was at the higher grades.
4. I could live with this one, but doesn't it contradict #2 by giving 50 points for nothing?
...
3. Depends on the homework. I could assign a chapter to read on minerals (since I was an earth science teacher), along with the text questions at the end of the chapter. That could be for background information, not necessarily for a grade. On the other hand, an essay or lab report for homework might very well be graded.
4. I don't approve of giving these points for nothing, but on the other hand, you are still "giving" the student an F.
Thank you. Sounds very mixed up and even self-contradictory. Some thoughts.
1. If students are allowed to turn in work right up to the last minute, how do you assess their performance going along and how can the work build on previous work during the semester? How can a student do B if B depends on mastering A and they haven't done A?
2. Compressing the grading scale or just giving extra credit? Doesn't this directly contradict items 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9?
3. Ok, isn't that what homework was for anyway, to get a sense of how the student was doing without making the stakes too high? This one I can live with, but I don't know how practical it was at the higher grades.
4. I could live with this one, but doesn't it contradict #2 by giving 50 points for nothing?
5. Wow. This one is absolutely in contradiction to #2. This one says students shouldn't be rewarded for the minimum yet 2 is rewarding the student for doing nothing AND is specifically intended to artificially raise grades.
6. I can agree on grading to a standard. Do we have one?
7. Seems like a repeat of 6, but ok.
8. I'm afraid I can't translate this one in a way that makes sense. Are not most of those things that shouldn't be graded a facet of ability? To me this one seems to be saying only count part of the ability and not all the parts that make up ability.
9. This could be interpreted as give just a midterm and final like in college. That basically turns every test into a high stakes test since there's not enough data to compute a valid overall performance level. Two data points is insufficient to project a curve.
10. Seems like a restatement of 8 and 9.
It does seem like they just grabbed some ideas from different schools of thought and tossed them all together like a salad. Thank you for the explanation.
The premise underpinning the 50/40% rule is that there are actually only 5 grades. A 95 percent is translated to an A and the A is translated to a 4 which is used to calculate GPA. Once the class is over the difference between a 93 and a 98 no longer exists. Similarly a 10% and a 59% are both going to be translated as a 0.
So from that point of view in a traditional grading scale there are 10 ways to earn a 4, 10 ways to earn a 3, 10 ways to earn a 2, 10 ways to earn a 1, and 59 ways to earn a 0. The book talks a LOT about statistics and the ways that grades average and gives a complex mathimatical explanation for either using 40 or 50% as the baseline.
I essence they want teachers to use a 5 point scale instead of a 100 point scale.
I totally agree that the issue with equitable grading is that it doesn't provide incentives for students to do the things that they will need to so in order to actually master the skills that are being tested. 90% of the teachers I work with feel the same... but, you know, admin didn't ask us of course.
This is perhaps the most controversial aspect of it. What kind of a precedent is set by this?
If a student gets into a university, will they expect a professor to give them 50% for missing work and just showing up?
This sounds like an overhaul of the educational system.
I totally agree that it sends a bad message. If the traditional 10 point scale is bad (and I am open to the idea that it might be) why not ditch the scale rather than shoehorning in these bandaid solutions?
Today's students will be competing on a global scale with the best and the brightest from China, India, Japan, Korea, etc -- all of whom are likely to receive a far better education in their school systems.
The premise underpinning the 50/40% rule is that there are actually only 5 grades. A 95 percent is translated to an A and the A is translated to a 4 which is used to calculate GPA. Once the class is over the difference between a 93 and a 98 no longer exists. Similarly a 10% and a 59% are both going to be translated as a 0.
So from that point of view in a traditional grading scale there are 10 ways to earn a 4, 10 ways to earn a 3, 10 ways to earn a 2, 10 ways to earn a 1, and 59 ways to earn a 0. The book talks a LOT about statistics and the ways that grades average and gives a complex mathimatical explanation for either using 40 or 50% as the baseline.
I essence they want teachers to use a 5 point scale instead of a 100 point scale.
I totally agree that the issue with equitable grading is that it doesn't provide incentives for students to do the things that they will need to so in order to actually master the skills that are being tested. 90% of the teachers I work with feel the same... but, you know, admin didn't ask us of course.
Is there an on line or open source for that information? I'd love to read it, esp on the grade discussion. I've always felt the conversion from a percent grade to an A-B-C was pretty hokey statistically. Why not just directly grade A through F; why even assign a percent grade at all?
Though this still leaves open the difference between taking dual enrollment Calc vs AP Calc, vs general math when creating a GPA. There's a degree of difficulty that should be included as well.
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