Separating Gradebooks and Report Cards

I recently had the opportunity to engage in a two-day workshop with Dr. Tom Guskey of the University of Kentucky. His session, “Leading the Way to More Effective Grading and Reporting for All Students,” urged participants to consider three guiding questions when designing their grading and reporting systems:

• Why do we use report cards and assign grades to students’ work?
• Ideally, what purposes should report cards or grades serve?
• What elements should teachers use in determining students grades?
• With these questions in mind, Dr. Guskey identified potential purposes and audiences for a comprehensive grading system. This graphic summarizes those elements.

Once upon a time, before technology made grading and communicating about grades more efficient, those three reports were unique. The gradebook was the teacher’s domain. It was where she recorded progress and anecdotal information. Students and parents did not have access to it which gave the teacher a great deal more autonomy in using professional judgment when putting grades on the report card. Now that our gradebooks are public, mathematic algorithms override professional judgment to determine the grade on the report card. Efficiency has merged these three different reports. And maybe that’s not a good thing.

Let me be clear here: I am not advocating for eliminating online gradebooks.  They definitely serve purpose of reporting learning progress. The online gradebook holds all three interested parties – students, teachers, and families – accountable. But – here’s a crazy thought – what if the gradebook did not have a current grade? What if it only did what it was supposed to do: show progress?

On several occasions throughout the conference, Dr. Guskey emphasized the importance of informed professional judgment. We all know the perils of averaging grades. Students who take longer to master concepts and skills are penalized by earlier grades. Not to mention, most systems use the antiquated 100-point grading scale where failing grades are weighted 6 times those of passing grades. In our current system, teachers are challenged to manipulate the gradebook to make it reflect what they know is true about their students’ learning, and students play the game of school, calculating how many points they need to earn a grade. Moving to rubrics, a 4-point scale, and removing the grade from the online grade book may be a step in the right direction. The report card could then be the opportunity for the teacher to share the final professional judgment of the student’s learning during that grading period.

It’s a radical idea. It would require a fundamental shift in practice. It would involve a lot of education for all of the stakeholders about its purpose as well as the logistics. And it just might be worth it.