The purpose of a grading system is to give feedback to students so they can take charge of their learning and to provide information to all who support these students—teachers, special educators, parents, and others. The purpose of a reporting system is to communicate the students’ achievement to families, post-secondary institutions, and employers. These systems must, above all, communicate clear information about the skills a student has mastered or the areas where they need more support or practice. When schools use grades to reward or punish students, or to sort students into levels, imbalances in power and privilege will be magnified and the purposes of the grading and reporting systems will not be achieved. This guide is intended to highlight the central practices that schools can use to ensure that their grading and reporting systems help them build a nurturing, equitable, creative, and dynamic culture of learning.
Communicate Information About Learning
Effective grading systems communicate information about learning to help students be proactive, overcome failures, and excel. In equitable schools and classrooms, grades will never be used as rewards, punishments, or tools to force compliance.
See what this looks like in action →
Design Clear Grading & Reporting Guidelines
When each teacher designs their own unique grading system, consistency becomes impossible. Clear, collaboratively- designed school guidelines for grading and reporting, known and followed by everyone, help create a school culture that supports all students.
See what this looks like in action →
Use Common Rubrics or Scoring Guides
An essential practice for educational equity is establishing clear, agreed-upon learning outcomes and defining the criteria for meeting those outcomes. These descriptions of what mastery looks like are powerful tools for learning, teaching, and assessment design.
See what this looks like in action →
Provide Low- Stakes Practice & Feedback
In order for students to learn from practice and feedback, they need chances to practice, make mistakes, and get feedback based on common scoring criteria, without worrying that early mistakes will count heavily against them.
See what this looks like in action →
Report on Habits of Work Separately
Separating habits of work from academic proficiency ensures that a student’s good behavior or work habits cannot mask a lack of proficiency, and that a student’s poor behavior or work habits cannot mask their attainment of proficiency.
See what this looks like in action →
Organize Grade Books Consistently
Design grade book categories in such a way that they will yield the most useful information to educators and learners. The method used for organizing information in gradebooks should be consistent across the school.
See what this looks like in action →
Report Grades Clearly and Consistently
The numerals, letters, or other codes used to designate various levels of achievement or proficiency should be clear, easy to understand, and connected to common scoring guides or rubrics; they should also be used in a consistent way by all teachers.
See what this looks like in action →
Establish a Process for Determining Course or Standards Grades
Agree upon a consistent method for determining a final grade from multiple assessment grades. (Note: A separate verification system may be built in order to ensure that students can meet standards through internships or out-of-school projects.)
See what this looks like in action →
Definition of Terms
Grading System: The system that a school has developed to guide how teachers assess and grade student work.
Reporting System: The system that a school has developed for the organization of assignment scores in gradebooks (either online or paper), and the determination of final grades for report cards and transcripts.
The central challenge for all schools is to create a vibrant and supportive culture of learning. In schools where this culture exists, the faculty believe they can teach all students to reach high standards and have designed school-wide systems to help students get there. Grading and reporting systems can play an important role in helping schools create this culture of high expectations and nurturing support.
In the work of making grading equitable, schools should initially shift culture through the tenets that focus on classroom practice, rather than starting with a change of the symbols that will be used on report cards. Begin redesign efforts by working on common scoring criteria, assessment design, calibration of scoring, opportunities for low-stakes practice and feedback, and systems of academic support. Remember, the point of improving the grading system is to make grading fair, informative, and transparent so students can focus on learning, creating, and growing.
We are grateful to the many extraordinary schools and districts that have contributed to this guide. Their work exemplifies what it means to strive for educational equity.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThis tool depends on the input and advice of many individual educators, schools, and districts. In no particular order, we would like to thank:
The faculties and leaders of the following schools and districts: