Education Commentary: Is It Time to Rethink the Standard Grading Rubric?

Is it Time to Rethink the Standard Grading Rubric?

In recent years, there has been a push to force teachers to engage in practice of giving away grades to students who have done nothing to earn them.  The push is to have teachers give students a 50% even if the student makes no effort, and turns nothing in.

Let’s let that sink in.   50% for doing nothing – no progress, no learning, and no effort.   

Obviously, there is a reason that otherwise rational and reasonable people would  push teachers to engage in such behavior.   The questions that come to mind are why would something like this be needed, and is this the best way to address it?

Why is it needed? 

There seems to be a growing realization that the “standard grading rubric” which requires students to earn 60% of the total points to earn a “D”, 70% to earn a “C”, 80% to earn a “B”, and 90%+ to earn an “A”, is not working in the way it was intended to – to show progress towards mastery of a subject.

In the sport of baseball, professional players – the top people in their field, with years of experience, are supposed to hit a baseball when it is pitched to them.   This is a basic part of their job.   If they get it right 40% of the time, they will be in the Hall of Fame.   

Meanwhile, if a student, who is learning something new, gets it right 59.99% of the time, they fail.

An NFL quarterback who gets it right less than that still earns millions of dollars – and can even successfully sue if they are fired for that level of performance (Colin Kaepernick won only 48% of his games, and completed only 59% of his passes, and successfully sued for not being kept on the team).

In the process of learning a new skill, you will fail many times before you succeed, and even after your first success, you will still have to work and practice to improve your performance (and may never achieve perfection).

Yet a student learning a new subject “fails” if they are not able to maintain at least a 60% average on their attempts to work towards mastery of it.  Even if you weight the final assessment much higher than the earlier attempts, you are setting the student up for failure.

There’s a problem there.

So the next question is: Is giving 50% to those who don't even try actually an appropriate way to address it?

Giving half credit for not doing anything is not the solution – in fact, it is counterproductive and harmful.  It teaches students many wrong lessons – that laziness and lack of effort are worthy of reward, that points and grades are "given" by teachers, rather than being earned by students, and that it is not important or necessary to put any effort into school and learning.     Woody Allen famously said that “90% of life is just showing up”, yet teachers are being pushed to give 50% credit to students who effectively don’t even bother to “show up” – students who make no effort, and turn nothing in.

I understand that getting an extremely low score can put a student in a place where it is difficult (or even impossible) for them to bring the grade up, and I will often create a grading scale where students earn a minimum of 50% for putting in the effort – but the student has to actually make an effort in order to earn that 50% - just as in real life, there are no free points for doing nothing.  But that is not good enough for those who demand that kids be given 50% credit for doing nothing and making no effort.

So let's rethink this.  Instead of giving away 50% for doing nothing, why not simply adjust the rubric?  

In other words, if you are giving half the points for doing nothing, then why not just subtract that bottom 50% from the total?   So instead of giving an unearned gift of 500 of 1000 points to a student who does nothing, makes no effort, and makes no progress towards learning, because you are worried that it will make it impossible for them to dig themselves out of the "F hole" by doing other assignments, just adjust the rubric  to make the "F hole" less deep.

Instead of giving away 50% credit to those who do nothing, why not just take the bottom 50% of the points off for everyone?  In other words, adjust the rubric so that 20% earns a “D”, 40% earns a “C”, 60% earns a “B”, and 80% earns an “A”. 

Or, we could keep stringent requirements for “A”s and “B”s at 90% and 80%, but have broader percentage ranges for “C”s and “D”s, giving us a standard grading rubric of 20% for a “D”, 50% for a “C”. 80% for a “B”, and 90% + for an “A”.

Adjusting the “standard grading rubric” is an ethically correct way to do this.   Pressuring teachers to give away 50% credit for doing nothing is unethical, dishonest, unprofessional, and harmful, and it needs to stop.

One Possible Solution:
We need to simply get rid of the "standard grading rubric" and move to a "progress towards mastery" grading/tracking system.

Keep in mind that "mastery" doesn't always mean 100% or even 90% success.

I'm not a baseball fan, but I know that a MLB player is a trained expert and has achieved mastery in their field, with years of experience. They are paid millions of dollars to do the job that they have focused on for the years of training and apprenticeship. Yet if they are successful in hitting the ball and getting on base just 40% of the time (.400 batting average), they are likely to end up in the hall of fame. Even a 30% success rate (.300 batting average) is considered good (with league average percentages in the 20s).

So we need to accept the fact that, for some tasks, a success rate as low as 25% could be considered "mastery", and base our grading system accordingly.  Sure, other tasks will require a higher success rate for mastery, and it should be the job of teachers - not bureaucrats - to determine what that level should be.

But not even trying is always going to be a zero, and always needs to be graded as a zero, and any "educator" or bureaucrat who demands that credit should be given when no work is accomplished  - or even attempted - needs to be removed from a position where they can influence educational policy.