Letter grades don’t tell us enough
Asa retired person, I count myself fortunate to have access to the services of an excellent medical practitioner. Consultations never feel hurried, and he is an excellent listener. Examinations are thorough, and diagnoses and prescriptions explained in language I understand.
Imagine how dissatisfied I might be if, after a consultation, my doctor ended the session with: “Well, given your age and multiple bad habits I’d rate you a C- at best. Check with the receptionist on the way out.”
The assignment of a letter grade to my state of health would leave me with too many unanswered questions.
It came as no surprise then, to read in a recent Globe and Mail article that Maple Ridge School District, with about 8,000 students, had asked for volunteers to pilot a new report-card system that abandons traditional letter grades.
Seventeen of the district’s 21 schools stepped forward.
The proposal was largely driven by teacher concerns that letter grades are inadequate when it comes to describing the cognitive complexities of how individual kids learn and how they progress at different rates in an irregular pattern. That requires more than a simple letter grade to describe — much less understand.
Teachers recognize this and are frustrated by the few parents who still reduce any conversation about student progress to: “Let’s cut the edubabble — just give me the letter grade.”
Since the Maple Ridge program began, the number of families who still ask for letter grades has fallen from almost half to just 14.
It is true that a doctor/patient relationship is one-on-one and teachers deal with up to 30 kids at a time. No doctor could be realistically expected to communicate patient progress with a written report and a simple letter grade five times a year.
Yet that’s what the Ministry of Education Policy Statement on Student Reporting requires: “Boards of Education [i.e. teachers] must provide parents of students with a minimum of five reports describing students’ school progress. Reporting to parents should be timely and responsive throughout the school year.”
And that for each of 30 kids. Timely and responsive. If that were required of my doctor I could expect a much more cursory diagnosis and limited followup — if any. Too busy writing the many reports on his caseload.
While several other school districts, including Comox Valley, Surrey and most recently Sea to Sky, have launched similar “no letter grade” reporting programs for students in Grades 4 to 7, Premier Christy Clark responded to the Globe and Mail report with a tweet about the issue: “To be completely clear, B.C. is not getting rid of letter grades for our students.” End of discussion.
Clark, according to reports, was not available for an interview to expand on her comments.
Education Minister Mike Bernier said the premier wanted to assure parents that letter grades would not “be pulled out from under them,” especially for Grades 10 through 12, where students need to satisfy postsecondary requirements.
Notwithstanding that a tweet does not fully address the complexities of the topic, what has become increasingly clear is that both parents and teachers are looking for a system of reporting that provides a more indepth analysis of how an individual student is progressing — more than a simple letter grade provides.
But just ditching letter grades without a satisfactory alternative and a thoughtful examination of how rates of learning can be assessed and explained is bound to be contentious.
To develop an assessment of student progress that is of use to parents and, most importantly, the student, the teacher must consider and be able to communicate all evidence collected through observations, conversations and student products such as tests/exams and assignments. The teacher will consider that some evidence carries greater weight than other evidence.
For example, some performance tasks are richer and reveal more about students’ skills and knowledge than others. That’s the kind of information that, in a business about growth and development, is useful to everybody involved and will require more communication than the notorious and infrequent formal parentteacher meetings.
Nor does a letter grade, by itself, reveal much about our own wellbeing.
Speaking for myself, and as a result of too much Netflix last night, I was a D- when I awoke this morning. That improved to a C- after coffee and by lunchtime I had dragged myself up to a C+. Trying for a “B” by dinner time. I have not asked my wife for her own, more detailed, assessment, which sometimes differs from my own.