The Grading Podcast

Sharona: Well, in the article it says grading reformers’ goal is to make grades clearer so an A truly reflects deep understanding. I have that goal. I also have another goal, which is if grades are going to do anything related to motivation, I want it to be positive. It might be neutral, like grades might just have no effect on motivation. Most of the research shows that grades actually decrease motivation. So, if grades are going to influence motivation, I would like it to be a positive motivator and not a negative one.

Boz: Welcome to the Grading Podcast, where we’ll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students learning, from traditional grading to alternative methods of grading. We’ll look at how grades impact our classrooms and our students success. I’m Robert Bosley, a high school math teacher, instructional coach, intervention specialist, and instructional designer in the Los Angeles Unified School District and with Cal State LA.

Sharona: And I’m Sharona Krinsky, a math instructor at Cal State Los Angeles, faculty coach, and instructional designer. Whether you work in higher Ed or K 12, whatever your discipline is, whether you are a teacher, a coach, or an administrator, this podcast is for you each week, you will get the practical detailed information you need to be able to actually implement effective grading practices in your class and at your institution.

Boz: Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co hosts, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: Well, let’s see. We’re going into week 11, I believe, of the semester. So we’re right in my worst time psychologically of the semester. I just have this real Issue with right around 2/3rds.

Boz: You know, I’ve worked with you for years, and I know that we’ve actually talked about that off air plenty of times, but is it any different this year? Since you’re in this drastically different role than you have been in the past?

Sharona: It definitely is. This is probably the least I have felt this mid semester slump so far. What I am noticing different this time is an overall level of exhaustion because of the amount of work. But it’s not, it doesn’t feel as mid semestery. It just feels I’m in the two thirds spot of a marathon.

Boz: Yeah. And you’ve been just barely keeping above the water the whole time.

Sharona: Exactly. Thanks largely to you. So shout out to you because I would never make it through this without your hard work coding and writing and holding me accountable. So thank you. How about you? How are you doing?

Boz: You know, I’m doing well. We’ve got some big things changing in my professional life that we’ll probably talk about next episode, but.

Sharona: Yeah, I was wondering when we were going to talk about that. Yeah, next episode or, or maybe two episodes.

Sharona: Yeah. Well, I think when I started down this path of "going back", this happened when I wasn’t officially still coordinating. So I kind of didn’t say a lot about the design. And now that we’re in the middle of it, even I didn’t realize how much we had conflated the choices we made to support the alternative grading system that were specific to how we designed the class with even the principles of alternative grading. Because some of the choices that we made, yes, they were available to us because we were doing alternative grading, but they’re not required. They weren’t like part of the four pillars. For example, we have reintroduced paper and pencil midterms. There’s no reason you can’t have paper and pencil midterms in an alternative graded system.

Boz: No, not at all.

Sharona: But the people who designed the "traditional grading version" we’re like, Oh, we’re going to go back to paper and pencil midterms. And now that’s in our traditional class. It’s not in our mastery version. And people are saying all kinds of things about see this about alternative grading, or see that about alternative grading. And I said in a meeting this week, I’m like, this paper and pencil midterm has nothing to do with the traditional grading.

Boz: Yeah, which, these conversations kind of got me thinking about looking at some of the common myths about either traditional or alternative grading. And we found a couple of things, and I think that’s what we’re going to be talking about today, is really looking at some of these myths and debunking some of these myths. So, we’ve got a couple of source materials that we’ll be referring to that I’m sure you’ll get all in the show notes. That’s kind of where I wanted to go with today’s episode.

Sharona: That sounds great to me, especially because I was also been reading the book by Jack Schneider and Ethan Hunt , "Off the mark: how grades, ratings and rankings undermine learning, but don’t have to." So some of the things I hope to talk about in this myth busting, I actually have the history in front of me in this book about where they came from in traditional grading. So I’m excited about that part.

Boz: That’s one of those books on my list that I need to get. And I know you’ve been enjoying that book. So I need to get caught up on my reading. I’ve been a little bit slacking lately.

Sharona: Well, and I have to get ahold of the authors and get them on the podcast. Cause I cannot wait to hear about why they wrote this book. Because this is literally the best history portion of traditional grading that I have ever read.

Boz: And you know more about the history of grading than I do. When we do some of our trainings and PDs together, that’s always been the section that you take and the section that you kind of specialize is the history of how traditional grading became the tradition, like where it came from and all that. So if you’re saying that book does a better job than any others that you’ve seen, then if any of our listeners are interested in some of the history, that’s a great resource, cause if you’re saying that, I completely believe it.

Sharona: Yeah. Well this entire book is only eight chapters and one of the chapters, it’s 40 pages called tools of necessity, is entirely about the development of grading as a technology. So it’s fascinating and amazing. So.

Sharona: Before you go on, I just want to make a comment about Sarah Ruth Morris. She’s a former public middle school math teacher, who at the time was a education policy doctoral candidate. Can I just do a shout out to math teachers everywhere who are driving a lot of this grading reform conversation, at least in our worlds. Middle school math teachers, high school math teachers, college instructors, because we come in for so much crap as math instructors that I’m just so proud of our institution of math instructors to be really trying to lead some of those efforts. So shout out to Sarah Ruth Morris and Matt Townsley, who’s a former math educator, and all the math educators who’ve been at the front of this. So I just had to do that.

Boz: Absolutely. But the first myth I kind of want to talk about, because this is one that I have also heard quite a bit, is that grading reformists like you and I want everyone to earn an A. And let me be clear. As an educator, I have always wanted all of my students to earn A. That’s not a tradition or alternative grading mentality. That’s always been one of my goals because that would mean that all of my students are succeeding. And as an educator, I think we all should want all of our students to be succeeding. Do I expect all of my students to ever get an A? Like I said, I would love to see it. I’ve never seen it. I’ve never come close to it. And if I never do in my professional career, I would not consider that a failure at my part, but.

Sharona: Well, and there’s a subtext to that. That we want everyone to earn an A "without actually earning it" is what is not spoken. Right? By want everyone to earn an A because we want to lower the standards so that everyone can like all of this subtext is built into that statement.

Boz: Yeah. And what they point out in this article is that most grading reformists, it’s not that we want, to lower standards or we want to inflate grades. We want to stop conflating achievement with behavior. We want the extra credit, the turning things on time, all the behavioral mechanisms that are baked into traditional grading. We want those to be removed.

We want our grades to represent our students’ level of achievement and, you know, defined learning targets by the end of the semester.

Sharona: Well in the article it says grading reformers goal is to make grades clearer. So an a truly reflects deep understanding. I have that goal. I also have another goal, which is if grades are going to do anything related to motivation, I want it to be positive. It might be neutral. Like, grades might just have no effect on motivation. Most of the research shows that grades actually decrease motivation. So, if grades are going to influence motivation, I would like it to be a positive motivator and not A negative one.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So I also thought it was really interesting in this article because I have felt that, but people don’t believe me. Cause again, they’re conflating different things in the article. It says anecdotally, so this is not data, this is anecdote, classroom educators have shared with us that some students find it harder to earn high marks when they are graded only on content knowledge. And I’m kind of like, yeah, if you can’t game the system, you actually have to learn.

Boz: Yeah, and that’s been something you and I have said many times, is that you know, when we get asked the question about the rigor in our classes, and I know we hate that word, but our bars are actually higher now than they were when we were doing traditional grading. In fact, they’re quite a bit higher especially in my classes that I do revisions on assignments on assignments that I’m doing for proficiency or mastery. Absolutely. My expectations are much higher of my students than they used to be.

Sharona: Yeah. I don’t take arithmetic mistakes anymore. They got to fix them. I used to always accept arithmetic mistakes because I don’t teach arithmetic. I teach algebra, or trigonometry, or geometry, or calculus. So, in traditional grading, I don’t feel good about dinging them if they got a negative sign wrong. But at the end of the day, I’d rather they didn’t get it wrong.

Boz: Yeah, but that’s also reminding me, as you were talking about, This part of this article that says that some students actually find it harder to get an A. One of the last times that I taught Algebra 2 I had a student, of course I won’t say his name, but They were very much accustomed to getting very high grades. Partly because the student’s mother was extremely engaged with faculty actually to the point to where, We actually had to ban her from campus except by appointment because she would just show up and literally ambush teachers. She actually tried this a few times with me, but I wouldn’t let this student game the system. I wouldn’t let them game my system. You know, tried to do a few things that I called them out on. And eventually this parent bugged and harassed the administration and the counselors at my school so much that they ended up transferring the kid out of my class. And of course the class he got, he went to very easily, got the A because he did, did all the homework, did all the, the behavioral control mechanisms perfectly. But I know for a fact that that student did not know the material to the point to where justified the A.

Sharona: So you brought up then the behavioral control and that’s something that, again, in this very first paragraph of this section of the article, they say it’s about matching grades with actual learning, not conflating achievement with behavior. And as I was reading the Ethan and Hutt book, they were talking, in this chapter, about the intentional ways, very, very intentional ways, that behavior was actually chosen to be part of grades when this, these grading systems started.

So this chapter starts with first of all, an understanding that grades, test scores, and transcripts are very recent. They’re may be 150, 175 years old compared to the thousands of years of recorded history where we could have done grades and test scores and things. We just didn’t. And a lot of it was because in the world that existed there was no formal schooling system until about 200 years ago. If you just look at the history of human progress, there was education.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: But it was almost entirely relational. So it was either you were an apprentice to a trade and you learned that way. And in return, you paid for that with your work as an apprentice. Or if you had a lot of money, because also children worked. Children were in the labor market very young, either on a family farm or in a trade. So when you pulled a child out to school them, you not only had to pay for the schooling, but you lost their wages. So only the upper echelon could even afford this, and they did it through governesses and tutors.

Boz: Mathematics.

Sharona: Mathematics. And the reason for this, there was a, a few things, but they began, they were starting to look at merit and distinction and distinguishing between students. And this was a check. So Cambridge had different colleges internal to the university. And so they were trying to have some ability to check on the quality of each of those. So they wanted this public mechanism of accountability. And they had this examination structure, and everyone was arguing about what should be in it. Should it be the classics, the Greeks and the Romans, and all these other things. And they decided that math was the easiest to decide if the answer was right.

So there was a whole structure around this. And then, Yale and Harvard, they’re like feeling their oats as the upstart American colleges compared to the colonial British hierarchy. So they want to start to seem like they’re like that. So they adopt it. And they also started then, particularly at places like West Point, they started putting in numerical marking systems with weighted averages. Thank you, West Point. Because prior to that, it was based on favoritism and partisanship. So like favorite students got the recommendation letters of the officers and things like that. So they were trying to systematize all this.

And then they started realizing that these parents are paying for these kids to go away to college. And they started having real behavioral issues at the universities. Because the students were kind of loving being out from under the eyes of the parents. And they didn’t necessarily agree with the instructors as to the purpose of their education. And they started rebelling. Like on mass, they would literally get out, start getting out of a class in the middle of the class by walking out in ones and twos until literally the whole class had left the room as an act of rebellion. So then they decided, well, we have to exert control.

So then Horace Mann comes into the picture in Massachusetts and decides that public accountability, publishing both numerical and narrative reports in the local papers about the schools. is going to be useful in judging whether public money is being used appropriately. And so we get the first standardized tests. This is, yes, they wanted to know how students were doing academically, but they were really struggling with control issues.

Boz: Is it any wonder then, I mean, so it was not by mistake, but by design that behavioral mechanisms are built into our traditional grading system, whether any of us that don’t know the history know that or not, it’s there by design.

Sharona: Well, and I guess the question is, is there such a huge problem with using control mechanisms like these? I mean, I don’t want to ignore, do we need control mechanisms?

Boz: Well, no, but that’s the, I think that’s the point of a lot of the grading reform is it’s not that we don’t need it. And we’ve talked about this in several different episodes here. It’s not that we’re saying, as an educator and as a teacher, you don’t need some control mechanisms. We’re saying it shouldn’t be part of the grade, that there’s other things, or you have multi letter grade reporting, like what we actually do have in LAUSD, what Thomas Guskey was talking about and a few others. That it’s fine to report those and to mark those and to give those grades, just keep them separate from the academic.

Now, unfortunately, like I said, In LAUSD, we do. We actually have three different grades that we report every time we do grade reporting. An academic, a work habit, and a cooperation. Yet, we still see all those behavior things in the academic. And one of the reasons why is because the academic is the only one that goes on the transcripts that goes anywhere after high school. So I’ve often heard people say, yeah, we don’t use the work habit distinction between the academic because those other two, the behavior and the work habit have no teeth. They, they don’t mean anything.

Sharona: Well, and this probably goes also back to, I think we lack clarity on what exactly we’re trying to teach our students. We focus so much on "we’re only teaching our students content". But when you talk to instructors, they’ll say things like, I have to teach my students to turn their stuff in on time. I have to teach my students to have ethical integrity. I have to teach my students these other things. And I’m like, then articulate those things and assess those things. And maybe in the academic grade or not, but you have to make a decision because the problem is when you don’t articulate those things, I think they get out of balance. And suddenly, 99 percent of the grade is do they turn things in on time?

Boz: Yeah, and especially if you’re not, as an educator, really looking at and reflecting on those practices. And you’re like, oh yeah, of course I don’t accept late work, or I take this many points off for late work, because I’ve got to teach them in real world and in college, you can’t do things late. Which is debatable. But anyways, if you’re not really examining those practices and realizing, oh, wait, by doing these things, that actually has a lot more weight on the grade than anything else. So the content that I am hired to teach and that by, you know, Ed code, I’m supposed to be teaching my students and my grade is supposed to say, yes, the student can do this. It’s more on the behavior than the actual content.

Sharona: Which we could go on forever, but I think I’d like to continue on with some of these myths.

Boz: All right.

Sharona: So, Myth number two, and this just makes my blood boil as a mathematician, grading reformers eliminate the use of a zero to inflate grades. So this is talking about that minimal grading stuff on a 100 point scale.

Boz: Well, so here’s the first myth I want to debunk about that right away. You and I are both use alternative grading. We have now for several years. Let me ask you something. Are there zeros in your classes?

Sharona: Oh my god, oh yeah, there’s a ton of zeros.

Boz: So there’s the first part of this myth I want to debunk, is the fact that anyone that doesn’t use traditional grading doesn’t use zeros. Yeah, we do. We have done things that have eliminated the unfair weighting of a zero in a hundred point scale, but that doesn’t mean we’ve done away with zeros. That doesn’t mean students don’t have consequences for not doing work. It’s just not this massively unfair. I mean, let’s look at the math.

Sharona: And I think that’s the problem is that if you’re going to insist on a 100 point scale, you have two choices, skew your scale towards failure or balance it. And if you balance it, you have to change the math.

Boz: Yeah, because, and we have a whole episode on what’s wrong with traditional grading. And we spend quite a bit on the actual math. But just a real quick recap, let’s say we’re doing a traditional grading with 90 to 100 being an A and so on. If you have 10 assignments and I, for whatever reason, don’t do one of them and get a zero on it, those other nine have to be perfect 100s for me to get that grade back up to an A. Now, does that really seem fair that I have to show nine times perfection just to show that I have an A minus? I mean, if you give me a task ten times and I’ve done it perfectly nine times, have I really not shown that?

Sharona: Well, it’s not even nine times. What if you show it perfectly five times?

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: One time you screwed it up. Cause a lot of people would argue, yeah, nine times, that’s 90%. So let’s take it out of nine times. Let’s take it to five times. If I do it perfectly five times and one time, screw it up because I forget to do it.

Boz: Or something comes, just something comes up in life. I’m sorry. There are things in life with our students. I’d love to take all of the things and pressures and requirements and expectations away from my students that weren’t based on school. Unfortunately, most of our students have real lives and in those real lives have roles and responsibilities that have nothing to do with education. So yeah, you do it five times, one of those five times something came up and you couldn’t do it as a student. And now you’ve shown it perfect four out of five times. That’s a B minus in a traditional grading with a hundred points and that one zero. Have you really not shown that, as a student, if you can do it perfect four out of five times that you know what you’re doing?

Sharona: Now, can I take a little side nitpick on this article’s graphic? Cause there’s such a lost opportunity as a statistician with data visualization, they have a graphic and they reinforce in my mind that there’s no problem. They had an opportunity. So they show this graphic that shows a is 10 levels or 10 levels. B is 10 levels. C is 10 levels. D is 10 levels. And that they should have made the F which has 60 levels. visually 60 percent of the graphic.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So they lost an opportunity. So now you’ve also heard me say, though, I, as a mathematician, I’m extremely uncomfortable using a 50 percent minimum and we see that I went to a presentation at MathFest this past summer and the guy’s like, yeah, I understand, but 50 percent was just too high. So I made my minimum 40%. I was like, great. So you only have twice as much weight on it. F, you know, so I just, if you can come to recognize that 100 points is skewed to an F, don’t use 100 points. Use 4 points.

Boz: Yeah, and I’ll admit, I’ve talked about this several times, that, unlike you, I did not jump straight from traditional to what we do now. I did a lot of these traditional hacks and these minimum, I did a lot of these, and one of them was getting rid of the zero. Now, we, Joe and I, Joe Zeccola and I, worked on this, we were both at Santee together and him and I worked together on this, and we did get a school wide policy. in place for a short time that did away with zeros and we replaced it with a minimal grade. Now, because we were doing it school wide and because we couldn’t, we also did what you just talked about where we went a little bit below 50. We actually, him and I personally went to 40, but some people went as far down as 35.

So we, yeah, we, we did do this. And again, every time, and this is what I tell people would, because I did a lot of these second chance quizzes, the getting rid of the zero. Every time I did one of these helped the problem, but it either didn’t eliminate it or it created another one until I just was like, forget the, and threw out the whole traditional grading system and got rid of averages completely. But that was one of them. I did try it. There are some real criticisms to doing the 50 percent for a zero, and I have seen some of those in my student behaviors because it students first see without the explanation and without. Making the students really understand they just see the zero as a 50 percent. Oh, I don’t have to do as much So there this can cause some some negative student behavior when it’s not communicated well with the students

Sharona: This also though reminds me. So since I’m now teaching a whole bunch, or not teaching but coordinating a whole bunch of traditional classes, I’m trying to do what I can to mitigate this issue Because I’m having to live with it. And one of the things we’re doing right now is we’re allowing anyone who scores below 70 percent on an exam to retake the exam to improve their grade to a 70%. Now you could say, well, why wouldn’t you just allow them to retake it to get higher, right? To get anything. If they retake it and they get a 90, well, why not? Right?

And the challenge that we’re running into is if you allow that, then you kind of have to allow everyone to retake it. And if you allow everyone to retake it, you’ve now doubled your grading load on your instructors. And that is a real serious limitation. I mean, that’s not something to just sneeze at. So I am sensitive to that, which is why at the moment, what I’m attempting to do and the reason that I’ve, and no one’s really objected, is that they can kind of see, we’re all mathematicians, we can kind of see the damage that something below 70 does to your chance of passing. Because a 70 percent is a bare minimum passing grade.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: But I’m not totally comfortable with it. And it’s the best I can do right now to balance the competing factors.

Boz: But I love going back to the article. I love what was pointed out. I think they were quoting Douglas Reeves on the best way to deal with this issue. Just get, like you said, get rid of the hundred points, you know, going to a scale like a zero to four, where yes, the zero is still there. It’s just now not disproportionately damaging like it is on a point. And I know this is something that You know, he does use, you and I don’t use four point rubrics, we use, you know, often use two or three point rubrics, but he uses a four point rubric that includes a zero. And yes, students don’t do work, they get, they get the zero. It’s not like we are saying students should get something for nothing.

Sharona: The nice thing about the zero to four scale as a stepping stone to a more robust alt grading system for me is that it does have familiarity to the students because it’s a GPA scale, but it’s a balanced GPA scale where a zero and a four. So an A and an F averages out to a C. So it’s an equally weighted system. So mathematically it doesn’t skew to failure. Okay. What can we move on to myth number three? Because this one cracks me up because it’s sort of a myth. And it’s sort of not.

So myth number three says grading reformers want to burn up the system. So shout out to my burn it all down folks. There are some people who want to burn it all down as far as grades. They really believe that grades should be gone. I’ve gotten closer to burn it all down than I used to be. But I am definitely not there. Because I do believe we still have the necessities that drove a lot of these things in the first place.

Boz: And again, you and I both, when we do our trainings and the target groups that we’re trying to reach, is not what we would consider the burn it down. Although I am very much admittedly what I would consider a burn it all down person.

Although when I say that, I don’t necessarily mean just getting rid of grades.

Sharona: Yeah, I know. You want to reconstruct the entire schooling system from the ground up.

Boz: Yeah, I want to burn the entire system down. But, in doing so, would probably actually keep grades. There is a real function that grades provide, which is communication. The way we do the grades, yes, needs to be drastically changed, but

Sharona: Well, I think that the thing, as I’m reading through this history book, many of the things that drove the design of grades really do exist. So we have that episode on artificial scarcity in the writings of David Clark. There’s artificial scarcity, and then there’s real scarcity, and there may be a time and a place when ranking students is important. whether it’s employers trying to figure out the person who’s the best fit for a job or, or if there is a place where there are scarce resources. And with schooling being so publicly funded, I do think we have those accountability and reportability challenges.

So I don’t think you can burn it all down without having replacement designs in place. And what they say in this section is grades have long intended to serve as the primary mode of communicating student proficiency to students and their families. This is where, in my mind, the conflation of what is and what isn’t alternative grading in my world has really come up. I intend grades to communicate to students what their proficiency is. When you conflate, like, so, so the number one argument for why everyone told me they wanted to put traditional grading back in was that students did not understand how to know how they were doing. That was the number one criticism of our alternative grading system by people who don’t understand it themselves because they haven’t bothered to learn it, is that students constantly complain that they don’t know how they’re doing. So they wanted to go back to communicating in a way that they felt that students could understand.

Boz: And to some degree, I understand this argument. I empathize with this argument. I don’t agree with it, but I do understand it.

Sharona: Right. And the whole episode on progress trackers.

Yeah. But let me do a little explanation of why I do understand this argument. With traditional grading, you can look at any LMS system and see a number and know what that number means. Now, know what, let me rephrase that, know what that number refers back to as a letter grade. However, and again, I wish we had video on for just this part because you almost jumped through the screen when I said that.

Sharona: Thank you.

Boz: Yeah, what those points actually represent and what those letter grades actually represent Has nothing to do with actual learning.

Sharona: And it’s worse than that though. And that’s what I was jumping on. They think they know what that number means. But given the way that the math lies in the middle of the semester, they’re actually even wrong for what they think it means.

Boz: With, yeah, with some of them because some LMS systems do treat zeros differently. And if you don’t, if an instructor doesn’t actually put the zero in, it’s treated as an exemption until the educator actually puts the zero in.

Which might be on an ongoing basis might not be until the very end, right?

Sharona: So there’s two layers here of not communicating the learning and then lying about what it actually does communicate. And I have problems with both of them.

Boz: But here’s where I think one of the bigger issues is with this argument is that every LMS system out there is designed for traditional grading. They’re designed to do averages and points and weighted averages There isn’t any good LMS systems out there. I mean Canvas is the best one we’ve worked with. And shout out to Canvas, you guys are better than any of the others that I’ve worked with, but it’s still, it still actually is built for traditional. So until we get an LMS system, until we get some stuff designed to really support alternative methods of grading and alternative ways to wrap grades up. We’re going to be dealing with this kind of issue.

Sharona: Right. But here’s the bigger problem of where I was going with, with this, what I’ve come to recognize. So grades are supposed to communicate student learning. The number one argument was that our grades weren’t doing that and that they want to go back to traditional. However, this going back to traditional wasn’t just taking our existing structure and putting points back onto it instead of our proficiency scales. Okay? It was also, but now we need midterms to check to see if students are actually learning because we’re uncomfortable with all of the asynchronous quizzing.

Well, there’s plenty of classes out there in traditional grading that do asynchronous quizzing. And there’s plenty of alternative grading systems out there that do paper and pencil midterms. And on top of that part of it, they insisted on doing weighted assignment categories. So now they made the preparation, participation, and practice part of the class, 35 percent of the grade. So it went from instead of being one out of 15 learning outcomes, which is like 8 percent of the grade or 6 percent of the grade, 7%, whatever, instead of it being that, suddenly it’s 35%. So then now they made a completely different weighting on the system.

And then on top of that, they wanted us to still do this in a coordinated way, which means that we had to norm and agree. And you and I know you can barely get faculty to agree on two or maybe three levels, on any scale, points or not. So we chose to keep the same individual item scale that we do in the mastery.

And so in the mastery section we have individual questions, and we look for major and minor mistakes, and depending on the level of major mistakes and minor mistakes, we decide whether or not holistically this assessment meets mastery for a standard. Well, when you translate that into points, basically seven out of ten points is the equivalent to mastery. C level is passing to mastery.

But you get two masteries in a standard in our alternative grading system, you’re at full credit for that standard. You get two sevens in a traditionally graded system, you’re at a C. And then if you get one of them at seven points and the other one down at three or four points, you’ve brought the whole thing down to essentially counting for nothing. So it’s so complicated, the entire class was designed around alternative grading, all of the choices, the types of questions that we ask. One of the things we’re seeing is supposedly everyone’s like, oh, it’s just way too easy to pass the mastery class. So on the one hand, your DFW rate is too high. And on the other hand, we’re not confident that the students who pass actually know anything.

These are all the things that are being told to me. And now we’re seeing, we just gave our first paper and pencil midterm, with the same questions that we would have on our checkpoint quizzes, and we’re having 30 percent pass rates on the midterm. Whereas we’re at 70% or 80 percent on the mastery. So wait, which one is harder? So it’s just, it’s all confusing and it’s conflated because we’ve taken just the proficiency scale, which is what the argument was, right? The argument was students couldn’t understand their grades. That’s why we had to do this.

Boz: Yep.

Sharona: And they’ve now wrapped in modalities of taking assessments. They’ve now changed the amount of time. They’ve made the weighting on some of the work that we give heavier, and yet it was actually intended to be lighter. So we’ve got a whole mess. So it’s not that I want to burn up the system. But grades are way more central to course design than we realize.

Boz: Which kind of brings us to that fourth myth that they talk about, which again, we’ve alluded to here, and I’ve actually brought this up as a huge difference between the K 12 world and the college world from what I’m seeing, but this myth that grading reform should be able to happen overnight. The way the article wrote it, grading reformers should be able to snap their fingers and make it happen. That this should be an easy, quick fix.

Sharona: Yeah, if it’s just the grades measurement, we should be able to change that.

Boz: Yeah. And you know, I think we were was it Dr. Chad Lang maybe that we were talking about this and I was asking him, because that’s one of the things I see in any kind of reform in K 12. Like, it gotta be done now. We’re doing the PD tonight. We expect to see this in two days in your classroom. And, if it’s not there, or if it’s not working, oh, next semester we’re on to something different. This is not a quick, short fix. This is something that takes time.

Sharona: Well, yes and no. The problem is that’s what they said they were going to do, and the people who designed it didn’t do that. So they couldn’t, when they started looking at everything, the educators involved didn’t just replace proficiency scales with points. That would have been the most authentic way to do it. I still think we would have seen lots of problems. They didn’t do that. They fundamentally changed everything, or as much as they could, back to what they perceived a "traditionally graded course." But look at all of the pedagogical choices that went back into it. Things that we had done to encourage active learning in a safe environment with our iClickers and the participation versus the accuracy, and even the homeworks. We created all of these safe spaces for students to just get credit for trying because philosophically that is part of alternative grading that only the things that were actually intentionally and transparently checking for a success are what goes into the grade. Now, all of these extra assignments are now checked for accuracy. And the only thing that can do is hurt students.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: Everyone thinks it helps. Oh, it’s going to help. If I make my homework grade bigger, that’s the easier part of the class. So I’m going to help students. That’s it. I’m lowering my standards by including homework. Homework is the place where it’s the hardest to get stuff correct. Because you are just learning .

Boz: And again, you know what? When I was in college, I had jobs. Not a job, I had jobs. I’ve always had to. A lot of my students have even more responsibilities than that. I’m sorry. If I am , and I often did this as a student, I de emphasized my homework in most of my math classes because I didn’t need to do it. It was just going through the motion to check off the box. If I really needed to study, I was studying in a class that I needed to study in because I had a limited amount of time. Well, luckily, the limited amount of time, I was still able to get mostly A’s and B’s in my math classes. But if I had some of the extra responsibilities that some of my students have in even less time than when I did, there’s no way I could have gotten all that stuff done.

Sharona: I think the reason I wanted to do this particular episode, because we know that a lot of people listening know a lot of this stuff. But what I’m hoping to do is to give the people listening the at your fingers knowledge of how and when these these myths might come up so that you can debunk them in the moment. Because sometimes, even though we know something’s not true, I know for me, if I don’t have arguments pre practiced at my fingertips, I’m like, I know that’s wrong, but I can’t say it. I can’t figure out what to say in the moment. So for each of these four myths, I’m hoping that, and I think at the higher ed, probably the first three are more relevant than the fourth one. I think the fourth one is much more a K 12 thing.

Boz: Yeah, I agree.

Sharona: But having it at your fingertips about, do we want to burn up a system that lies? Well, yeah, if something’s a lie, don’t you want to burn it up or replace it with something that’s true? But that might not be the best way to say it, right? What we want to burn up is communicating false information. Right now, traditional grades mostly just communicate how good a student is at the game of grades. It does not communicate their knowledge. We really would rather communicate knowledge. Eliminating the use of a zero to inflate grades? I want to eliminate the use of the zero because it’s deflating grades. Zeros are grade deflation.

Boz: And again, we don’t even have to eliminate zeros to do that. Just change the hundred point scale, which is, there’s lots of ways around it. We’re not saying that we should eliminate consequences for students not doing work, but just eliminating the extra weight that it has in a traditional grading hundred point scale.

Sharona: And if you’re In an environment where this is going to be very hard, my number one recommendation is go to a zero to four scale and you can use all the decimals in between. Like you can give a 3. We’re not saying it’s just the integers, right? All we’re saying is go to a symmetric scale. As opposed to a skewed scale. That is bare step one. Yes, I personally would not try to use more than just the integers. But if you have to, like, it’s not the end of the world that it comes in. I don’t love it, but at least you’re getting rid of the skew. That’s like step number one. Get rid of the skew. And the first myth, do we want everyone to earn an A? Yes. I firmly believe that you should set the bar for an A in the class that everyone who hits that bar has successfully learned the majority of the material in your class. Whatever that means.

Boz: Yeah, but like I said, this was a goal. This has always been a goal of mine as an educator. I think it’s foolish to, to say otherwise. I mean, I would always love my students. I didn’t get into this to say, oh, I only want certain students or some of my students to be successful. I would love for them to all be successful because that means I was successful as an educator. So yeah.

Sharona: I would just say that, It also depends what level you teach it, in what context. So for example, when I’m teaching juniors and seniors in an elective math course, it’s actually much more realistic for me to get almost all A’s or all A’s. My math history class, I was darn close. Because my bar was different. And I think it was a reasonable, useful bar because one of my biggest goals was for them to really enjoy learning about the history of mathematics more than their performance. And I think there’s certain places, even in K 12, whether it’s in maybe some of the arts or in some of the more personally expressive classes, maybe creative writing. Right? I think in some of the classes that have some external standards that are a little bit more, I don’t know what the right word is, but sort of comparable to a greater audience, it’s harder. It’s definitely harder.

Boz: That’s still, that’s not what the, I don’t think that’s what the myth is saying though.

Sharona: No, but you said that you don’t expect it. And I’m saying, I think there are places and times when it’s reasonable to even expect that everyone’s going to get it. That’s all I’m saying. Majority, you’re right. It’s, we want everyone to earn an A, but we want that A to mean something. That’s where I’m really going with that. So I think it’d be amazing. And I think there are times and places where it’s happened to me where everyone does legitimately earn an A. Because I set an appropriate bar, and I set the scaffolding, and I had the right circumstances, and I didn’t have any students whose life got in the way, and, you know, Yahtzee, Yahtzee.

Boz: So, what, what other myths have, have you, our listeners, heard or dealt with? Is there any, I can think of one more big one that we didn’t have time to talk about, but what other myths have you guys either heard or myths that you even believe? Let us know. We maybe can do another myths number two episode.

Sharona: I’d also like to know what you’ve seen with people conflating pedagogical practices and grading practices. Like this idea that paper and pencil midterms are what defines traditional grading. What other things have you heard? I’d love to hear about that as well. So if you do think of something, make sure to use the contact us form on our website. We have gotten some great episodes out of listeners contributing to the conversation. So please go ahead, hit that contact us form.

Boz: All right. And thank you for listening. And until next time, we’ll see you later.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode’s page on our website. www. thegradingpod. com, or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If you would like to suggest a future topic for the show, or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the contact us form on our website. The Grading Podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.

Boz: The views expressed here are those of the host and our guest. These views are not necessarily endorsed by the Cal State system or by the Los Angeles Unified School District.