Grading by percentage is failing our students

I was disheartened and dismayed by the story High school told to use percentage marking in the April 25 Free Press, where the deputy minister of education allegedly ordered a school division to reinstate percentage reporting of young people’s achievements.

This is clearly an expedient political decision as opposed to an informed educational one.

I am disheartened by the fact that we educators have been unable to dissuade politicians and many others from employing percentages to represent student achievement. Percentages are a crude, simplistic indication of a sophisticated, complex phenomenon: student learning.

Equally disturbing is the fact that governments have become too quick to employ provincial edicts to legislate matters best handled at the local level. The terms used in the article don’t help with a serious consideration of the issues.

“Ungrading,” “avant garde,” and “unorthodox system,” as used in the article, are unfortunate and not helpful. The first is a misnomer because high school courses themselves are graded, and the second and third just wrong because practices like Glenlawn’s go back at least 60 years to the Prospect Schools in Vermont and variations are used regularly in many schools across Manitoba and the world. “Progressive” and even “marks” have simply become politically charged and mostly meaningless terms. But let’s start with “percentages” which seem to have a frustrating durability despite their obvious shortcomings.

What human reality does assigning a percentage number to a person’s learning represent?

When it comes to evaluations of children’s achievements numbers are, at a minimum, a pernicious pretense of objectivity and an arbitrary pre-judgment of relative worth and achievement. At their worst, they are life-devastating categorizations and soul-destroying descriptions. Yet they persist, largely because post secondary institutions find them convenient tools to sort students, relieving them of the responsibility to make more sophisticated judgments and predictions about students’ readiness and potential for success.

What does it mean to be assigned a 75 per cent on a report card? Does it mean that the person understands three-quarters of the curriculum for that grade? Does it mean that they got three-quarters of the questions “right” as an aggregate on written tests? Is there a significant difference between 75 per cent and 70 per cent or 80 per cent? Who decided the questions or the material on which the percentage is based? Does a 75 per cent in one school mean the same as 75 per cent in another school? Is 75 per cent in one science teacher’s class identical to 75 per cent in the class next door?

Why must we attach numbers to what students have and have not learned? Perhaps more importantly, what messages do percentages give to students and their parents?

Why am I dismayed?

People remember percentages and letter grades, particularly the low ones that tell them they are somehow inadequate or of less worth, or the high ones which suggest to them that they are somehow superior.

There is virtually no basis to either of these claims: They have proven to be unreliable predictors of potential and future achievements. Any thinking teacher can verify this … and still we insist on this arbitrary and illogical way of judging students.

Portfolios, demonstrations and exhibitions are fundamentally more accurate ways of showing what a child is capable of, made even better by what has become the common practice of student-led reporting to their teachers and parents — and more motivating, as most children do not want to appear deficient in their parents’ eyes.

Enforcing percentages are a poor excuse for accountability; they amount to what Larry Cuban, renowned educational historian, former U.S. department official, superintendent and teacher calls “accountability by bullying.”

Cuban recommends “simply giving an account,” of what policies are justified, what course content is important, what students seem to have mastered, to what degree, how those accounts have been checked and verified and what impact teacher actions have had on student attitudes toward learning more.

His suggestions eliminate the need and the temptation to lay blame on children’s aptitudes and efforts, on parental failings, on teachers’ competencies and on local school official policies.

I understand education is the story about how one becomes a good person and a contributing member of ethical community. What constitutes “goodness” depends upon the views of the children themselves, the views of others interacting with them, and the values, norms and mores of the larger society. This means that students and their parents become integral to any account of student achievement — it’s everybody’s responsibility, including the government in power.

So, not for a moment am I suggesting that governments do not need to have good information to make fiscal decisions and formulate policies for educational improvement.

What I am suggesting, for starters, are two things.

First, the law should allow local school divisions work out their own systems of reporting and accountability — communities are different, schools are different, children are different, parents are different and so are teachers. Our young learn these habits of the mind, body and soul at home or close to home from emulating the adults they meet everyday, including teachers, by having people with whom they have trusting relationships guiding them and helping them shape themselves and by learning how to relate to the natural and the human-made world

Second, everyone should acknowledge that marks are extremely unreliable predictors of success in post secondary education for two reasons: teachers and parents are continuously surprised and astounded when confronted with the futures that young people choose and how they achieve success in their choices; and, many students who just squeak into colleges and universities by the skin of their teeth thrive and outperform those with high percentage marks in high school.

I think we would be amazed if we stopped kidding ourselves that percentage marks are necessary and important and we insisted on locally sensitive ways of noticing student achievement.

We simply have not created or ever employed a system in schools which is not problematic, much less above reproach.

Student assessment is an issue which should be approached humbly and cautiously, because our public judgments about our young have real consequences for them and for us.

John R. Wiens is dean emeritus at the faculty of education, University of Manitoba.