No penalties for late work. No grades on homework. Grading on standards, not points. In recent years, a new approach to grading in schools has emerged: equitable grading, or grading for equity.
Aimed to make education more focused on making kids learn rather than using grades as a motivation to score well, equitable grading suggests many policies for teachers and schools, from assigning letter grades more evenly across percentages to not grading homework at all.
Originally proposed by Joe Feldman, it has been adopted across the country, including by many schools in the Bay Area and even teachers at Wilcox. The debate over equitable grading has swept schools across the country; proponents argue equitable grading improves education by turning grading into a tool rather than a stick to punish students, while opponents argue the practice discourages students from working hard and contributes to grade inflation.
Equitable grading has many different aspects, but Joe Feldman, author of Grading for Equity, argues its main goal is to intrinsically motivate students to do well. “People who support traditional grading are very interested in motivation as compliance,” says Feldman, “whereas equitable grading talks about motivation in terms of personal responsibility,” according to Education Week. To that end, Feldman advocates that rather than grading based on raw number points received, teachers should grade based on how well students met the standards assessed. In fact, equitable grading has a large focus on whether students showed proficiency in an assessment: English teachers Mr. Allen and Mr. Feain use a four-point scale that grades students on how well they met the standard being assessed, rather than assigning percentages. Like Feldman, Mr. Allen—who teaches English for sophomores and seniors—criticizes the traditional grading scale where less than 60% is an F, arguing that it makes it harder to recover from a single bad grade. “If a person gets a zero for not doing their work, that’s a very far space between that and the lowest passing grade, 60%,” he argues. “So the more students fail, the harder it is to bounce back.”
Many school districts have been drawn to equitable grading; a survey by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute found that half of K-12 teachers said their school district adopted at least one equitable grading policy with 36% saying their school district had implemented two or more, according to Education Week. SCUSD itself organized a session on equitable grading a couple years ago involving Joe Feldman, who gave many suggestions for teachers such as the 4-point scale, “no homework, [and] no taking off points for late submissions,” as Mr. Feain, teacher of English 10 Honors and English 11, recounts.
Many have criticized equitable grading for dumbing down standards: the Fordham report found that 81% of teachers disapproved of never giving zeroes for missing work and 56% disapproved of removing grade reductions for late work, according to Education Week. However, there were some equitable grading policies the Fordham report did not look at; due to spacing constraints, they focused on the most controversial policies. Mr. Feain acknowledges equitable grading “can be abused by students, and therefore students aren’t rewarded for learning, they’re rewarded for being manipulative,” which is why he has stopped implementing some of its policies such as allowing revisions for tests and quizzes.
Dublin Unified School District (DUSD) faced backlash when they planned to get Feldman’s group to train teachers on new grading systems, causing them to take out Feldman and institute the same policies without calling it “equitable,” according to The San Francisco Chronicle. Even then, some policies were not implemented due to parent opposition. “In their head what we were doing was going to eliminate the chances of their child getting into College,” DUSD Superintendent Chris Funk told The Chronicle.
Despite this opposition, Wilcox teachers speak positively on equitable grading’s overall effects. Mr. Allen says his approach—which is technically “standards-based grading,” a type of equitable grading—and argues that his system in fact allows him “to grade more rigorously and use a higher standard.” Mr. Feain argues that equitable grading has really helped his on-level students, recalling how after he removed penalties for late work, more students turned in an important project on time. “A lot of procrastination is associated with stress,” but “because there was no stress about a deadline they were comfortable with submitting it when it was ready.” He notes that as he has experimented with equitable grading over the years, he’s found it is imperfect, but remarks “we should be cautious about any grading system, and that’s the thing with grading for equity—you can take the pieces you like.”
