Can Standards-based Grading Grade Less?
Before attempting to answer the question in the title, I’d like to first revisit what we mean by going gradeless:
Grading less, that is, limiting the impact of grades within current constraints. For many of us that has meant getting away from inaccurate and inequitable grading practices, like assignments with no opportunity to redo or retake or zeroes on the mathematically disproportionate 100-point scale. It also can mean not grading as much, assigning things that are required or not required, but not graded.
Without grades, that is, avoiding the damaging and demotivating effects of grades entirely, replacing them with feedback, revision, portfolios, and narrative reports. Evergreen State College, Hampshire College, and New College of Florida all successfully employ some version of this approach. At the K-12 level, the Mastery Transcript lists the courses in which students have received credit sans grades, using a combination of artifacts and reflections to tell a more detailed story.
Much of the thinking around going gradeless on this platform has been how we can shelve the gradebook, often until the negotiation of some final grade. That approach is what I practiced as an English teacher in my own traditionally graded setting. I have now transitioned into an administrative role at a school that uses standards-based grading. Although TG2 has always acknowledged SBG as part of the gradeless continuum, advocates of SBG do not generally share our critique of grades as problematic in themselves.
SBG does fit at least one part of the definition of going gradeless: “limiting the impact of grades within the context of current constraints.” According to Tom Schimmer, author of Grading From the Inside Out: Bringing Accuracy to Student Assessment Through a Standards-Based Mindset, the approach provides students with the safety to take risks and learn at their own pace, giving them a “sense of real optimism about the possibility of success.” When we think of the anxiety, frustration, and discouragement that attended many of our own experiences with traditional grades, the standards-based mindset has been a game changer. Perhaps it’s greatest contribution is the way it replaced a punitive notion of accountability with “a definition that views accountability not as punishment for undesirable behavior, but as responsibility for learning.” And it has done all this while still working within larger institutional constraints.
This notion of accountability is preserved in most gradeless approaches, with assignments often being ungraded but required. In my own approach, these showed up as checks and zeros with no gradations between credit and no credit, ergo “gradeless.”
One of the reasons why gradeless educators hesitate to call SBG gradeless is that it does not (at least in the experience of many of us who have used it) involve grading less. In the standards-based gradebook my school uses, scores must be assigned to formative and summative assessments alike. Although the formative scores do not contribute to the top-line cumulative grade, a score is required. (In theory, a 2-point, credit/no credit “scale” could be set up within the system, but that would have to be agreed upon school wide.)
Further, since SBG involves providing reassessment opportunities, you often end up grading more. While SBG may have enhanced student opportunity for success, it has often done so through increased labor on the part of teachers.
As Schimmer explains,
Reassessment is not about hitting the reset button or establishing a series of do-overs. It's about creating another opportunity to verify new levels of proficiency given the targeted instruction and learning that occurred after the first attempt. Something must happen between the first attempt and the second. When that something is independent study, a series of tutorials, or more targeted class-wide instruction, reassessment can reach its full potential of positively contributing to the overall process of learning. Used effectively, reassessment can play a significant role in establishing a culture where if students learn takes precedence over when they learn.
No offense, but I get tired just reading that. It feels like part of a larger phenomenon across education as we confront the related and mutually reinforcing crises of teacher burnout and teacher shortage. Jody Greene describes this hidden consequence of the student success movement in higher ed:
Workloads in higher education have been skyrocketing for the past 20 years. The pandemic taught us a lot about what happens when you suddenly ask faculty members to redirect enormous amounts of time and attention to redesigning their courses and changing their instructional practices, while leaving the rest of the expectations around their labor unchanged: morale plummets, research suffers and people decide perhaps they would like to look for other kinds of work, or work elsewhere, at another institution, where, they quickly discover, workloads are also skyrocketing. The problem is structural and cannot be fixed simply by asking individuals to “do better,” at least in part because, initially anyway, “do better” means “do more.”
The standards-based approach exists squarely within this dilemma, where greater student success has frequently come at the price of increased teacher workload. SBG does require teachers “to redirect enormous amounts of time and attention.” While I don’t count myself an expert at SBG, my attempts to implement it nearly pushed me to the breaking point as a teacher—long before the current inflection point of a global pandemic, a student mental health crisis, a noxious political climate, and the looming threat of mass shootings.
While going gradeless has always centered the student experience, it has likewise placed teacher overload and burnout high on the list of reasons for ditching grades. We have largely been able to address the two issues simultaneously—enhancing student motivation while lessening teacher workload and stress.
How? While I won’t be able to enumerate all the interlocking practices here, it boils down to one thing: gradeless teachers spend less time and effort grading.
We do whole assignments that are ungraded but required, necessitating nothing but a quick glance to confirm authorship and adequate completion
We employ portfolios, waiting until a certain number of pieces are collected before engaging in any evaluation
We invite the involvement of students without concern for fairness because none of it is being logged in the “official” gradebook
We give whole-group feedback, assessing only a fraction of assignments in order to identify common strengths and weaknesses
The very architecture of gradebooks—particularly standards-based gradebooks that require scores for formative and summative assessments alike—work against these methods. Certainly you can do whatever you want outside of the gradebook, and yet the very presence of a gradebook renders anything that is not graded as definitively less than. Once the economy of the gradebook is centered, the value of something outside of it is, for all intents and purposes, zero.
In recent months, I have felt increasing pressure to weigh in on “where we stand” on the topic of standards-based grading due to some growing divisiveness between the two groups. (To be fair, most of this has come from the SBG side, particularly from some well established authorities in that field.)
But after a long period of reflection, writing, feedback, more writing, and more reflection, I’ve decided that I’m not interested in entering that fray. SBGers may not consider our contribution valid or valuable, but I continue to consider SBG part of the gradeless continuum.
Still, I keep bumping up against a stubborn, inconvenient truth: It has been easier to help people grade less in a traditionally graded system than in a standards-based one.
Moving forward, I would like to explore ways standards-based grading can go from embodying one part of our gradeless definition—limiting the impact of grades within the context of current constraints—to making progress toward its other aspects—grading less and without grades.
I’m not interested in undermining the concrete ways the standards-based mindset has revolutionized assessment for the better. More students and teachers work in a standard-based system than ever before. Thus, addressing the ways in which SBG can become unmanageable is well worth our collective efforts.
Arthur Chiaravalli serves as House Director at Champlain Valley Union High School in Vermont and is co-founder of Teachers Going Gradeless. Over the course of his career, he has taught high school English, mathematics, technology, and media arts. Follow him on Twitter at @iamchiaravalli.
