When I was a student, I loved being graded, ✓+s and A+s. Being graded was a positive experience; it made me feel smart and full of possibilities. For my son, who learned differently, grades were a negative experience, mostly minuses, except that one time his science teacher gave him an F+. Being graded, made him feel dumb and at times hopeless. 

Our grading practices haven’t changed much from when I was graded, to when my son was graded, to now. Grades are still used as rewards and consequences to compare students, and the lowest grades leave scars of feeling not good enough that last a lifetime. Today, a major issue in public education is that teachers are using demotivating and inequitable grading practices that are harming our most underserved students. In the United States, our students of color, students with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ students, and especially our low income students are two to five times more likely to drop out of high school. The impact of low and failing grades increases anxiety, lowers self-esteem, and reduces motivation for the most vulnerable. These students believe they are not smart, lose hope, and leave public education feeling they have limited possibilities for their lives. Researchers have found that grades are one of the leading factors to our dropout rate (see here, here, and here). 

For twenty years as a middle school teacher, I never questioned the way I graded, grading how I learned from my mentor teacher, who probably graded how she learned from her mentor teacher, and so on. 

Grading practices still weren’t a concern for me when I moved to teaching high school eight years ago, but I was immediately concerned about the twelve students who failed my classes that year. I felt like I failed each one of them. Another teacher told me that students have a right to fail, suggesting that there is nothing we need to change as teachers—the students need to change. I believe teachers have a responsibility to do everything they can to help students find the possibilities within themselves.

So, I worked on changing my curriculum to make it more inclusive, improving my lesson design to make it more engaging, and adjusting my pedagogy to focus on building relationships first. My failure rate decreased by 25%.

The next year, I finally considered my grading practices and changed just one thing: no late penalties. I accepted late work graciously. My failure rate decreased another 17%.

I made even more changes after I discovered the book Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman. It inspired me to shift my grading practices significantly: 

• I stopped grading students at the beginning of the year before I had even taught them anything. I learned that when I graded everything at the beginning of the year I, I was grading them on what they had learned previously, not in my class. One of the biggest impacts from this practice was with a very quiet English Learner who would have been failing with traditional beginning of the year grading practices, limiting her chances to pass by the semester. As an English Learner of just a few years, her written English was just at a different place in development than grade level standards. Not grading our early formative practice work, gave her the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them. Focusing on feedback, not points, especially early in the year, created a safe space for her to learn...and her growth by the end of the semester was amazing...plus she met several grade level standards.

• And I stopped putting zeros in the gradebook. One pink-haired boy taught me the most about this. He hadn’t submitted a single assignment for the first two months of school. I had been using the traditional practice of entering a zero for missing assignments which motivates many students to turn in their work fairly quickly, but for some, like this pink-haired boy, it just seemed to motivate him to avoid the work even more. Halfway through the semester, I learned about a practice called minimum grading from Feldman’s book. Instead of entering a zero, you enter a minimum grade, something just below passing. I changed all of my students’ zeros to 50% with a comment “need to submit.”  Within a week, my pink-haired boy turned in a major writing assignment that was filled with evidence of his learning in my class. When I asked him why he finally turned something in he said, “Because I thought I finally had a chance.”

I couldn’t stop talking about grading practices and the Grading for Equity book with fellow educators. In the last year I have partnered with my school, the Department of Education, and equity-focused organizations to present my search for more equitable and motivating grading practices to over 300 educators. Through my presentations and published writing, I’m helping others across the state rethink grading, too.

As I continued to learn this past year, I tried out co-creating grades. During the last quarter, I had my students set their own reading, writing, and communicating goals and track their own progress. I did not post grades during this learning time, just conferenced with them and provided support. At our school’s required grading checkpoints, my students and I examined their learning evidence and collaborated on their grades. I learned that grading is not for me to judge them but for them to understand their own individual growth. 

I surveyed my students to find out how these grading shifts were working for them. In comparison to traditional grading practices, 95% of my students felt the individual growth-based grading practices I was using were more fair and unbiased, more equitable, with 84% claiming they were also more motivating. Most importantly, only 3 of my students failed my courses this past year, a 75% decrease from the failure rate I had years before...and this was during the pandemic when failure rates were soaring across the country. 

Last year when the pandemic started, we heard from our administrators and state education officials to do no harm with our grading. Do no harm. What does that suggest about the way we graded before the pandemic?

We can not go back to grading practices that harm students, students like my ADHD dyslexic son, my quiet English learner, my pink-haired boy, and our most vulnerable students. We cannot continue to do what we’ve always done without question when some students are failing and dropping out before graduation. As we move forward, all educators, at every level, must rethink and adjust grading practices to empower all students to meet their potential—so that every single one can find the possibilities within themselves and for themselves.

Patti Forster is a high school English teacher and department head at Camden Hills Regional High School in Rockport, Maine, the 2021 Knox County Teacher of the Year, a National Board Certified Teacher, Vice President of Maine Council for English Language Arts, Bay Area Writing Project Teacher Consultant, and winner of the John and Claudette Brassil Distinguished Educator Award. You can follow her at @pforster25.