(NewsNation) — The pandemic forced many school districts to approach instruction and grade assessment more leniently to accommodate the new challenges faced by students, but four years later, many educators continue to grapple with grading reforms.
Remote learning, social distancing and masks in classrooms created unprecedented challenges for schools. Some districts began to deemphasize homework, allowed students multiple chances to redo assignments and eliminated zeros and penalties for late work.
Grade point averages for high school students increased nationally between 2010 and 2022, according to the organization that administers the ACT standardized test.
However, ACT composite scores were at the lowest average of the past decade in 2021. Studies in North Carolina and Washington have found similar results.
Some argue school grading reforms led to “grade inflation,” which is evident in how high school students are performing in college.
Others say the reforms were a long time coming, and more time should be given before pulling the plug on these measures.
Pandemic pressure and lowered expectations
Meredith Coffey taught high school in the Fairfax County public school district in Northern Virginia during the pandemic. She told NewsNation that she noticed a lack of motivation in her students largely due to the “lower standards” they were given due to COVID-19 accommodations.
She said one of these reforms was raising the minimum grade to 50%, even for missing and incomplete assignments.
Coffey, who is now a senior research assistant at the conservative-leaning think tank Thomas B. Fordham Institute, coauthored a research paper earlier this year that says lenient grading policies risk lowering expectations and that there is evidence more lenient grading leads to less learning.
It argues that grading reforms, which were kicked into overdrive by the pandemic, need to be dialed back.
“Grades are a means of communicating expectations to students, and by lowering standards, not only do you disincentivize doing the work, but you are miscommunicating to parents that their child is at a learning level that they are not,” she said.
Coffey believes that the laxity given to students during the pandemic has led to grade inflation as well as chronic absenteeism.
Students have returned to in-person learning, but grading practices haven’t returned to their pre-pandemic normal in many places, college counselor Laurie Kopp Weingarten said.
“So right now, we do have high schools, where you can retest until you get an ‘A,’ or if you don’t hand something in, you can you’ll get a 50% instead of a zero,” she said. “So what happens is they get to college, and some of these students are wondering, well, I didn’t get an ‘A’ on my test. Can I retest? Or, yeah, I’m two weeks late handing it in, but the teacher will let me still hand it in late and won’t really deduct.”
Weingarten adds that those students may struggle when they reach college and find out the expectations for quality work are much different.
Was grading fair before the pandemic?
The pandemic helped people realize that traditional grading practices were detrimental to effective teaching and learning and disproportionately made it harder for students with fewer resources, Joe Feldman, a former teacher and CEO of the Crescendo Education Group, told NewsNation. His group does educational consulting on equitable grading.
Feldman argues that while there is no reason why every pandemic pivot should continue, there is also no reason to “just rubber band back to exactly what we were doing before because we’re trying to achieve some normalcy.”
“There’s actually something we’ve learned from the pandemic, how to grade more fairly and more accurately, and we want to preserve those learnings and apply them now,” he said. “We want the grade to be purely a reflection of their understanding of the course content.”
Far too often under the traditional grading system, teachers used nonacademic factors, such as attendance points or participation points, to inflate grades, he said. This has nothing to do with knowledge, Feldman argues.
Some districts have learned from the pandemic and done the opposite by making the grade only represent what students know and not things that are outside of their control or circumstances.
Under the idea of equitable grading, which was adopted in some form by certain schools during the pandemic, students are given the option of retaking tests, and homework makes up less or none of final grades.
Including homework performance in the grades penalizes students who make mistakes on their way to learning or who didn’t get as much support before they came into the class, Feldman said.
He also argues using equitable grading will better prepare students for college and the real world by giving students agency versus testing compliance.
For example, if you don’t do well on a driver’s test or work assignment, you can try again until you learn, he said.
Feldman accepts that while initially students may be disincentivized to do the work, over time, both teachers and students will change, and education will shift away from a compliance-based mindset toward students becoming more autonomous.