Zeroing in on Grades
- Sep 7, 2025
- 3 min read
Students’ in school experience, especially in secondary classrooms, is often controlled and defined by student grades. Everything students do is tied to a letter which evaluates how successful students are at demonstrating understanding and compliance within the curriculum. These grades communicate to students what they got right or wrong but are grades telling us if students truly are mastering the content?
In my experiences most of this grading is on a 100 point grading scale. While it is widely
used this grading scale may not be the most equitable for students. When you look at this grading scale everything from a 0 to a 59 is considered an F or failing grade- which makes up about 60% of the possible grades a student can earn. This is compared to a 10% for each of the other letters on the scale. The primary problem of this scale lies in the impact of one zero on the overall grade. The amount of work students need to do correctly in order to offset one zero is concerning. Mathematically this can have a negative impact on how a student's grade demonstrates mastery.
There are different ways that this issue of inequity is being addressed. At my school the
district is encouraging the use of a 40% for a missing assignment and a 50% for the minimum grade if a student attempts the work but fails the assignment. While this makes sense mathematically the argument is that students are receiving 40% for doing nothing. While I would agree that this is what it appears, it makes it so the grade is recoverable for students. While this is making progress, I would argue the problem with this grading system is not the zero itself it is rather the distribution of the letter grades. If each letter grade was weighted at 20% instead of 10% it would allow students' grades to recover as they show mastery of the material.
What complicates matters even more is when the grade is determined on a few high-stake assessments. “The negative effects of high-stakes testing on teaching and learning are well known” (Shepard, 2000, p. 9). When combined with the traditional grading scale this problem can be exacerbated, especially when students do not have enough opportunities to recover from one zero. While grades should be based on a student’s understanding of the material there are more ways students can demonstrate mastery than just unit tests. “We have not only to make assessment more informative, more insightfully tied to learning steps, but at the same time we must change the social meaning of evaluation.” (Shepard, 2000, p. 10). Learning happens best when students have the opportunity to grow from their mistakes. When passing the end of unit assessments becomes the goal of learning, this learning opportunity is often missed.
As a teacher we should be using assessment to support student learning and not as a way to penalize students for knowledge gaps. While it is easy to give students a test, grade it, and move on, learning best occurs when the assessment shapes what is happening in the classroom and rather than serves as a goal in itself. Just because something has been done for years does not make it the best practice for our students. As teachers it is our role to examine our grading practices and keep students at the center of what we do.
Shepard, L. A. (2000). The role of assessment in a learning culture. Educational Researcher, 29(7), 4-14.
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