Assessment, Grading and Report Cards

Dr. James L. Huneycutt

Department Chair, Social Studies

Overview
In the best educational environments, content is taught through skill development. By mastering
essential skills, the learner has a lifetime access to knowledge. The primary job of a teacher is to provide
informative feedback to students about both their content understanding and their skill performance.
This can be a difficult task for many reasons. Barriers to effective communication about performance
include the reality of preconceptions and prior knowledge of parents and students about this process,
the limitations of the software used to facilitate this communication, class size, teacher load, new
research, knowledge and vocabulary about assessment, etc. The goal of the social studies department at
Monticello High School is to continually work to find the best and most effective ways possible to
communicate with students and parents about student performance. The purpose of this narrative is to
provide some insights and understanding to the assessment process which is employed in the social
studies department at this time.

Formative and Summative Assessment

Formative and summative assessments are terms that should be quite familiar to an educator and
hopefully are becoming more comfortable for parents and students. The relative importance of these
terms to understanding effective communication about student performance merits some attention
here.

The Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University states that the goal of
formative assessment is to “monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by
instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning.”i Formative assessments
are meant to provide students and parents with information about how well they are doing BEFORE
students are measured for a grade. Formative assessments usually do not have a point value and are not
generally included in a student’s grade. However, teachers want to share this information with students
and parents because it can help students see where they need to improve and teachers see how they
can be more helpful.

Summative assessments are what most people typically associate with grading. That is, the purpose of a
summative assessment is to provide an evaluation report on how well a student understands content
material or masters a skill. Summative assessments are often conveyed through numbers and letters.
Symbolic communication leaves parents and students to interpret meaning about what the students can
or cannot do well. While this alphanumeric system is deeply embedded in the culture of our schools

In short, the goal of this department is to provide frequent opportunities for formative feedback which
will lead to a few moments of summative assessment.
The Problem with Averaging Grades
"Averaging grades creates average performance”, is an oft quoted phrase within the department. ii
Grading practices in schools are deeply embedded in the history and culture of schools. L. W. Cureton
provides one of the few overviews of this process in her article “A History of Grading Practices.”iii
Cureton stated that by the early 1900s "marking systems based on 100 points or 100 percent were
pretty well entrenched in many quarters, schools and colleges, as well as civil service programs" (p. 4).
This practice was being highly criticized one hundred years ago, but as is often the case in education,
change has been slow in coming. Lawrence Cross, while a member of a Testing Advisory Committee
serving the Research and Measurement Division of the Learning Resources Center at Virginia Tech,
provided one of the most cogent articles addressing the issues of percentages.

…The purpose of this memo is to challenge the use of fixed percentage ranges for
assigning letter grades to tests of academic knowledge and to argue that letter grades
can be assigned to test scores more reliably and equitably if fixed percentage ranges are
abandoned in favor of flexible percentage ranges. At issue is whether percent-correct
scores should be viewed as absolute or relative indicators of achievement. Given the
enduring and pervasive use of fixed percentage scales, one might suspect that percent-
correct scores can be interpreted in an absolute sense, as is the case for percentage of
blood-alcohol or relative humidity. However, percent-correct scores have no external
physical referent, and reflect the difficulty of the tests, or test questions, as much as they
reflect the level of knowledge a student possesses.

Recommendations:

1.) Do not prescribe percent-correct score ranges for letter grades in your course
syllabus. Instead, indicate that you will exercise your professional judgment as to what
constitutes A, B, C, etc., only after reviewing the test scores. You may wish to indicate
only tentative letter grades for any given test and base final test grades on the average
of standardized scores from several tests…

3.) Alert students to the fact that the test may be more difficult than what they are
accustomed to, but that the percent-correct scores will be interpreted in a relative,
rather than an absolute sense.

4.) Determine the minimum passing score on each test by identifying items that you
(and/or your colleagues) judge to represent essential knowledge, or that you (or they)
believe should be correctly answered by any student deserving of a passing grade. Base
the passing score on the percentage of the total points these questions contribute. You
may wish to compute a separate score for items so identified, but it is probably sufficient
to use this percentage regardless of which items are answered correctly.

5.) Use your professional judgment to determine cut points between grades. You might
consider the test performance of students about whom you have independent
knowledge of achievement via other assignments or previous courses. Naturally
 occurring breaks in the score distribution can suggest cut points between letter grades
that might minimize the number of students clamoring at your door for the extra point
or two needed for the next higher grade. Ultimately, judgments in this area are
subjective and should be acknowledged as such when implemented...iv

Cross directly provides support for the practices endorsed by the social studies department at
Monticello High School in these comments. While a final grade represented by a letter is inevitable, the
department strives to provide better information about student performance and skill development
through direct reports on skill and content categories. Additionally, the final grade is not aggregated
through a process of pure averaging, but rather by holding students accountable to standards in each
skill and content area.

Grades Based on Standards

There is a movement afoot in the academic community, particularly higher education, to do away with
grades.v Generally found under the constructivist heading, the impetus for the most current push may
be found as far back as Deming’s work on Total Performance. The essence of the argument is that
grades have become a distraction from learning, rather than providing feedback that is helpful in
assisting learning. While it is doubtful from the department’s perspective that such changes could be
made in the near future, if ever, the underlying theories provide useful fodder for thought.vi

A grade based on standards is derived by analyzing the total performance of a student in a particular
course. Total performance is measured by looking at discrete skills and content knowledge categories
defined for each course. Students must meet the standard established in each category in order to
achieve a grade of that magnitude.

Step One: Evaluating the Non -Negotiable-Did the student pass?

The first judgment that must be made is whether or not the student “passed” the course. Should they
receive credit? The most important factor in this process is whether or not the student meets any non-
negotiable requirements. If a student is required to demonstrate a specific skill or show understanding
of particular content at a pre-determined level, then that becomes a non-negotiable task. Adequate
time and opportunity will be given for the student to address the task. However, each individual
standard must be met in order to receive credit for the course. Once it is determined that a students has
passed, then a grade can be derived.

Step Two: Aggregating Data within Categories

There could be several bits of information within a category. If the category was the skill of writing, then
there could be some formative feedback and a couple of summative experiences. To determine a grade
for writing, the most recent work bears the most weight. This allows for the process of learning. If a
student is struggling at the beginning of a marking period with a skill, but does the work necessary to
master the skill by the end, then they should not be inhibited by earlier work. The ability to demonstrate
“A” work by the end of the marking period should have the most sway.
It is in aggregating data within a category that formative data becomes extremely important. If a student
demonstrates high skill ability throughout formative assessment and then does very poorly on a
summative assessment, the teacher has evidence that this may be an anomaly and should investigate. A
student who has little formative assessment data must be scored by the summative moment without
question.

Skill categories differ from content categories in how they are aggregated. Content categories will be
averaged over the course of the marking period. Just because a student scores better on the second
content unit summative assessment does not mean they understand the first content unit. While efforts
will be made to allow students to address and learn material from each unit, the total for this category is
derived by an appropriate use of averaging.

Step Three: Aggregating Data across Cate gories

When a teacher looks across the tops of the categories (the grade or score for each category), they will
use this information to determine the final grade. For a student to receive a grade of “A”, they must
have an “A” in every category. As a rule of thumb, a student’s grade can never be higher than their
lowest category. In other words, if a student has a “C” in writing, that will determine the final grade
regardless of performance in other categories (unless another category has a lower score). While
numerically this could be averaged into a higher score, this process will not make the student a better
writer. At worst, this decision will give the student a false impression that their writing has improved.

Conclusion
The professional goal of this department is to provide teachers, students and parents with better
information about the skills and knowledge of the student. While these practices may be unfamiliar,
they are grounded in a solid foundation of theory and logic. For further information or discussion, please
contact the social studies department chair at Monticello High School.

i
“Formative vs Summative Assessment - Enhancing Education - Carnegie Mellon University”, n.d.,
http://www.cmu.edu/teaching/assessment/basics/formative-summative.html.
ii
James L. Huneycutt, “Assessment, Grading and Report Cards,” in The Primacy of the Teacher, n.d.
iii
L. W. Cureton, “A History of Grading Practices,” Measurement in Education 2, no. 4 (1971): 1-8.
iv
“Testing Memo 11 | Testing & Data Services | Virginia Tech”, 1978-79,
http://www.testscoring.vt.edu/memo11.html.
v
Alfie Kohn, “From Degrading to De-Grading,” www.alfiekohn.org, March 1999,
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm.
vi
Ken Kickbusch, “Teaching for Understanding: Educating Students for Performance | 1996-1997 | Education News
| News & Publications | Wisconsin Education Association Council,” http://www.weac.org, n.d.,
http://www.weac.org/News_and_Publications/education_news/1996-1997/under.aspx.