Percentage Grades
Posted in Assessment, Ed Admin, High School Reform on December 13, 2007 by TrevI’ve been working with a committee from our school division on developing an assessment protocol. I am wrestling with the following thoughts:
Why do we continue to try to provide assessment information to students with percentage grades? The easy answer is because our “Ministry of Education” requires the school to provide a percentage grade for credit classes in grades 10, 11 and 12 so they can be reported on the students’ official transcripts. However, the more disturbing answer is that the percentage grade is required to provide a sorting service for society. This really became apparent to me during several discussions with other educators over the past few weeks. Some of the arguments about proposed changes to our grading practices were couched in not impacting the chances of some students getting into university or impacting how scholarships are distributed. I may be cynical, but I don’t think it really maters, in the big picture, what the criterion for the sorting process is. As long as the sorting happens! Obviously this is contrary to what we strive to do in our classrooms—to provide rich assessment information to students to help them improve. How do we resolve this very strong conflict between providing sound assessment for learning information to students and parents vs. providing information for which gate-keeping decisions are based?
