A Comprehensive Teacher’s Guide to Evidence Based Grading

Grading can often feel like a race against time. As teachers, we aim to provide meaningful feedback to help students meet their learning goals. AI in classroom can significantly streamline this process, offering digital solutions that help manage workload and enhance efficiency. But with a growing number of papers, essays, and projects to assess, this task becomes increasingly challenging. Evidence-based grading offers a solution. Focusing on detailed learning progressions provides a clear and objective way to measure student performance toward specific goals.

This article will examine evidence-based grading and offer practical tips for transitioning. We’ll also introduce EssayGrader.ai, a grading software for teachers that supports implementing this approach and enhances the overall grading process.

What Is Evidence-Based Grading?

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Evidence-based grading defines a grading and assessment system that measures student performance against specific learning objectives. Instead of relying on averaged scores that may mix different kinds of work or penalize students for behaviors, evidence-based grading assembles learning targets into smaller objectives so teachers can accurately assess and report student progress toward identified academic standards.

The Principles Behind Evidence-Based Grading

Evidence-based grading is based on three principles:

Prioritizes student learning
Emphasizes clear learning goals
Uses various data to monitor student progress

Instead of assigning a single grade representing a student’s performance on a unit or chapter, evidence-based grading allows teachers and students to:

Break down a subject
Track progress on individual learning objectives
Identify areas where the student is excelling and may need help

As students demonstrate proficiency, they build confidence and develop sustainable learning habits that promote long-term success and self-reliance.

Connecting Learning Across Disciplines

Learning targets are often organized by subject but can also help students connect across different disciplines. For example, a student might learn specific writing targets in both their English and social studies classes, and evidence-based grading would help them understand that their writing performance was improving as they achieved proficiency on the objectives in both classes, even if the assessments were different.

The Focus of Evidence-Based Grading

This practice is called evidence-based because it relies on the evidence of learning and the data it produces to better help students succeed in all identified standards. It is focused solely on learning and ensuring student understanding of the material rather than a student’s habits. In short, evidence-based grading standardizes how students are scored by eliminating from a grade any material that is not directly related to the learning standard.

How Does Evidence-Based Grading Work?

Evidence-based grading works by allowing students to demonstrate their knowledge and skills through:

Targeted practice
Formative assessments
Summative evaluations aligned to specific standards

Separately, teachers collect additional data on student’s:

Participation
Behavior
Attendance
Technology usage, etc

Instead of traditional grading that averages a student's achievement data from the semester with other characteristics, such as work habits, evidence-based grading focuses solely on a student's progress toward identified learning standards. As a result, achievement grades reflect academic progress, and student learning-related behaviors are reported separately.

What is Reported?

Under evidence-based grading, the following information is reported to students, parents, and other stakeholders:

Skills (Used in determining an academic grade)

This area communicates information about the student's proficiency in each course standard. The following codes are used to indicate the mastery level of each student in the targets and skills of the course:

Proficiency
Approaching
Developing
No evidence

Growth

Growth Performance levels will represent the most recent, comprehensive, or frequent evidence.

Formative assessments may inform, but will not be included in the final assessment of the standard.
Summative assessments will be used to determine performance levels.

Behavior

Respectful, engaged, and dependable behaviors will be reported separately from academic performance levels.

Differences Between Traditional Grading Practices and Evidence Based Grading

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In traditional grading systems, one grade is given per assessment, with assessments determining a student’s performance based on a percentage system. The criteria for success are often unclear, leading to confusion among students about what is expected of them.

Final grades are based on an uncertain mix of academic achievement, effort and behavior. To make matters worse, traditional grading systems often penalize students for late work and reward others with extra credit.

Diagnostic Assessments and Grades

Everything goes in the grade book, regardless of purpose. This means that a poor score on a quiz meant to diagnose a student’s needs before instruction may go in the grade book alongside an assignment given after instruction to measure mastery.

Average Scores vs. Mastery

Traditional grading systems also include every score, regardless of when it was collected. This means that assessments record the average—not the best—work. A student’s grade may reflect their early performance before they received feedback and had an opportunity to improve rather than their most recent and accurate level of mastery.

The Better Way of Grading: An Overview of Evidence-Based Grading Systems

In evidence-based grading systems, one grade is given per learning goal, ensuring that each grade accurately reflects a student’s performance on a specific target. Evidence-based grading focuses on clear standards that are set ahead of time so students know exactly what is expected of them.

Transparency and Clarity in Grading

The criteria for success are clear and targets are made available to students ahead of time, so there are no surprises. Evidence-based grading measures achievement only or separates academic performance from effort and behavior. There are no penalties for late work or extra credit to inflate scores. Instead, selected assessments (tests, quizzes, projects, etc.) are used for grading.

Evidence-based grading emphasizes the most recent evidence of learning when grading, providing a more accurate reflection of a student’s current level of mastery.

9 Deficiencies of Traditional Grading Systems and Recommendations for the Future

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1. Grading Systems

Traditional grading practices are rooted in flawed assumptions that have little to do with student learning. Evidence-based grading is a fairer and more accurate alternative. The most basic assumption concerning grades is that they accurately measure learning. Yet, numerous factors influence traditional grades’ validity in measuring learning and how those measurements are interpreted.

2. Assessments Can Misrepresent Learning

The precision of how we measure and report learning (through points and grades) depends on the reliability of our assessments. Figure 1 illustrates how assessments with different Kuder-Richardson (KR-20) reliability scores and standard deviations can be interpreted differently when used to examine learning between B and C students.

Reliability and Confidence in True Scores

If an assessment has a KR-20 of 0.9, which is excellent, then it is reasonable to assume that the student’s true score would reflect actual learning. If we take a standard deviation of 10%, there is no overlap between the distributions of the actual score (X ± SEM), and we may be confident we can differentiate between the two students.

Reliability, Standard Deviation, and Differentiation

If the assessment’s KR-20 drops to 0.6 with the same 10% standard deviation, there is an overlap between the two true score distributions. The situation is further complicated as the standard deviation increases, preventing us from definitively stating that the B student has learned more than the C student.

3. Grades Can Misrepresent Learning Objectives

If grades comprise items other than assessment of knowledge and skills, then they may not accurately reflect learning. When points are awarded for subjective activities that aid the learning process (e.g., participation or homework completion), results will vary from when we only consider objective measures of standards achievement (ie, quizzes and exams). Table 1 illustrates these variations through an example of three students with varying performance and grading schemes.

4. The Number of Assessment Questions Matters

The number of questions that differentiate a grade is also essential when assessing via exams. For example, the difference between a student with an 80% versus a 70% on a 10-question assessment is only represented by one question (8/10 vs 7/10). The issue is whether a single question is sufficient to discern an above-average student (80%) from an average student (70%).

Question Distribution and Grade Meaning

With a 100-question exam, the difference between average and above average is 10 questions. Whether those 10 questions relate to a single or four different competencies may also change an instructor’s interpretation of the grade.

5. Different Instructors Have Different Grading Standards

Instructors' criteria for achieving high grades can vary considerably. Differences in grading rigor and leniency among instructors are well documented. Therefore, it is easy to comprehend how instructor variability complicates interpreting what grades mean.

Also, beginning in elementary school education, subjects such as social studies focus on performance and tests, while mathematics and English focus on enablers like:

Effort
Class participation
Homework

If elementary and high school educators formally trained in assessment exhibit variability in grading, it is reasonable to assume that pharmacy instructors will do the same.

6. Grading Approaches Can Misrepresent Learning Outcomes

Differences in grading approaches complicate grade interpretations. Many instructors use examinations to assess learning, but examinations tend to reflect performance, and a student’s performance may reflect acute studying more so than learning. Sufficient evidence suggests that acute examination performances may not reflect longer-term retention. For example, student X scores 90% on an examination, and student Y scores 85%.

Limitations of Single-Point Assessments

The interpretation is that student X learned more than student Y. Nevertheless, the interpretation might change if a surprise repeat examination is administered a month later. Student Y outperforms student X. Traditional approaches to grading usually do not consider growth over time nor the impact and importance of longitudinal growth.

Importance of Longitudinal Growth in Grading

The complexity of grade interpretation is illustrated by comparing students with different learning trajectories. For example, a student who starts the semester with low scores but progressively improves over time to achieve the best grade in the class will finish with the same grade as a student with the mirror opposite performance.

7. There Can Be a Disconnect Between Grades and Clinical Performance

A key issue regarding the validity of grades in the specific context of health professions education is whether grades align with clinical performance. In pharmacy education, correlations between didactic training and clinical performance have become increasingly critical as accreditation standards emphasize students’ readiness to enter advanced pharmacy practice experiences (APPEs).

Relationship Between Grades and Clinical

The interface between grades and experiential coursework traverses two issues. First, investigators have raised the issue of whether performance within the didactic curriculum (as measured by grades) correlates to performance in clinical settings. Second, some have questioned whether, in clinical settings, pass-fail grading systems might be more logical than traditional A-F grading scales.

8. Grades Can Have Undesirable Motivational Effects

Another assumption that should be examined is the motivational aspects of grades. A common sentiment among instructors is that grades motivate students to learn and that students might ignore any activity that does not have a direct link to their grade. Sometimes, points may be used to incentivize behavior more than measure learning. While grades influence which tasks students complete, the motivational nature of grades is more complicated and nuanced.

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation

Motivation is a complex construct that can be examined from various perspectives and theoretical models. But at the most basic level, motivation can be intrinsic or extrinsic. Students with intrinsic motivation will complete learning activities out of natural curiosity and desire to obtain knowledge and skills; those with extrinsic motivation will engage in activities for some external reward (e.g., getting a good grade or pleasing the instructor) rather than an internal desire to learn.

Limitations of Extrinsic Motivation in Learning

Extrinsic motivation is on display when students plead for partial credit points. In contrast, intrinsic motivation drives student behavior to learn for the sake of learning, not because there is some reward.

With grades as an external motivator, students may still learn and devote appropriate attention if they self-endorse the value of the activities beyond the grade; however, decades of research have shown that using external rewards to motivate learning is much less powerful than intrinsic motivation.

9. Grades Can Interfere With Learning

Another issue with grades is the type of feedback they represent. In traditional education settings, students typically receive one of two types of feedback on their work or assessments: evaluative or descriptive.

Evaluative feedback includes letter grades, points, percentage marks, or even statements of praise or concern such as:

Try harder next time
Your skills have improved
Good work

This type of feedback tells learners how they compare to others and provides a judgment summarizing the quality of learning or the learner's characteristics. In contrast, descriptive feedback focuses on depicting the characteristics of the work product to help students understand how to improve academic knowledge and performance for future assessments.

One example of descriptive feedback on a student’s communication skills might be, “You made some mistakes with the use of open-ended questions; in the future make sure you ask, ‘What questions do you have about your medication?’ versus ‘Do you have any questions?’”

Grades can interfere with learning as a form of evaluative feedback. Lipnevich and Smith demonstrated that including a grade with descriptive feedback depressed future learning performance compared to providing descriptive feedback alone.

The Impact of Grades on Feedback Effectiveness

Koenka and colleagues’ meta-analysis of the impact of grades on learning showed that compared to written feedback and no feedback at all, students receiving grades had poorer achievement and less optimal motivation. Therefore, simply telling students their test grades or indicating which questions they missed does not help improve their knowledge or skills as much as providing feedback about why a certain answer is correct or incorrect.

Limitations of Passive Feedback Engagement

Even descriptive feedback is meaningless if students only passively review it or do not read it at all. Research has shown that although students want feedback, they may refrain from engaging with it (by not reading or forgetting it), reflecting on it, interpreting it, or applying it. This problem may be made worse by grades.

The Role of Grades in Feedback Engagement

As Keupper-Tetzel and colleagues showed, the presence of a grade can interfere with students’ engagement with feedback because students may prioritize and focus on the grade rather than processing and attending to written descriptive feedback. Therefore, for feedback to be used effectively to improve performance, it must encourage students to be “mindful” when responding and move the learner to process the information actively. Grades do not appear to stimulate either of these situations.

5 Core Values of Evidence-Based Grading

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1. Limiting Grade Book Entries to Course Standards Ensures Fairness and Accuracy

Entries in the grade book that count towards the final grade will be limited to course or grade-level standards. When grades are based solely on assessing how well a student meets clearly defined standards, the grades become more accurate and meaningful. This process also helps students understand what they need to do to improve their grades by focusing on mastering the course standards.

2. No Extra Credit: Keeping the Focus on Learning

Extra credit will not be given at any time. While offering extra credit may seem harmless to help struggling students, it can undermine the grading process by creating confusion and misleading information about student learning. Instead of helping students learn, extra credit assignments often reward students for completing tasks with little or nothing to do with the course standards. By eliminating extra credit opportunities, we can keep the focus on learning.

3. Multiple Opportunities Promote Consistency and Accuracy

Students will be allowed multiple opportunities to demonstrate their understanding of classroom standards in various ways. Retakes and revisions will be allowed. All students learn at different rates, and it is essential to give them time to master the necessary skills. Allowing for multiple opportunities to demonstrate learning not only promotes fairness and accuracy but also helps to reduce anxiety for students who may not perform well on initial assessments.

4. Using Recent Evidence to Inform Grades Promotes Transparency

Teachers will determine grade book entries by considering multiple data points, emphasizing the most recent data, and providing evidence to support their determinations. This process helps to ensure that grades are not biased by early performance and instead reflect the current level of student understanding of classroom standards. Using various assessments to determine grades also provides students with explicit feedback on their progress toward mastering the necessary skills.

5. Independent Practice Improves Accuracy and Provides Meaningful Feedback

Students will be provided multiple opportunities to practice standards independently through homework or other class work. Practice assignments and activities will be consistent with classroom standards to provide feedback. Practice assignments and homework will not be included as part of the final grade. Instead, they will be used to help students prepare for upcoming assessments. By decoupling practice from grades, we can ensure that students can complete assignments without the pressure of a grade that may influence their performance.

6 Benefits of Evidence-Based Grading

1. Students Become Intrinsically Motivated To Demonstrate Mastery of Competencies

In a standards-based learning approach, students do not worry about achieving a high grade at the end of the semester. Instead, they become focused on understanding each instructional material in class. As students learn to take ownership of their learning, they become motivated to meet all learning standards set for them to achieve.

Standards-Based Learning and Engagement

According to Feldman, students learning in a standards-based classroom are more engaged in their learning environment because they clearly understand the skills they need to master in class. They also acquire the habit of assessing their competencies to ensure that their performance will meet the standards set by their teachers.

2. Students Are Provided With Appropriate Feedback That Will Improve their Skills

In a standards-based learning approach, teachers must provide their students with quality feedback to improve student learning. Unlike the traditional grading system that only provides students with a single numerical or letter grade, the standards-based grading system requires teachers to provide their students with meaningful and appropriate feedback that will accelerate mastery of learning standards.

Standards-Based Grading and Student Growth

The results of Hany's research stated that the majority of the teachers who participated in the study believed that standards-based grading allowed students to identify their areas of growth and to improve their competencies.

3. Students Can Track Their Progress

In a standards-based grading approach, students understand the meaning of each score they receive. Because there are rubrics that explain the meaning of each proficiency score, students can easily monitor which standards need to be improved further and which learning standards have already been met.

Transparency and Accountability in Standards-Based Grading

In the traditional grading system, where students receive a letter or numerical grade without any explanation, students and their parents understand why each score was given to them in a standards-based grading system. As such, students monitor their progress and become accountable for their learning goals.

How Does Standards-Based Grading Benefit Instruction?

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We already know how using learning standards in class benefits students. Now, we will discuss how a standards-based grading system will benefit teacher instruction.

1. Instruction Becomes More Engaging and Meaningful

The activities presented in class should be aligned with the learning standards set for the students. As such, teachers should provide the students with different engaging materials that will continuously capture their interest and enthusiasm.

Tailored Instruction in Standards-Based Classrooms

In standards-based classrooms, teachers keenly understand how student mastery is demonstrated. They can easily identify if there are more students at level 1 or 2 mastery than those in levels 4 or 5. In such instances, teachers can quickly adapt to the students' needs to accelerate the demonstration of skill mastery.

For instance, differentiated learning activities can be provided to help students reach the next proficiency level in class. This approach will make learning more engaging and interesting for the students.

2. Quality Education Becomes a Standard

In a standard-based educational approach, students must meet the standards set in the curriculum. Heidi Diefes-Dux, a professor from Purdue University, stressed that students are taught that they are expected to submit assessments and perform with excellent quality before they can achieve proficiency in a specific standard.

Quality Instruction and Student Mastery

Similarly, teachers are expected to deliver quality instruction for their students to demonstrate mastery of learning standards. Both teachers and students should have a mindset of quality and proficiency to ensure that mastery and proficiency will be achieved.

3. Parents Better Understand the Meaning of Grades

In standards-based grading, parents are provided with an accurate and meaningful explanation of the meaning of their children’s grades. Standards-based reporting reflects students' progress in each learning standard, and parents begin to understand how their children have mastered their lessons by looking at each standard’s proficiency scores.

Parental Support for Standards-Based Learning

In the same way, by looking at proficiency scores, parents will understand which learning standard their children need help with. In this way, parents can help their children to become more proficient in a specific standard by providing additional activities at home.

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Step-By-Step Guide to Implementing Evidence Based Grading

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1. Understanding the Problem With Traditional Grading

The grading system in education today needs to be fixed. With an outdated A to F scale and heavy reliance on zeroes, grades can create damaging inequities that undermine student motivation and learning. Many students don’t recover from the impact of even a single zero, as it skews their overall average and can significantly reduce their chances of academic success. What’s more, traditional grading is:

Subjective
Inconsistent
Varies from teacher to teacher

For example, two math teachers might give a student the same score on a test, yet their overall grades could differ drastically simply based on how they weighted categories in their grade books. Evidence-based grading can solve these problems by creating a more accurate and equitable system for reporting student learning.

2. Mind Your Zeros

A through F letter grades and the 100-point scale feel like eternal verities—systems handed down from the heavens, fully formed. The 100-point grading scale made its U.S. debut nearly two centuries ago. It was initially centered around the 50-point mark, with scores rarely reaching the upper and lower extremes, according to a 2013 study. For your grandparents’ grandparents, a score of 0 for missed work would be a setback, but not an insurmountable one.

The Limitations of the 100-Point Grading Scale

However, today’s version of the 100-point grading scale, after shifting upward to align with the A through F grading scale, is a “badly lopsided scale that is heavily gamed against the student,” the researchers concluded. Factor a single zero into a relatively strong learning quarter, and a previously A student may never fully recover. Some educators argue that handling stiff sentences for missing work sensibly teaches students important lessons about accountability and prepares them for real-world consequences.

The Impact of Grading Policies on Student Motivation

A survey from 2022 reveals that extensions are frequently granted in professional settings. In a 2012 study, researchers discovered that when the minimum mark in school was a 50 instead of a zero, students put more effort into their learning, earned higher test scores, and graduated at higher rates than their peers under traditional grading schemes.

The Importance of Finding Opportunities for Student Growth

The researchers explained that severe grading practices can trigger “defensive and self-destructive responses in students” that can hamper motivation and elicit disruptive behavior. While it might still make sense to give zeros under some circumstances, the research suggests that it’s better to look for opportunities to give students a path forward.

Simple mathematical adjustments, such as dropping the lowest grade (or both the lowest and highest grades) can:

Remove anomalous scores
Improve student motivation
Provide a more accurate picture of a student’s ability

3. Hold Your Cards

You can maintain report cards and some, or even most, of your grading practices but find innovative ways to prioritize process over product. In a 2021 study, researchers proposed a simple tweak to the grading sequence.

Feedback Timing and Student Learning

Undergraduate students were randomly assigned to receive either grades or written feedback on their lab assignments first. Those who saw their input before the grade became more proficient learners, outperforming their peers by two-thirds of a letter grade on future assignments.

“Prioritizing written teacher comments can support students to understand their strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to allocate effort to aspects that need improvement. This important process can be undermined by seeing a grade,” the study authors concluded.

Delaying Grades to Foster Creativity and Risk-Taking

To cultivate an atmosphere that encourages creativity and curiosity, teachers at King Middle School in Portland, Maine, make it a point to delay grades until the end of the unit. This mistake-friendly strategy motivates students to be creative and take intellectual risks. Emphasizing grades too early in the learning process can derail students, explains English language learners teacher Kirsten McWilliams, but delaying grades “is a great way just to give them fluency and comfort with the writing process.”

4. Go Low-Stakes, Frequently

Quizzes are surprisingly flexible tools, often thought of as a quick way to measure knowledge. A deep body of research reveals that they also improve learning, an unexpected benefit usually called the testing effect. Repeated quizzing works wonders.

A 2013 study, for example, demonstrated that quizzing students frequently while providing corrective feedback significantly improved learning outcomes—an effect that was still detectable five weeks later. There’s no need to invest much teacher time since even simple quizzing formats seem to do the job.

The Effectiveness of Quizzing With Feedback

A study from 2014 looked at the impact of short-answer and multiple-choice quizzes on middle school students. It concluded that “frequent classroom quizzing with feedback” dramatically outperformed rereading and restudying on learning outcomes and that “multiple-choice quizzing was as effective as short-answer quizzing for this purpose.”

Reducing Test Anxiety Through Frequent Quizzes

Lowering the stakes also means lowering blood pressure: A 2014 study demonstrated that breaking bigger tests into smaller retrieval sessions reduced final test anxiety for 72 percent of middle and high school students. To change students’ mindsets around testing, consider calling your low-stakes sessions “practice” rather than “quizzes,” and use digital tools like Kahoot or Quizizz to speed up the process, allowing you to see the results in real time and even to gamify your quizzing.

5. Peer Grading (With Training Wheels)

Fair, reliable assessment instruments are hard to design and can be difficult to respond to quickly and meaningfully. In many cases, according to former high school mathematics teacher Kareem Farah, now the founder of the Modern Classroom Project, assessment becomes the cart that drives the horse—teachers know that practice makes perfect but assign less work because they feel incapable of grading the products.

The Effectiveness of Self and Peer Assessment

Recent research suggests that there are natural alternatives if you plan accordingly. In a 2022 meta-analysis, for example, researchers looked at 175 studies on self-assessment and peer assessment. They found that asking students to take active roles in feedback and evaluation “led to significantly better academic performance” across all age groups. But teachers can’t just ask students to grade and expect big results, the researchers caution.

To ensure that students give helpful, learning-oriented feedback, spend time modeling productive feedback, and provide:

Rubrics
Checklists
Exemplars

Research from 2023 confirms the finding, revealing that high school students improved their writing by a half-letter grade when they revised while referring to mentor texts or rubrics that laid out expectations, such as narrative cohesiveness or the importance of making a central claim.

6. Lean on Rubrics

Even with the best intentions, grading can be biased, subtly injecting variability and unpredictability into students’ scores. Research, for example, shows that teachers unwittingly award higher grades to essays with good handwriting, are more lenient toward boys when they submit partial math solutions, and associate being overweight with laziness and low academic potential.

Research suggests that rubrics can help greatly by providing a structured way to grade subjective work products, reducing the factors contributing to the grade, and explicitly guiding student efforts.

Grading Essays with Different Names

In a 2020 study, David Quinn, an assistant professor of education at the USC Rossier School of Education, asked teachers to grade personal essays written by a fictional second-grade student. Two versions of the essay were produced, with one subtle difference: The name of a sibling referenced in the essays was either “Dashawn” or “Connor,” signaling a possible racial difference.

Implicit Bias in Grading

Despite being virtually identical, the essays, including the name Dashawn, were 4.7 percentage points less likely to meet grade-level standards than their Connor counterparts. According to research from USC professor David Quinn, nearly identical writing samples, the only difference is the names mentioned can yield different grades.

Bias seeps in where standards are lacking: “If teachers are evaluating student work and they are unsure what standard to compare the work to, implicit stereotypes can ‘fill in the blanks,’” Quinn explained in the study.

The Impact of Rubrics on Reducing Grading Bias

When teachers used a grading rubric, on the other hand—one that guided teachers to look for specific elements such as being able to recount an event with details—the grading bias was nearly eliminated, he discovered. “To improve your grading, you can use rubrics that identify clear standards and invite other teachers to audit your assessment policies and materials,” said Quinn.

High school teacher Danah Hashem uses the single-point rubric—which focuses on a single element, such as “Uses clear examples to support the argument”—to simplify the activity, reduce noise in the feedback, and shift student attention toward a single area of improvement.

Teacher Jacqueline Harmer uses rubrics to help her students build metacognitive strategies, reflecting on their knowledge while planning for their future learning.

7. Making the Switch to Evidence-Based Grading

One district's desire for fairness and uniformity in grading prompted a major change. Districts across the country have made strides toward grading reform, often adopting some version of standards-based grading.

Naysayers claim it’s just a trend in education; proponents say it’s an innovation, but both are left with the question: “How do we implement a new system and make meaningful changes?”

It’s simple—you’ve got to start with the root of the problem. Grade books, and it won’t take you long to uncover the discrepancies among teachers who teach the same course.

The Inconsistency of Grading Practices

Grading is an inconsistent practice that can be radically different from teacher to teacher. For example, we easily uncovered grade book inequities, such as a student in teacher A’s class performing identically to a student in teacher B’s class on tests measuring standards. However, the student’s grades differed from a C to an A because of how categories were weighted and how the points were arbitrarily assigned.

The Need for a Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum

When you cannot stand by grading practices such as these, you can begin the process of justifying the Herculean task of altering them. Fargo Public Schools in North Dakota set out to find and implement a practical model. The district established a strategic plan with an initiative to create a guaranteed and viable curriculum that is comprehensive and equitable.

8. Transitioning to Evidence-Based Grading

Starting in 2019, we found success in switching to an evidence-based model. Evidence-based grading uses a body of evidence to determine student learning toward a set of skills and standards while increasing student agency and efficacy.

The Initial Steps Toward Standards-Based Grading

To embark on this paradigm shift, the following action steps were followed: Professional learning community (PLC) teams agreed on which state standards and course-enduring skills were essential. Points and percentages were removed and replaced with a four-point scale using common proficiency scales to report student progress.

Building Capacity and Collaboration

Volunteer teacher groups piloted the process early to provide a model for others. PLC teams were repurposed to improve collective efficacy and calibrate common assessments to unify grading. Strategic expert personnel were used to guide the implementation process for teachers, and the district centered their professional development to support understanding.

Implementing Standards-Based Grading: A Phased Approach

Teachers were given more time to collaborate by altering the daily instructional schedule to allow PLCs to meet more frequently. Teachers were also given curriculum release days to meet with their PLC teams for an entire workday to create proficiency scales and common assessments. A yearly timeline was also established for implementation and to ensure an easier transition, beginning with sixth grade in fall 2021.

Grades seven and eight followed in the subsequent years. All secondary courses will be fully implemented by fall 2025. Because of the success of early adopters, some high schools in the district are at nearly 75 percent implementation, well ahead of the timeline.

9. The Role of Traditional Letter Grades

To facilitate the transition and adapt to new mental frameworks, traditional letter grades (A, B, C, D, F) remained at the high school level and for all credit-bearing courses at any level. This allows for grade point averages to be still reported, making college and scholarship applications an unchanged process.

Grade books have evolved to encompass student proficiency scores, categorizing them based on the enduring skills for each course. To achieve an A in any course by the end of the semester, students must attain a proficiency level of 3 (proficient) across all enduring skills in the course.

The Impact of Proficiency Levels on Letter Grades

A proficiency level of 2 (partially proficient) or 1 (developing) in enduring skills will lower the letter grade. In middle school, a few courses, such as algebra and geometry, still use traditional grading because they receive high school credit. Middle school students do not receive letter grades. Eligibility for things that require a certain GPA is based on proficiency scores. This grading system ensures that a student’s performance is holistically evaluated, using evidence to account for their proficiency across all enduring skills in the course.

10. Changes Beyond Grading

The results have transcended simply changing the grading system. The transition caused a shift in mental models for educators around instructional practices, curriculum, and assessments, with one 27-year-veteran teacher reporting that shifting to this model has “made me a better teacher, period.”

Enhanced Communication Through Aligned Standards and Success Criteria

The hyper-alignment of standards with proficiency scales and specific success criteria needed to reach proficiency has greatly improved communication with students. Students are now active participants in their learning instead of merely recipients. The discussions between teachers and students evolved from:

How can I get three points back?
What do I need to learn to show proficiency on this assessment?

This clarity enables students to understand precisely what they need to know (content) and how they need to showcase that knowledge (through a skill). For example, students in a science class recognized that their comprehension of genetics would be reflected in their ability to analyze and interpret data.

Cross-Curricular Learning

Meanwhile, in social studies, students would convey the involvement of the U.S. in World War I through the skill of argumentation. A few years in, we’re reaping the rewards. Courses have increased their rigor by introducing standards they’ve traditionally never taught in previous years. Students gain a more holistic skill base by practicing argumentation skills in multiple classes. They are learning what it means to build a line of reasoning as a writer, scientist, and historian, revealing the success of a cross-curricular approach.

Data-Driven Instruction on Student Success

Now, our PLC groups are functioning beyond the cyclical planning stage. For the first time, they analyze student data to drive and inform their instruction while determining the effectiveness of their assessments. Teachers are more intentional about alignment and using data to drive decisions, meeting the needs of each student and closing learning gaps. Suddenly, grading reform is no longer an initiative in education but a remarkable and necessary innovation.

6 Challenges of Implementing Evidence-Based Grading

1. Performance Standards: Establishing Consistency

Performance standards specify how good is good enough. They are the indicators of quality that specify how adept or competent a student demonstration must be Ohio Department of Education. Performance standards are the core of assessment and grading, so it is critical that teachers use them consistently and that students and parents understand them.

The Limitations of Traditional Letter Grades

Traditionally, performance standards have consisted of letters linked to percentage ranges (e.g., A = 90-100%, B = 80-89%, and so on). These have given only the illusion of precision because teachers are very inconsistent with a 101-level scheme and have generally not been able to explain clearly the differences between the letter grades.

Criterion-Referenced Performance Scales as an Alternative

One way to overcome this is suggested by Natalie Bolton, an associate professor at the University of Missouri St. Louis, who described a process for developing criterion-referenced performance scales describing three or four proficiency levels.

Step One: Deconstruct standards to identify learning targets into more straightforward explicit learning targets to guide daily classroom instruction.
Step Two: Classify the deconstructed learning targets using a taxonomy related to cognitive complexity.
Step Three: Develop criterion-referenced performance scales for the learning targets.
Step Four: use the performance scales to determine grades.

Teachers should use the performance scales as follows:

Basis of instruction
Assessment
Feedback
Determining grades

Developing Clear and Student-Friendly Performance Scales

Performance scales should be shared with students in student-friendly language. A few other approaches are detailed in my book, such as the team of administrators from the American School of Dubai who developed a protocol by which teachers collaboratively develop consensus descriptors for each letter grade without using percentages). Their whole story and method can be found in HTGFL.

For Standards-Based Learning to be successful, three critical issues have to be agreed upon for performance standards:

How many levels? I recommend between two and seven, whether we have a level or levels above proficiency.
Meeting the standard: For early elementary, it is appropriate only to identify proficient/not proficient, but for upper elementary and beyond, it is relevant to locate one level of performance above proficiency to acknowledge and encourage excellence.
How to label a level above proficiency: I recommend “Excels” or “Advanced” or almost anything except “Exceeds,” which should be eradicated from standards-based terminology.

2. Zeros: The Downside of Using Zeros as Punishment

Some teachers use zeros on assignments to punish inappropriate behaviors, most commonly for “missing work” (not submitting required assessment evidence). They do this in the belief that the punishment will push the students to be accountable, but it is clear that this doesn’t work for most students. Instead, students often see zeros as a free pass not to do the work, creating a classroom culture that promotes the exact opposite of accountability.

The Limitations of Using Zeros in Grading

The central tendency and ratio measure that many of us are taught in math classes (usually in Grade 5) provide overwhelming reasons for not using zeros with percentage grades and averaging because it goes against those mathematical principles. That is different from what I want to emphasize here; the most important is not the mathematical gymnastics but how we get students to be accountable for submitting required assessment evidence.

The Power of the ICU Approach to Improve Assignment Completion

One way to do this is with an approach called the Power of ICU (Intensive Care Unit). In ICU the focus is on all students completing all quality assignments. Students with missing or poor-quality assignments have their names placed on an electronic ICU list that all staff members can view. Parents immediately receive automated texts and/or e-mail messages when their children’s names are added to the ICU list.

A variety of staff members ask students:

Whom do you owe?
What do you owe?
What is your plan?
What do you need?
How can I help?

Staff members reteach concepts and provide students with extra assistance to complete their work:

Before school
During lunch
During intervention time
After school

Once students produce quality work, their names are removed from the ICU list, and follow-up messages inform parents that the job has been completed.

Sherri Nelson describes how this works at Huron Middle School in South Dakota, and Cory Strasser describes how it is implemented at Pipestone Middle/High School in Minnesota.

3. Meeting Deadlines

One of the essential principles of standards-based grading is that grades are accurate measures of achievement, not contaminated by bonuses or penalties for behavior. Put simply, teachers should not use mark penalties for students failing to meet timelines for submitting assessment evidence.

Let’s consider some of the common reasons why students may not complete an assignment on time or at all: They may have difficulty understanding quadratic equations, latitude and longitude, or how to identify the main idea.

The teacher may need to spend more time helping students understand these concepts through one-on-one tutoring, partner work with a strong peer, or engaging in-class activities. A student is struggling to meet deadlines on assignments and projects.
There may be an underlying problem in this student’s life. They could be poorly organized, have bad time-management skills (or none at all), or be experiencing difficulties outside of school that make it impossible for them to meet timelines. The teacher can help by printing out graphic organizers, providing a place to store the student’s materials, and weekly check-ins.

It is up to the teacher to use their resources and the school resources to support students in their learning and behaviors. One of the best ways to do this is by having times when students will receive support to complete assignments that weren’t done in a timely way. These times could be before, at lunchtime, or after school, but I believe the best way is to build a support period into the timetable. This is becoming increasingly common in middle and high schools with an exciting array of acronyms and titles:

SOAR
WIN
FAST
FLEX
QU#SST
Callback and Tiger Paws

4. The Role of Formative Assessments

The standards movement renewed interest in the most favorable course of action to prepare students to meet the expected standards. An almost unified belief emerged that formative assessment practices were the most effective and efficient way to increase student achievement. Although this belief has widely emerged, there is still disagreement and misunderstanding about how formative assessment should be assessed and used.

Misuse of Formative Assessment in Grading

Some schools and districts that profess to be standards-based require teachers to have a set number of weekly scores and require that formative assessments count for as much as 40% of grades. (The worst example I’ve heard recently is a school district that requires teachers to have at least 14 scores each twelve-week reporting period!) This shows a lack of assessment literacy and understanding that the primary purpose of classroom assessment is to gather information that provides the basis for teachers to adjust their instruction and for students to adjust their learning.

Descriptive Feedback Over Scores

This guiding information needs to be effective in words, not numbers; 7/10 tells nothing about what adjustments should be made, but descriptive feedback that identifies strengths and areas for improvement does provide that information. The bottom line is that formative assessment should provide descriptive feedback, not scores, and without scores, it can have no direct place in grades.

Formative Assessment in Student Motivation and Learning

Students receive feedback in band and basketball; in those activities, they understand that practice “counts” in helping them improve. There is no evaluation until the performance – i.e., a critique of the band concert or the final score of the basketball game.

Richard Cash describes how he moved his students from focusing on the extrinsic motivation of grades to becoming intrinsically motivated learners through descriptive feedback. He says, “At first, my students struggled with feedback only, but after a period, they got used to the idea and desired it over just a grade.

Summative Assessments in Grading

The evidence used to determine grades should come from summative assessments, and grades for any standard should be determined with at most three scores from summative assessments on that standard.

If the teacher didn’t provide at least three opportunities on a standard, the grade for that standard should be “NA” for Not Assessed. However, if at least three opportunities were provided and the student only provided evidence on one or two, the grade should be “I” for Insufficient Evidence. If somewhere between 4 and 6 standards are reported on in each grading period, then no more than five summative assessments are required in each grading period.

Limiting the number of summative assessments provides sufficient time for an appropriate teaching/learning process with:

Instruction
Learning
Formative assessment
Feedback
Relearning before each summative assessment

It also increases the likelihood that each summative assessment is high quality and that students see them all as necessary.

5. Resistance to Change

One of the most difficult challenges in dealing with this transition is teachers' possible resistance to shifting from a grading system they have already mastered to a new one that needs to be learned.

Challenges in Transitioning to Standards-Based Grading

According to Matt Townsley, author of the research article “Considering Standards-based Grading: Challenges for Secondary School Leaders," teachers might resist this transition because they need to unlearn the grading system that they have been accustomed to and learn about a new grading system that is more taxing and rigorous to implement. Likewise, the research shows that many teachers implementing the standard-based grading system continued to use non-achievement factors in grading their students.

Overcoming Resistance to Standards-Based Grading

Students might also resist transitioning from one grading system to another because they are used to receiving a single holistic grade for a specific subject. To address this challenge, school management should carefully explain to both teachers and students how they will benefit from the new grading system.

6. Time-Consuming Process

In a standards-based grading system, all lessons, activities, and assessments should be aligned with standards that students are set to achieve at the end of the grading period. This means that teachers must create new instructional materials and assessment tools that will support the student’s mastery of skills.

The Challenges of Implementing Standards-Based Grading

This process may be time-consuming because most pre-prepared materials teachers use must be overhauled. Teachers will also be asked to create both formative and summative assessments. These will gauge how students can apply the lessons that they have learned to real-life settings.

The Importance of Adequate Preparation Time for Teachers

They also need to create rubrics for each performance task to help students understand the meaning of each proficiency score they will receive. To address this challenge, teachers should be given enough time to prepare the materials they need before the academic year starts. In this way, teachers can carefully align each instructional material with the standards students are expected to master at the end of the term.

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