If we graded schools on how accurately they grade students, they’d fail. Nearly six out of 10 course grades are inaccurate, according to a new study of grades that teachers gave to 22,000 middle and high school students in 2022 and 2023.
The Equitable Grading Project, a nonprofit organization that seeks to change grading practices, compared 33,000 course grades with students’ scores on standardized exams, including Advanced Placement tests and annual state assessments. The organization considered a course grade to be inaccurate if a student’s test score indicated a level of knowledge that was at least a letter grade off from what the teacher had issued. For example, a grade was classified as inaccurate if a student’s test score indicated a C-level of skills and knowledge, but the student received an A or a B in the course. In this example, a D or an F grade would also be inaccurate.
Inflated grades were more common than depressed grades. In this analysis, over 40 percent of the 33,000 grades analyzed – more than 13,000 transcript grades – were higher than they should have been, while only 16 percent or 5,300 grades were lower than they should have been. In other words, two out of five transcript grades indicated that students were more competent in the course than they actually were, while nearly one out of six grades was lower than the student’s true understanding of the course content.
The discrepancy matters, the white paper says, because inaccurate grades make it harder to figure out which students are prepared for advanced coursework or ready for college. With inflated grades, students can be promoted to difficult courses without the foundation or extra help they need to succeed. Depressed grades can discourage a student from pursuing a subject or prompt them to drop out of school altogether.
“This data suggests that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of students in this study may have been denied, or not even offered, opportunities that they were prepared and eligible for,” the white paper said.
This analysis is evidence that widespread grade inflation, which has also been documented by the ACT, the National Center for Education Statistics and independent scholars, has persisted through 2023. In this transcript analysis, grade inflation occurred more frequently for Black and Hispanic students than Asian and white students. It was also more common for low-income students.
Large discrepancies were documented. Almost 4,800 of the inflated grades were two letters higher than the student’s test score would indicate. An AP exam might have indicated a D-level of mastery, but the student earned a B in the class. On the flip side, more than 1,000 students received grades that were two letter grades lower than their assessment score.
The report rejected the possibility that test anxiety is the main culprit for such widespread and large discrepancies, and laid out a list of other reasons for why grades don’t reflect a student’s skills and content mastery. Some teachers feel pressure from parents and school administrators to give high grades. Many teachers factor in participation, behavior and handing in homework assignments – things that have little to do with what a student has learned or knows. Meanwhile, grades can be depressed when teachers make deductions for late work or when students fail to turn in assignments. Group projects that are weighed heavily in the final grade can swing a student’s final transcript grade up or down. In the report, one superintendent described how teachers in his district awarded students points toward their grade based on whether their parents attended Back to School Night.
Reasonable people can debate how much grades should be used to promote good behavior. The Equitable Grading Project argues that schools should use other rewards and consequences, and keep grades tied to academic achievement.
However, solutions aren’t quick or easy. The organization worked with over 260 teachers during the 2022-23 school year to implement a version of “mastery-based grading,” which excludes homework, class assignments and student behavior from the final grade, but uses a range of assessments – not only tests and papers – to ascertain a student’s proficiency. Teachers were encouraged to allow students multiple retakes. After five workshops and four coaching sessions, teachers’ grading accuracy improved by only 3 percentage points, from 37.6 percent of their grades accurately reflecting student proficiency to 40.6 percent.
Part of the challenge may be changing the minds of teachers, who tend to think that their own grades are fine but the problem lies with their colleagues. In a survey of almost 1,200 teachers that accompanied this quantitative study, more than 4 out of 5 teachers agreed or somewhat agreed that their grades accurately reflect student learning and academic readiness. But nearly half of those same teachers doubted the accuracy of grades assigned by other teachers in their own school and department.
Grading practices are an area where schools and teachers could really use some research on what works. I’ll be keeping my eye out for solutions with evidence behind them.
This story about the Equitable Grading Project was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.
This study has an unsupportable foundation. It assumes standardized tests are an accurate measure of student skills. For many years teachers have pointed out the weaknesses of standardized tests. Studies of standardized tests have shown them to be poor evaluators of student skills. Internationally, countries that do a lot of standardized testing are academically mediocre. How about if we turned the approach around. Let’s assume that teachers, who work with their kids every day, accurately evaluate their performance and know better than anyone what student grades should be. On the basis of this assumption we would say that this study shows that standardized tests are poor evaluators of student skills.
All that being said, behavior, participation, and such things as parents attending Back to School night have no place in a students grade. A grade should reflect a student’s academic performance. On the other side, students getting an F grade assignment for not turning in work is perfectly legitimate. The low grade reflects the work done. Those students know the consequences of their actions and make a choice. They choose to get a low grade.
This is a valid topic for discussion. But before we can have that conversation we need to put aside the idea that standardized tests are necessarily more accurate than grades. That is a common argument, often in support of arguments and policies designed to weaken public schools. But it is not necessarily true.
Standardized tests sample selected skills across predetermined domains. Because they cannot measure all student knowledge, they have to sample certain ones and weight their importance to create a score. There are many, many choices along this path that can lead to error or bias. Moreover, even when done very well, as many are, what they are intended measure and what is taught in a given class are not always the same thing.
More specific to this article, transcript analyses have many challenges and must be interpreted carefully. It appears the EGP ‘s methodology was to link a given course, such as a high school ELA or math class, to a given test and then compare the grade to the scale score band or proficiency level. Creating such bands can have many potential pitfalls and the white paper does not really provide sufficient information on how that was done.
But more critically, it appears EGP simply equated all courses in a domain with the same set of tests. For example, all California students would have their grades in an ELA course equated the the ELPAC. But why would one expect every ELA course to have the same relationship to a single test? Would you expect students in a honors ELA, student in a regular ELA, and students in a remedial ELA to have the same relationship between grades and ELPAC scores? I might expect, for example, that a C in the honors ELA would equate to a higher average ELPAC score than a C in the remedial class, or even an A in the remedial class.
I don’t argue for avoiding these conservations or ignoring standardized test results. But these discussions need to be done carefully.
Teachers are pressured by admin to inflate grades and most of those students are not White or Asian. Standards-based grading has also inflated grades by moving the grading bar down (i.e. 38-53 is a D thus passing). The up-side for the latter system is that almost everyone is graduating…
The assumption that a score received on a standardized test is more valid than one assigned by a teacher is faulty. There are programs available that teach students test taking skills to improve a score rather than content mastery and as a math teacher, I am well aware of the flaws inherent in the standardized testing of my discipline that can lead to higher or lower scores.
The article mentions AP scores. For the new AP Precalculus course, there is an entire unit in the frameworks that is specifically NOT included on the exam. A student may excel in the unit 4 topics and improve their course grade or may do very poorly on this unit and lower their course grade. Either way the result of the exam would differ from the report card. Additionally, points may be lost due to not following rounding instructions. A 1-point question may receive zero points because the student answered 0.66 instead of 0.667. This reflects more on the student’s test preparation and/or reading of directions rather than their knowledge of the mathematics of the problem.
On the SAT, a score of 800 does not necessarily mean that a student answered all the questions correctly. Depending on the centering of the scores, a student may get a few wrong answers or leave a couple blank and still score 800. A 100% on a teacher-scored assessment is more likely to indicate that a student had all of the answers (and work) correct.
On any multiple choice section of a paper version, a student may accidentally skip a line on the answer sheet and not realize it. All of the “bubbled” answers would be to the wrong question. On the paper version of the SAT, if a student accidentally filled in the wrong section they are allowed to move the answers to the correct section and continue the test on a new answer sheet as long as it was done within the section’s time limit. If they realized it too late, they could either leave it as it was or cancel their scores and retake the test another day (with another fee). A student with financial issues, test anxiety, etc. might have chosen to leave the score hoping that the rest of the sections would make up for it.
I have seen students with reading issues score poorly on a standardized test because they were unable to decode the problem and determine the math that was required. If the question has been coded to a specific standard the report will indicate that the student needs to work on the math skill rather than the reading skill.
The New Jersey standardized tests have questions that include the directions to “Select all that apply.” and are worth only one point. There may be as many as 8 choices which essentially means that it consists of 8 true/false questions. The student may get 7 of these correct and still receive no credit for their answer. Reports will indicate that this student had not mastered the standard even though the question was 87.5% correct. Additionally, while students may choose to use their own calculator, if they forget to bring one, the only calculator available is a drop down graphing calculator set to radian mode. A student may forget to change the mode to degrees under the stress of a testing situation. Since the trigonometry questions on the geometry test are presented in degrees, a student may do all of the work correctly (including how it was entered into the calculator), but have the final answers wrong. It also discriminates against students who may only get to practice on a graphing calculator during class while having to use a different calculator when at home.
There is no doubt that getting the correct answer is important. In real life, it may be so important that the results and processes are double- and triple-checked to ascertain their accuracy because it is the final result that matters. In school, students need to be able to demonstrate correct answers AND an understanding of concepts. (There may be assessments where only the results matter (computational) and those where the goal is to assess understanding.)
When a teacher grades an assessment, these factors can be taken into account and the overall grade on the report card may better reflect them. In such cases, the standardized test score is the one that does not accurately reflect a student’s mastery of the skills and standards.