What does a grade represent? In reality, grades don’t mean what we think they do. What we experienced as students and brought into our own class are largely biased grading policies that harm many of our students. In so many classrooms in schools across the country, a grade could represent any combination of the following: how many absences the student had the number of mistakes made early on in the quarter ( regardless of how much their skills grew toward the end) The student’s ability to get to class on time How often students turned in late work, regardless of their understanding of the material Teacher’s implicit biases toward students…
