The History of Grading in the US – What You Need to Know

 In my quest to understand how I could make my grades have more meaning and be truly representative of my students’ success I had to ask – how did we get here? What does a grade “A” represent? Why does any number from 0-59 mean an F, but only 80 – 89 equal a B? The only answer I could come up with was “That’s the way it’s always been done.” Any rational human knows that is not usually a good enough reason to do something. So, if I couldn’t explain WHY I graded on an A-F scale, how could I justify ANY of the grades I gave to my students? I started with the book Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman. That led me to some journal articles, which led me to dedicate an entire summer to researching this question. As it turns out, the way we grade is not based in any kind of research. In fact, there is strong research that suggests the way we traditionally assign a grade to students is harmful and defeats the purpose of learning. Let me tell you all about the history of grading in the United States.

What is a grade? Where We Are Now

Ideally, teachers assign grades to students in order to have an accessible summary of a student’s academic achievement ( through GPA, credits earned, etc.) for college and career applications ( higher grade = better candidate). In reality, grades actually do much more:

1. Summarize student tardiness, ability to turn in work on time, and participate in class
2. Summarize a student’s ability to collect points and play the game of school
3. Identify students who will show up and do any work as long as there’s a grade involved
4. Allow teachers to exert control within the classroom ( grades are a reward/ punishment for compliance)
5. Are the tiny but powerful gatekeepers that have a significant impact on a student’s future

So how did we get here?

There was a time when students learned for the sake of learning, because of a desire to know more, do more, be more. It’s why I became a teacher. But the current grading system has turned education into a game of point collecting, offering bonuses to students who have parents at home to remind them to finish their homework, full bellies, a safe place to sleep, and access to technology. You are almost guaranteed to win if you have lots of natural ability, but can at best hope for a mediocre score if you have to really work hard to master the skills. It gives special shortcuts students whose families and cultures value compliance, students who speak English as a first language, and, let’s face it, who are white ( Chiekem 2015).

I keep thinking there has to be a reason, some kind of scientific justification for why we grade the way we do but our grading practices actually stem from tradition, not science or reason.

A Brief History of Grading in the United States

Pre- Colonial United States

The modern education system in the United States has its roots in Western- European schooling values. It’s important to acknowledge the education and grading norms of the Native American Nations that existed far before colonialism.

• Gregory Cajete, a Tewa Native American educator, described  education among native nations as incorporating experiential learning, storytelling, dreaming, and tutoring (Cajete 1994).
• Although each nation had differing values, beliefs, and skills to pass down to their youngsters, for the most part, “grading” was an evaluation determined by elders over time with no scale, numbers, or overall competition.
• The community, not just designated “teachers,” were in charge of the many different facets of the education of their young people.
• There was a constant loop of feedback between pupils and their teachers, and students had multiple opportunities to learn, practice, and master the values important to their communities ( Morgan 2009).

Colonial America/ Early United States

In the 1600’s and 1700’s, most children were schooled in buildings in each community, although the social elites of the colonies sent their students to the preparatory schools designed as feeder schools to Harvard, the only American college at the time. Curriculum and rigor varied widely, as did valuations of students’ academics ( although most reflected a Puritan belief system). Grades as we know them did not exist yet – students sat exams for entrance to colleges (for the few who chose to pursue higher learning) and students earned a degree only after exit exams that demonstrated their intellectual attainment – there were no letter grades or GPA involved.

Here’s what WAS involved:

• There was a central focus on the relationship between a teacher, her pupils, and their parents.
• Progress was communicated through oral reports on home visits (getting some strong Ichabod Crane vibes here).
• Success of this system was based on the teacher being a trusted part of the community as well as teachers having a manageable load of students to provide meaningful specific formal and informal feedback.
• Students sat oral exams for a committee on a regular basis as an official determination of their academic standing. Often, students were ranked and re-ranked in order to motivate them, but even then critics worried that this focused on immediate success and not genuine intellectual development( Schneider and Hutt 2014).  
• Yale ranked its students into categories of intellectual achievement after examinations, but these were not necessarily known to students. Harvard used labels as well ( summa cum laude, magna cum laude, and cum laude) to designate special achievement .

Industrial Age

With the 1800’s came a wave of change to the United States and the foundations for the grading system in use today. The Industrial Revolution, city migration, and massive immigration numbers( not to mention child labor laws and compulsory education laws)  meant that far more students than ever before were crowding schools. The detailed, personalized accounts of student progress were no longer possible ( Schneider and Hutt 2014). 

• Grammar schools began awarding percentage grades for individual courses and requiring a certain amount of “credit” to graduate.
• Students also began to sit written exams regularly and report cards were sent home ( albeit still without letter grades) thanks to the recommendations of Horace Mann, an early advocate for education reform who believed that students should “shine” all the time, not just for the oral competitions and rankings ( Schneider and Hutt 2014).
• Other factors were sometimes incorporated into grades, including timeliness and neatness – skills valued by factories in their workers. This is when we also see the standardization of the school day – everything based on factory norms.

1900’s to Modern Day

Many schools began using percentages to rank students on paper around the 1900’s. This was done in part so that teachers could assess higher numbers of students, but also because higher learning institutions now needed a succinct way to determine whether a prospective student would be academically successful at their school (Carifio and Carey 2013).

• Something interesting to note about this percentage system, however, is that the average score of students was 50. Grades above 75 and below 25 were rare ( Smallwood 1935) and indicated truly exceptional academic and intellectual abilities.
• The percentages were still not succinct enough for colleges, and so many schools created scales in which a word or letter was assigned to different ranges of scores.
• Students quickly learned how to maximize the points they earned while minimizing effort ( I think every student, myself included, has done this for at least one class in their life).
• Studies conducted during the time period noted that grades created high levels of anxiety and competition as well as encouraging cheating (Schneider and Hutt 2014). 
• Due to tracking, the ladder of opportunity was often easier to access for white or wealthy students with resources to earn more points. Poor, immigrant, or students of color were often excluded from college tracks in schools, regardless of their actual intellectual skills because of this( Feldman 2018).

Where does this exploration of the history of grading leave us?

Through this research, it seems to me that the grades I have been assigning since I started teaching are wholly arbitrary. There is no scientific justification behind these systems, other than attempts to create a standardized grading summary for the purpose of college admittance. I am confident that today, if I asked 100 different high school educators how they arrive at each grade for their students, I would get 100 different answers. As honorable as our intentions may be, this is not equity, and it seems to me that our grades have become so far removed from reports on actual intellectual ability that they are meaningless.

Here are some of the problems I see:

1. The system favors one singular Euro-centric philosophy of education which is out of date and inherently biased. It ignores the rich and valuable belief systems and educational practices of a multitude of cultures, including the indigenous ones that predate our country. 
2. Grades are not being assigned as initially intended  – rather than most students receiving Cs, most students receive As and Bs, watering down true academic exceptionalism in order to avoid students losing out on college opportunities. Furthermore, the number of failing grades available (59) is far higher than the number of available passing grades.
3. This system was built to satisfy the needs and values of the Industrial- Revolution era United States – but we’ve evolved as a country and as humans since then. Our needs and values have evolved as well.
4. Grades favor students with access to resources, and penalizes students without.
5. Teachers, who are not immune to bias ( explicit or implicit), are ultimately in charge of determining a single letter that can impact a child’s entire academic future. Moreover, that letter in a classroom in Wisconsin or California could mean something completely different from the same letter in Louisiana or Massachusetts (let alone by two teachers in the same district or even school).

Where do we go from here?

Unless we can dismantle this deeply entrenched arbitrary grading system, we have to figure out how to make our grades reflect a student’s academic skills and not their ability to grab points on their way up the educational ladder. But that’s a story for another blog post.

References

Cajete, G. (1994). Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Education (1st ed.). Kivaki Press.

Carifio, J., & Carey, T. (2013). The Arguments and Data in Favor of Minimum Grading. Mid-Western educational researcher, 25, 19-30.

Chiekem, E. (2015). Grading Practice as Valid Measures of Academic Achievement of Secondary Schools Students for National Development. Journal of Education and Practice, 6(26), 24- 28. ERIC. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1077389.pdf

Feldman, J. (2018). Grading for equity: What it is, why it matters, and how it can transform schools and classrooms.

Feldman, J. (2019, April). Beyond standards-based grading: Why equity must be part of grading reform. Phi Delta Kappan, 100(8), 4. SAGE Journals. https://doi.org/10.1177/0031721719846890

Morgan, H. (2009). What Every Teacher Needs to Know to Teach Native American Students. Multicultural Education, 16(4). https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ858583.pdf

Schneider, J., & Hutt, E. (2014, May). Making the grade: a history of the A–F marking scheme. Journal of Curriculum Studies. Research Gate.http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2013.790480

Smallwood, M. L. (1935). An historical study of examinations and grading systems in early American universities: A critical study of the original records of Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Mount Holyoke, and Michigan from their founding to 1900. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.