Marks - a rant

[velvetpage]

I hate giving marks.

I hate the process of figuring out how a dozen different assignments, all relating to different expectations and all taught, supported, and assessed in different ways, go together to create one overarching letter that is supposed to sum up a kid's work for a term.

You know what? It doesn't. There's no way that it can. The same kid can be at three different levels in three different key expectations, and giving them the middle level doesn't recognize either their weaknesses or their strengths well enough to satisfy my professionalism, much less well enough to really represent the kid.

Furthermore, the parents don't look at that A and say, "Wow, you did really well on that brochure assignment! You put a lot of effort into it and used your information well, and your research came from lots of different sources! I'm impressed with your work!" No, the vast majority of parents look at the A and say, "You're really smart in English!"

Then they look at the C+ in number sense and numeration, and instead of saying, "It seems you were really struggling with multiplication. What can we work on together that will help you with that?" they say, "It's okay. Some people just aren't good at math." Which is a better message than the other most likely one: "You're stupid and lazy and that's why you got a low mark." But it's still not the truth. Neither of them are the truth. And since a parent's opinion is necessarily and properly more important to a kid than a teacher's, my repetition of the first message gets drowned out by their repetitions of the other messages.

For the parents out there, please, please, know this: no matter what your personal relationship with grades was in school, you need to put it aside. If there's one message I want to give you, as a teacher trying to improve your child's learning and give them hope for their future, it's this: marks are not a reflection of the child's abilities. They're a reflection of the child's achievement on a certain number of assessment tasks which may or may not accurately reflect the child's understanding of the material and almost certainly do not reflect the child's full potential. If you treat marks as indicators of work already done, and tie them directly to the learning that went into that work, then you'll probably avoid this trap. If you interpret marks as a reflection of your child's aptitudes, you are doing your child a significant disservice. Marks are only as good as the expectations they relate to and the tasks used to assess the child's achievement of that expectation. They do not reflect the child well at all. They're at best a necessary evil, at worst a horrible setback to kids who might otherwise be making great gains.

This rant brought to you by my second-term report cards and the letter C+.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

*pets*

[velvetpage]

At least I'm giving out a whole ton of A's and a few A+'s (which my kids totally earned - they were doing grade seven math and complaining that if this was grade seven math, they wanted to skip to grade eight - they're in grade five) so there should be more, "I told you you were smart in math!" type comments than usual.

But I've got at least one parent who is going to be all over her son's C+. Not looking forward to having to deal with her, especially since she's the one who asked me, "Why do they have to understand it? Isn't it enough that they can do the long division and get the answer right?" Now she's going to wonder why her son got a C+. Sigh.

[redsnake05]

Reports really are one of my least favourite parts of teaching. We write comments too, but it never seems to capture the actual complexity of their performance - without turning into a mini-essay. But one of my goals for this year is to write comments that give more detailed feedback.

[liv]

I hear you so much. I'm running into exactly this problem with 19-year-old medical students, trying to get them to see their numerical marks as indications of how well they're handling one particular bit of the assessment, not the whole value of their character reduced to a number out of a hundred. At least I don't have parents to contend with, but it's an uphill struggle.

[velvetpage]

If you'd tried to convince me of that at the age of 19, I would have thereafter discounted everything you said because you didn't have a clue. I hear you.

[groovekittie]

What is so weird. I didn't realise schools still used that form of grading. The schools my children have attended (both the mainstream school and the Native school here on the reserve) use a different form.

The marks they give are not numerical and are as such:
"U" for Usually
"S" for Sometimes
"E" for Meets Expectations
"N" for Never or Needs Work

The grading system has varied between the schools, but it is basically as above. Plus, they break it down into concepts such as attitude towards the work, whether or not the student grasps the concepts, how much effort they put into the work, etc. This way the parent gets an accurate picture of the student's overall progress and when we go into the Parent/Teacher interviews, we have a better idea of what we should be discussing and what areas we can work on to improve both home and school performance.

Sorry, I just really like how our school systems have arranged marking even if I didn't always agree with the school administrations.

[velvetpage]

We have a system similar to that for learning skills, but it doesn't apply to the regular marks. I must admit that qualifiers related to frequency don't work for me either. They don't usually show something if they've only really done one big assignment on it; they either showed it or they didn't. So many of the content expectations in particular are only really going to be graded once, and I'm more likely to do a single big project than a series of small assessments. It makes more sense in math or in language, but even there, we're expected to teach using culminating tasks that sum up a unit and form most of the mark for that unit, so those qualifiers aren't going to work very well.

What I'd really like to see is a checklist. I want to slot in an expectation, and check off one of four boxes next to it: not yet met, met, exceeded, not assessed. The only comments necessary would be for learning skills at the bottom of the report card.