Assigning Grades and Reporting Students’ Performance

Assigning grades is one of the most difficult and emotion-laden tasks for a teacher. It is also a task for which teachers have had little professional preparation. A good grading system should be a clear, accurate reflection of the differences in student achievement. School use a variety of systems to report student performance. The alternative reporting systems are Percentage Grades, Letter and number grades, Pass-fail marks, Checklist, Written description, and Conferences with parents.

The first system is Percentage Grades. The percentage grading system is another widely-used, absolute grading system.  This approach relies on the calculation of the percentage of correct responses. Percentage grades assigns each student a number between 0 and 100. It used because these grades are assumed to represent the percentage of content a student has a great score or skill. The advantages of this system are the percentage grades provide a convenient summary of student performance and they can be recorded and processed quickly. It means, if the distribution of grades for a given class is known, percentage grades provide a quick overview for a counselor or other audiences of student performance relative to other in the class. The limitation of percentage grades are the name itself is misleading, they imply a degree of precision that cannot be justified given the reliability of grades, and percentage grades do not indicate the combination of skills that a student has achieved.

The second system is Letter and number grades. Letter grades consist of a series of letters. Such as, Excellent, Good, Poor, Unacceptable. The most common series is:

A=outstanding            (Excellent)

B=very good               (Good)

C=satisfactory             (Enough)

D=weak                      (Poor)

F=unsatisfactory         (unacceptable)

The advantages of Letter and number grades are providing a convenient summary of student performance, approaching the optimal number of categories for reporting students’ progress, and prevalence and hence familiarity in the US and some other countries. The limitation itself are they do not indicate the combination of skills that a student has achieved and a letter grade by itself does not provide sufficient information to determine whether a student should be promoted to the next grade level in school.

The third system is Pass-fail marks. Pass-fail marks collapses all letter grades into two categories. A variation of pass-fail is a pass and no pass policy in which a students’ record lists only the courses that a student has passed. The advantages of pass-fail marks is as a means of encouraging students to take courses in content areas they might otherwise avoid. The limitation of it are reducing the utility of grades and tending to have low reliability.

The forth system is Checklist. Checklist allows a teacher to indicate which of a variety of statements describes a given student. The advantages of it are more adequately communicate student performance and allowing the teacher to report separately a variety of traits relevant to instruction. Then its’ limitation are more time-consuming to prepare and process, it can also be misleading, typically, parents are unable to use highly detailed information about a child’s achievement.

The next system is written description. Written description is a writing narrative description of each student. The narrative can describe traits that facilitate or restrict learning, in addition to the student’s accomplishments. The advantages of written description is it can include whatever is relevant and can focus the reader’s attention on the most significant issues. The limitation of written description are the flexibility of written description is also their greatest limitation and they are time-consuming to prepare and read.

The last system is Conferences with parents. It means the relationship and conference between teachers and parents. Many schools supplement written grade reports with conferences between teachers and parents. It is has some advantages are direct communication between parents and teacher, allows teacher to use feedback from the parents to assure that ideas are being communicated accurately and with appropriate emphasis, and a conference also increases parents’ involvement in the child schooling. The limitation of conferences with parents are they often are unstructured, care must be taken to provide a representative description of the student, it allows teachers to sense inadequate communication, and about time-consuming.