- July 24, 2021
Find More About Grading for School
Grading is an exercise in professional judgment on the part of teachers. It involves the collection and evaluation of evidence on students’ achievement or performance over a specified period of time, such as nine weeks, an academic semester, or an entire school year. You can use a school year grade calculator for your grading system.
Through this process, various types of descriptive information and measures of students’ performance are converted into grades or marks that summarize students’ accomplishments.
Although some educators distinguish between grade and marks, most consider these terms synonymous. Both imply a set of symbols, words, or numbers that are used to designate different levels of achievement or performance.
While elementary teachers continued to use written descriptions and narrative reports to document student learning, high school teachers began using percentages and other similar markings to certify students’ accomplishments in different subject areas. This was the beginning of the grading and reporting systems that exist today.
The shift to percentage grading was gradual, and few American educators questioned it. The practice seemed a natural by-product of the increased demands on high school teachers, who now faced classrooms with growing numbers of students.
These demonstrations of the wide variation in grading practices led to a gradual move away from percentage scores to scales that had fewer and larger categories. One was a three-point scale that employed the categories of excellent, average, and poor.
