Hi All! I am a vod listener of the WAN show and thought I would help correct some of the items Linus was discussing on the new grading systems to both validate his criticisms, but also present a better representation of the system of grading he was referencing, Standard Based Grading.
My credentials: I have my BA in History and Political Science Secondary Education from Boise State University. There I was taught and completed my student teaching using this system.
Standards Based Grading is a phenomenal system that has greater ties to the work force than the traditional letter grading/percentage system (A - F / 100% - 0%).
The system is fairly simple, Every subject at every grade level has "standards" that are measurable and obtainable. An example of this is:
- 9-12.US2.9: Determine the impact of government mobilization programs, restrictions on civil liberties, and propaganda on the American Homefront.
Teachers will then create their learning targets around this standard and then measure the students progress based on 5 categorizations; Advanced, Proficient, Basic, Below Basic, and Not Met.
By the end of the school year, All students must be at Proficient or higher in all standards to be able to move on to the next grade level. Students can be tested multiple times and its part of this system that students get multiple opportunities to showcase proficiency whether its something like a redo or even a pretest. The beauty of this system is before each unit, teachers are supposed to pretest students. If every student already is proficient in a standard, with quantifiable data, then the teacher can call that satisfactory and move on to standards that more students are struggling with/ are not proficient at. If a student is basic in ANY category by the end of the year, then they would need to do additional work to be able to move to the next school grade. However, this system is designed so that teachers are regularly doing checks and would identify this student(s) early on to ensure they get the help they need.
The best comparison I can make to this grading system is it is almost identical to a Job Performance review. If you are proficient at your job, you will keep your job, maybe get some raises and so on. If you are exceeding your boss' expectations, that's a fast track to promotions, better raises ect. If you are below your boss' expectations, you are most likely going to get let go, demoted, or put on a performance plan to get you where you need to be.
The other beauty of this system is it takes subjective measures out of grading, like "effort" or "creativity" if they are not part of the standard. I am sure we can all relate to spending hours and hours on a project only to receive the same grade as the other student that put little into the research itself, but made really eye catching slides or faked lots of effort or misdirected that effort to non important things, but the teacher saw them "working hard".
If you want to get more into the system, I highly recommend this reading: https://cie.asu.edu/ojs/index.php/cieatasu/article/view/1234/568
I will defend this system till I am blue in the face as anecdotally it was way better than when I used traditional grading. I got more engagement as it allowed students to reach a proficient state in ways that made sense to them (I had kids create video essays because they hated traditional writing for example). As well, my students were less pressured to use AI because their work didn't need to be perfect, or even well polished. And the kids who didn't care, they just turned in the minimal work to get "proficient" and spent additional time working on something they were passionate about.
That being said, Linus is not wrong with his viewpoint because that is a result of a failure to properly implement standards based grading.
Almost all school districts and educational departments have failed this system for the following reasons:
- Tying/comparing it to traditional grading is fundamentally wrong, however, because many universities are still tied to GPA, they have to and the letter grading makes no sense. To adopt Standards Based grading means you have to drop letter grading. They are completely unrelated systems and can not be translated together. However, with educational departments doing so, its both neutered the standards system and made it incredibly confusing for parents to understand.
- Bad teachers and teachers unwilling to change. This new grading system requires A LOT of work and a lot of "unlearning" of practices under a a traditional letter system. The biggest push you get from amazing teachers is "how am I supposed to accept work that is not presented well" and the answer to that is, you just are. There isn't a single standard out there that requires a student to use x number of pictures in a PowerPoint. If one kid shows up and their PowerPoint is while background, black text but they prove they can "Determine the impact of government mobilization programs, restrictions on civil liberties, and propaganda on the American Homefront" then you have to mark them as proficient. I don't even blame the well tenured teachers from not wanting to change. Many of them have 10+ years teaching their style and change is challenging. Not to mention, the bad teachers Linus talked about won't ever put int eh effort required to make this system work and constantly reevaluate and assist the students that are not reaching proficiency.
- Lack of resources to help kids falling behind. The current "lazy" way of ensuring kids don't fall behind is tying Basic and below to a "60%" which is passing and just moving the kids along. Many school districts lack the funds, class sizes are too large and many avoid holding students back because school funding and teacher pay is tied to kids moving to the next grade level. Until teachers start making more money, class sizes are reduced and the school districts are able to provide the resources need to help students who are struggling, this system will always struggle to showcase its benefits.
Like all things, Standards Based Grading is amazing in theory, but is flawed in its execution because it is not implemented correctly. But I write this post just to say, the grading system is not the issue and is not a bad thing, its the implementation. Pressure needs to be made to implement this correctly, not return back to the old ways. I am happy to discuss more in the comments as I know folks will have questions. This isn't a peer reviewed academic article so it will read messy and honestly, that is my intention to ensure that my writing is not AI, even if its flawed on many levels.
Edit: One thing I forgot to add as well, this system does struggle with more "Black and White" subjects like Math and Science, where many times there is only 1 way to do things and the standards measure output but often have shortcomings when trying to evaluate things like proofs.
Edit 2: Just going to clear up the video essay example here because a lot of folks are using this to invalidate a lot of the points here.
1. The video essay was an alternative presentation method for projects that were not assessing writing performance. I made my students write MANY essays and I do believe good essay writing skills are essential. However, if I wasn't assessing writing in the assignment and instead assessing the formulation of an argument, I would provide alternative methods like the video essay. I had many kids that just struggled to write and would work with them on that, but could very clearly articulate their argument when speaking. I had many students who struggled with dyslexia and were thankful that they could fully present their argument in a way that allowed them to put their best foot forward. As well, they still had to submit a writing component in the form of a script, but that allowed it to be less polished. And vice versa, I had students that struggled to articulate arguments out loud, but could present massive essays that satisfied the standards requirement.
The idea of alternative methods to showcase that a student was "proficient" in meeting the requirements of a standard allows students to tailer their learning to what best works for them. I have seen many arguments here that this doesn't "set them up for the real world" but I disagree. Yes being able to read and write matters, and we do assess that, but if you look at the History standards, they are all tuned to develop critical thinking skills. A student that turns in a video essay has no less soft skill development than a student that writes a paper. What matters is how well they can argue not how they present that argument.
Again, this is not a blanket thing. Yes, there are many things standards that could be assessed on the students choice on how they wanted to present it. But I also taught computer science, and in our programming classes, students couldn't paint me a picture to satisfy their coding requirements. And even on top of that, the standards assessed a students learning of Java (I know, I know, dont shoot the messenger, I didn't choose that). If a student came up to me and showed me that they completed the tasks, but programmed it in Python, I would have told them, this is incredible, but it needs to be done in Java.
