Grades are a standard part of the American educational system that most students and teachers take for granted.

To better understand those implications, we evaluated ChatGPT’s essay scoring ability using the . This includes approximately written by U.S. middle and high school students. What makes ASAP 2.0 particularly useful for this type of research is that each essay was scored by humans, and it includes demographic data, such as race, English learner status, gender and the economic status of each student author. That means researchers can look at how AI performs not just in comparison to human scorers, but across different student groups.

So what did we find? Chat GPT did to different demographic groups, but most of those differences were so small, they probably wouldn’t matter much. However, there was one exception: , and that gap was large enough to warrant some attention.

But here’s the thing: . In other words, ChatGPT didn’t introduce new bias, but rather replicated the bias that already existed in the human scoring data. While that might suggest the model accurately reflects current standards, it also highlights a serious risk. When training data reflects existing demographic disparities, those inequalities can be baked into the model itself. The result is then predictable: The same students who’ve historically been overlooked stay overlooked.

And that matters a lot. If AI models reinforce existing scoring disparities, students could see lower grades not because of poor writing, but because of how performance has been historically judged. Over time, this could impact academic confidence, access to advanced coursework or even college admissions, amplifying educational inequities rather than closing them.

Furthermore, our study also found that between great and poor writing. Unlike human graders, who gave out more As and Fs, ChatGPT handed out a lot of Cs. That means strong writers may not get the recognition they deserve, while weaker writing could go unchecked. For students of marginalized backgrounds who often have to work harder to be noticed, that’s potentially a serious loss.

To be clear, human grading isn’t perfect. Teachers can harbor unconscious biases or apply inconsistent standards when scoring essays. But if AI both replicates those biases and fails to recognize exceptional work, it doesn’t fix the problem. It reinforces the same inequalities that so many advocates and educators are trying to fix.

That’s why schools and educators must carefully consider when and how to utilize AI for scoring. Rather than replacing grading, they could provide feedback on grammar or paragraph structure while leaving the final assessment to the teacher. Meanwhile, ed tech developers have a responsibility to evaluate their tools critically. It’s not enough to measure accuracy; developers need to ask: Who is it accurate for, and under what circumstances? Who benefits and who gets left behind?

Benchmark datasets like ASAP 2.0, which include demographic details and human scores, are essential for anyone trying to evaluate fairness in an AI system. But there is a need for more. Developers need access to more high-quality datasets, researchers need the funding to create them and the industry needs clear guidelines that prioritize equity from the start, not as an afterthought.

AI is beginning to reshape how students are taught and judged. But if that future is going to be fair, developers must build AI tools that account for bias, and educators must use them with clear boundaries in place. These tools should help all students shine, not flatten their potential to fit the average. The promise of educational AI isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about equity. And nobody can afford to get that part wrong.

One day he was chatting with an 8th-grade student, who he described as a “superstar,” and asked if she had studied for that day’s exam. He was shocked to hear she hadn’t.

“Well Mr. Guskey,” he remembers her saying, a quizzical look on her face, “I worked it out. I only need a 50.2 to get an A [in the class]. I don’t need to study for a 50.2.”

This was a moment of realization for him. “This 8th grader had worked it out to the tenth decimal place what she needed to do to get an A in my class,” he said. “And she was surprised I didn’t get it. And I thought, ‘Wow. What have I done?’” 

For this student — and so many others — school was not about learning. It was about getting a good grade. And with flawed traditional grading systems, those two outcomes didn’t always coincide.

Every time Guskey tells this story to other teachers, he said they shake their heads and share similar anecdotes of their own. Other experts in the field echo these sentiments, noting that schools have spent far too long grading students based on whether or not they turned in a pile of work or showed up to class on time, rather than focusing on if a student has learned academic content. This can ultimately lead to final grades that inaccurately reflect and communicate what kids actually know. 

Today, as schools combat post-pandemic learning gaps, it’s become even clearer that traditional grades are not precise communicators of learning. In some cases, this leads parents to believe their kids are performing at grade level, when in reality they’re falling behind. 

As educators push for more clarity and transparency, a number of schools and districts are turning to what’s known as standards-based grading, a system and communication tool that separates academic mastery from behavioral factors. When done correctly, it should more accurately reflect what students know and correct for both inflating — and deflating — grades. 

But a misunderstanding of standards-based grading’s true principles, a lack of proper training for educators and a rush to quickly adopt a complex new system often leads to messy implementation, various experts told The 74. And, they warn, districts looking for support are turning to grading consultants, a number of whom aren’t qualified in the field.

“So many districts are getting into this and they’re failing miserably,” said Guskey, the grading and assessment expert and professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky College of Education. “Schools are jumping into this without a clear notion of what they’re doing and what the prerequisites are to being standards based,” he continued. “And then when problems arise, they have no recourse except to abandon [it] completely.”

As schools look for an effective fix to learning gaps, “standards-based grading is one that seems like it can be a quickly adopted effort. But it could backfire and does backfire very easily,” said Laura Link, associate professor of teaching and leadership at the University of North Dakota.

In a she and Guskey wrote, “although many schools today are initiating SBG reforms, there’s little consensus on what ‘standards-based grading’ actually means. As a result, SBG implementation is widely inconsistent.” This creates uncertainty, confusion, frustration — and resistance, which can ultimately lead to it being tossed aside, the authors said.

The many meanings of a “C”

Standards-based grading is not new. While it’s challenging to pin down just how many schools are currently using it, post-pandemic interest in a system that’s seen as more accurate and equitable appears to be growing. 

Link is now working with the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania school district on implementation. It can also be found in at least one school district in the San Francisco Bay Area and is particularly prevalent in schools in Wyoming, New Hampshire, Maine and Wisconsin, with more cropping up in Connecticut, New Mexico, and Oregon, in November.

Another expert, Cathy Vatterott, who wrote Rethinking Grading: Meaningful Assessment for Standards-Based Learning and is professor emeritus of education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, said: “After we got through COVID, all of a sudden I started getting offers to come and speak to people about standards-based grading.” 

Regardless of what model teachers practice, they typically grade using three different criteria: what academic skills students have learned and are able to do, such as solving for “x” in an algebraic equation; what behaviors they bring that enable learning, such as attendance and turning in work on time; and how much they’ve grown and improved.

In traditional models, teachers combine these three, muddling them together and assigning a single mark for an assignment — often a letter grade or a percentage. At the end of a semester, these assignment scores get averaged into a final grade that goes onto a transcript or report card. Proponents of standards-based grading argue that this presents an unclear and inaccurate picture to parents, students and colleges. 

“It makes the grade impossible to interpret,” according to Guskey. For example, a “C” on a paper could mean the student really only understood the material at a “C” level or it could mean they turned in an excellent paper but two weeks late. Further adding to the confusion: what goes into a grade is inconsistent from teacher to teacher and school to school.

Traditional grading not only presents accuracy concerns but also equity ones, according to Matt Townsley, assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Northern Iowa. “For example, if we award points for assignments that are completed on a daily basis — called homework — outside of class, you can imagine a scenario where some families are more privileged in their ability to do it,” he said. 

Some students have access to a quiet place to work, tutors, parents who can help them with assignments, and other key resources, while others work after-school jobs or take care of younger siblings. When teachers grade homework, experts like Townsley argue, they are grading for these factors, rather than what students have actually learned. 

To combat this, standards-based grading does it differently. Rather than lumping together academic, behavioral and improvement grades, it separates them and reports them out individually in what Link calls a “dashboard of information.” 

Too often, she said, consultants and other self-proclaimed experts, who are not researchers, will push to throw away behavioral grades altogether. But she warned “that becomes problematic very, very quickly. We shouldn’t be using our gradebooks to punish and control. But those factors — those behavioral factors — are academic enablers, and we know that to be true as well.”

Reporting it out separately makes students recognize that these other components still count and, in some ways, it makes them each count more because they can no longer be disguised by other factors, like extra credit, according to Guskey.

It’s important for schools to decide upfront what behaviors they want to prioritize — whether that’s attendance, work ethic, responsibility— and then build a guide on how teachers will score for them. “By giving these kinds of dashboards of information, it helps colleges, trade schools, etc. have a deeper understanding of what kind of students they’re accepting into the programs and what kind of support they will need in college,” Link said. 

The academic grades should be based on grade-level standards and learning objectives, like the ability to find strong evidence to support a claim if a student is writing a paper or answering a test question.

A second key criteria is moving away from handing out percentage grades based on 100 to using a much smaller measurement scale, like 0 to 4. On each standard, students could also be graded as “exceeding,”, “meeting,” “almost” or “not yet.” Guskey noted that while this all may sound novel and unusual, other countries around the world, including Canada, have been using these practices for decades.

A third component — providing students multiple opportunities to demonstrate their understanding and mastery of a standard — is often where the greatest controversy crops up and things are most likely to go awry. Some educators argue that students should receive limitless opportunities to redo specific assignments. Researchers such as Link, though, argue that while students need multiple opportunities to demonstrate their understanding, that does not necessarily mean redoing the same assignment. 

“This is where a lot of non-academic proponents encourage that standards-based grading means you give as many retakes as it takes for mastery. Not true. Not true. That’s an assessment issue. That’s not a grading issue.”

So, while a second chance at one assignment is perhaps the fair thing to do, it is not inherent to the ethos of standards-based grading. She emphasized that if schools do implement retake policies, the process needs to be purposeful: If a student doesn’t get it the first time, they need to get corrective feedback and instruction. But “if they don’t get it on the second chance, you’re going to record their grade and move on,” she said. 

There is no empirical evidence supporting the benefits of endless retakes and, she added, such practices can be a time-consuming and unrealistic ask of teachers. 

Because many of the people who write about and consult on testing don’t fully understand what’s behind assessing students more than once, Guskey said, their recommendations on how best to do it are often untested and can’t be supported in practice. Their inconsistent advice, he said, can lead teachers and administrators to forsake efforts to reform grading. 

While it’s important to understand what standards-based grading is, it’s also essential to debunk what it’s not. At its core, experts say, it’s purely a communication tool. It doesn’t tell educators how to create assessments, build curriculum or manage behavior. It can make space for teachers to provide more individualized feedback and for students to move through the skills and knowledge they need to master at their own pace. But these things aren’t inherently a part of it. 

“Basically everything is just to pass.”

When Kenny Rodrequez became superintendent of the Grandview school district a decade ago, he knew the grading system needed to change. He was concerned that as it stood, the traditional grading model they relied on wasn’t communicating students’ progress to their parents accurately. Leaders in the district, located just outside of Kansas City, ultimately decided to shift to standards-based grading for kindergarten through 6th grade. 

Now, in his eighth year as superintendent and ninth year overseeing the transition, he feels good about what they’ve accomplished. One key factor of the successful implementation, he said, was “not trying to do it all at once.” It can be tempting to “just say, ‘Let’s bite the bullet and let’s just roll it all out at the same time,’” he added. It was important, though, to fight this urge and instead find a balance that allowed for deliberate policy shifts that still didn’t take an inordinate amount of time to implement.

Another key factor: making sure there was strong teacher and parent buy-in. The first year in particular, staff was nervous to explain this new system to parents before they even fully understood it themselves. Rodrequez said they created talking points for teachers and gave them the resources they needed. 

In the future, the district plans to bring standards-based grading to 7th-12th grade classrooms, but he anticipates at the high school level this will be trickier. “Our challenge … is nationally we still have a system that’s still pretty based upon our letter grades. And that system’s been around for so long and never was designed to do what we’re trying to get it to do right now.” Demands for GPAs and class rankings, in particular, are incongruous with the standards-based model but often necessary for college applications.

These very challenges have played out in one New York City high school, according to parent Talia Matz. When her stepson started 9th grade at Future High School in Manhattan, the school had orientation sessions to explain to parents how their standards-based grading system works. Still, she and her husband were skeptical. And over the past three years, they’ve only become more concerned, she told The 74. 

Some of the major assignments that the school uses instead of statewide Regents exams “are a bit of a joke,” she said, and students are not held accountable. “Basically everything is just to pass. It doesn’t matter how well you do,” she said, adding, “it doesn’t seem like there’s any love of learning. It’s just kind of to get it done.” 

Contrary to best practices, on his report card there are no separated out comments or grades about behaviors. All standards are scored on a 0-4 scale, and parents and students can see grades on an online platform called JumpRope. But, the school then converts this scale into a traditional percentage grade, which is ultimately sent to colleges — another big no-no, according to experts. (According to the , schools may choose from a number of grading scales, including A-F, but it appears that regardless of what they select, all grades are ultimately converted into percentages.)

Students have a number of opportunities to redo assignments and no clear consequences for late work, Matz said. Rather than getting grades on daily assignments, he gets a “Work Habits/Independent Practice” score, which his stepmom said never appears on a transcript. This, she said, provides no incentive to turn assignments in on time or get them right the first time.

School administrators did not respond to requests for comment. The school’s website contests this point: Their official policy states that the “Work Habits/Independent Practice” score becomes 10% of a student’s final grade. Never reporting the behavior grade or averaging it into a single final grade would both go against standards-based grading best practices. 

Matz fears all this lends itself to lowered standards, which will leave her son unprepared for college. In the fall, he’ll enroll at SUNY Buffalo, “but we’re concerned because there’s going to be different expectations … You have to study on your own, you don’t necessarily get second or third chances.”

Students and parents have begun suing school districts over grading policies and practices they say are unfair.

As a who studies grading practices, I’ve seen how important grades are to schools, students and their families.

Grades are the primary basis for making important decisions about students. They determine whether students are promoted from one grade level to the next. They also determine honor roll status and enrollment in advanced or remedial classes, and they factor into special education services and college or university admissions.

now allow applicants to choose whether they want to take the ACT or SAT. That means grades are more important in admissions decisions and – and students and their parents know it.

In early 2022, a local political figure and his wife , claiming the city’s entire education system was not serving the public. They said limited students’ academic access.

Later that year, a parent in Kentucky sued the local school district, alleging had tainted remote learning classes that had been established during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Those cases are still pending, but even , because their daughter got a lower grade than expected on a biology project she turned in late. The lawsuit argued that the bad grade was unfair and hurt the student’s grade-point average, valedictorian status, scholarship potential and chances of getting into a good college.

These lawsuits show how important grades are to students and their parents.

Teachers spend lots of time grading

Teachers know how important grades are, too. In fact, teachers spend assessing and evaluating student learning.

But most university teacher-education programs focus on curriculum and instruction, with less attention given to assessment. My research has found that these programs do not talk about student work.

In keeping with a , teachers also have, and like, the autonomy to set their own practices. That results in in teachers’ grading practices.

For example, teachers decide if grades will be based on tests, quizzes, homework, participation, behavior, effort, extra credit or other evidence. When surveying over 15,000 teachers, administrators, support educators, parents and students, I found in grades. While they primarily use tests, quizzes, projects, and homework to assign grades, teachers at all grade levels also include nonacademic evidence, like behavior and effort, in their grading equations.

Teachers also decide whether students will get a second chance to take tests if they fail on the first attempt, or be allowed to turn in work late, sometimes reducing their maximum possible grade.

Once teachers decide what to include in their grades, they decide how much weight to assign to each grade category. One teacher may weigh homework as 20% of the final course grade, while another teacher in the same grade level may choose a different weight or not grade homework at all.

In my work, I have talked to teachers who curve grades, especially at the end of a course when they discover lots of students did poorly. To curve, these teachers adjust grades by adding points to all students’ scores to bring the highest score up to 100%. Other teachers in the same school told me they do not grade on a curve. Instead, they add extra credit points to students’ final course grades if they attend a school event, such as a play. Some teachers told me they also add grade points if a student was never tardy to class or never missed an assignment deadline.

Traditional grading is confusing and inaccurate

Schools do often have a common grade system all teachers must use, such as a scale from zero to 100. But my research has found that it’s that all teachers in a district, or even a school or a grade level, use the same grading policies and procedures.

The variation among teachers’ grading policies and practices causes confusion for students and their parents. High school students, for instance, typically have seven different teachers each semester. That means they have to keep up with seven different grading policies and procedures – and cope with the obvious differences.

My research indicates that the effort to keep up with multiple teachers’ different grading expectations , especially for those students with poor organizational, time-management and self-regulation skills. This is also the case for students competing for high grade-point averages and class rank. Still, students rarely question teachers’ grading or the grading differences between teachers.

It might seem unfair, for example, that one algebra teacher allows for extra credit to boost final course grades and another does not. But students have accepted these differences because this is . And parents often pass these grading differences off as what they experienced in school themselves.

Three ways to improve grading

Grading consistency and effectiveness could be improved if universities’ teacher-training programs included in their educator preparation programs, but not any training will do. Evidence-based research on grading conducted over the past century identifies .

First, grades are accurate and meaningful when they are based on reliable and valid evidence from classroom assessments. This information allows teachers to provide students and parents with feedback on learning progress, and to guide teachers’ own efforts to improve their teaching. For instance, an assessment strategy called has been shown to improve student achievement and deliver reliable evidence upon which teachers can base grades.

Second, grading works best when students, parents, teachers, administrators and others in the school are . These groups have different beliefs and expectations, but clarity in grades can be achieved when they agree on grading intentions to then anchor policies and practices.

Third, grade reports that include three to five categories of performance more meaningfully . Reducing a grade to a single letter or number that incorporates many aspects of learning, including behavior and effort, does not inform anyone as clearly about what a student has achieved, needs or is ready for.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — Joy Malak floundered through her freshman year in college.

“I had to learn how to balance my finances. I had to learn how to balance work and school and the relationship I’m in.” The hardest part about being a new college student, Malak said, “is not the coursework. It’s learning how to be an adult.”

That took a toll on her grades.

“I didn’t do well,” said Malak, who powered through and is now starting her sophomore year as a neuroscience and literature double major at the University of California, Santa Cruz, or UCSC. “It took a while for me to detangle my sense of self-worth from the grades that I was getting. It made me consider switching out of my major a handful of times.”

Experiences like these are among the reasons behind a growing movement to stop assigning conventional A through F letter grades to first-year college students and, sometimes, upperclassmen.

Called “un-grading,” the idea is meant to ease the transition to higher education — especially for freshmen who are the first in their families to go to college or who weren’t well prepared for college-level work in high school and need more time to master it.

But advocates say the most important reason to adopt un-grading is that students have become so preoccupied with grades, they aren’t actually learning.

“Grades are not a representation of student learning, as hard as it is for us to break the mindset that if the student got an A it means they learned,” said Jody Greene, special adviser to the provost for educational equity and academic success at UCSC, where several faculty are experimenting with various forms of un-grading.

If a student already knew the material before taking the class and got that A, “they didn’t learn anything,” said Greene, who also is director of the university’s Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning. And “if the student came in and struggled to get a C-plus, they may have learned a lot.”

Critics respond that replacing traditional A to F grades with new forms of assessments is like a college-level version of participation trophies. They say taking away grades is coddling students and treating them like “snowflakes.”

Bradley Jackson doesn’t use those words. But Jackson, vice president of policy at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, said that by getting of grades, “we get rid of crucial information that parents and students use to determine what they’re getting out of the expensive educations they’re paying for.”

Some of the momentum behind un-grading is in response to growing concerns about student mental health. The number of college students with one or more mental health problems , according to a study by researchers at Boston University and elsewhere. Teenagers said that the pressure to get good grades was , a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center found.

“A lot of the time I’m just so stressed in the class that I can barely focus,” said Serena Ramirez, a UCSC freshman. “Now you’re an adult, you’re by yourself, you’re responsible for your grades. The additional stress of grades just sort of undermines the whole learning.”

That was also the case for Tamara Caselin in her freshman year at UCSC. She worked 40 hours a week on top of school and ended up changing her major, which was originally business management economics. “I felt that I was way too focused on my grades, that I wasn’t focused on my personal well-being,” said Caselin, who is now a junior.

The Covid-19 pandemic made things even worse. It “brought to light the stressors students have in their lives,” said Nate Turcotte, an assistant professor in the Department of Leadership, Technology and Research at Florida Gulf Coast University who is using assessments other than grades. That’s why some of the nation’s most prestigious universities switched from letter grades to “pass” or “fail” at the outset of the crisis.

The pandemic era’s wide-scale disruption also makes it a good time to consider changing long-held educational practices, said Robert Talbert, a math professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan who is co-writing a book about new ways of assessing students and has tried some in his own classes. “Everything seems to be on the table right now. Why not throw in the grading system while we’re at it?”

Responded Jackson: “To say that because we’ve been through a very difficult and trying time, we now need to give up forever into the future these objective criteria that we use in order to determine whether students are improving — that seems to me to be a tremendous overreaction.”

In addition to those at UCSC, a small but growing number of faculty and some academic departments at universities and colleges nationwide are experimenting with alternative kinds of assessments.

Although they’re not eliminating grades, some instructors in the mathematics department at the University of California, Davis, are letting students decide between taking verbal and written exams, for instance, and giving them a choice of how much those exams and homework count, said Tim Lewis, the department’s vice chair for undergraduate matters.

“These efforts are meant to improve learning outcomes, as well as to be fair and advance equity, especially for new students and transfer students,” Lewis said.

The developments in California follow a March report to the University of California Board of Regents’ Academic and Student Affairs Committee that ; it encouraged schools to explore new means of assessment.

Several colleges and universities outside of California already practice unconventional forms of grading. At Reed College,  so that they can “focus on learning, not on grades,” the college says. Students at New College of Florida complete contracts establishing their goals, then get written evaluations about how they’re doing. Evergreen State and Hampshire colleges forgo letter grades in favor of written evaluations. And students at Brown University have a choice among written evaluations that only they see, results of “satisfactory” or “no credit” and letter grades — A, B or C, but no D or F.

“It takes stress and anxiety away and it prioritizes their mental health. But more importantly, it prioritizes their learning,” said Turcotte. “Instead of ‘What did I get?’ it’s ‘What did I learn?’ There’s a freedom to explore, a freedom to take chances without this fear of, ‘Am I going to get marked down for this?’ ”

MIT has what it calls “ramp-up grading” for first-year students. In their first semesters, they get only a “pass,” without a letter; if they don’t pass, no grade is recorded at all. In their second semesters, they get letter grades, but grades of D and F are not recorded on their transcripts.

“Starting any university is challenging to get acclimated academically to a new environment and it’s a big change for most students because for many of them it’s their first time away from home or at a new school,” said Ian Waitz, MIT’s vice chancellor for undergraduate and graduate education and a professor of aeronautics and astronautics.

“There’s a desire to have that acclimation to the entire environment happen in a less abrupt way, where people have more of an opportunity to get calibrated.”

Many proponents of un-grading say it addresses the unfairness of a system in which some students are better ready for college than others, have to balance school with work or are first generation and feel extra stress to perform well as a result of it.

“That’s a lot of pressure, and I hear a lot, like, ‘How are your grades?’ ” said Amaya Rosas, who also attends UCSC and is the first in her family to go to college. She said she feels as if “I need to get good grades because I don’t want to let everybody else down.”

Greene said students who come from lower-income families are the most vulnerable to anxiety from grades. “Let’s say they get a slightly failing grade on the first quiz. They are not likely to go and seek help. They’re likely to try and disappear.”

Some drop out altogether. “One of the things that they say again and again — it’s kind of heartbreaking — they say, ‘I wasn’t satisfied with my academic performance,’ ” Greene said. “You know, they’re not saying, ‘I hated the school’ or ‘My teachers were terrible.’ ”

What grades often actually show, said Turcotte, “is if someone is food insecure or comes from a home without the support that other individuals have. There are a lot of educators out there and parents and people involved in education who are wondering how can we better help our students while also recognizing the complexities of their lives.”

Students who work while in school are also “less likely to do the extra work to get things done perfectly, or they may have had to take an extra shift at work or they don’t have transportation so they’re late for class,” said Susan Blum, a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and the editor of “Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead).” By comparison, she said, higher-income classmates “had Ph.D. historians teaching them in their fancy high schools.”

When she was a freshman, Olivia Disabatino “saw that I didn’t necessarily have all the resources that other students had when it came to just being prepared for college.”

Disabatino, now a UCSC junior double-majoring in psychology and anthropology and also the first in her low-income family to go to college, said: “I kind of felt like a deer in the headlights.”

None of that is conducive to learning, said Joshua Eyler, director of faculty development at the University of Mississippi, who is also working on a book about grades, called “Scarlet Letters.”

“Grades inhibit students’ creativity and their desire to take intellectual risks,” Eyler said.

Instead, they’ve become “a magnet for student anxiety,” said Adam Light, an assistant professor of physics at Colorado College. “ ‘I only got a 93? Why didn’t I get a 94?’ ”

Light enters into contracts with his students about what tasks need to be learned. “ ‘Here are the things I think are important for you to get out of this class,’ ” he tells them. “And I ask, ‘What are your goals for this class?’ And we come up with consensus. Students know exactly what has to get checked off to get a better grade.”

UCSC, which was opened as an experimental progressive campus built among a dense forest of redwoods, bay laurels and California oaks, previously let students choose whether or not to get letter grades. As the public university grew, it made grades mandatory in 2000. But some of its faculty have continued to promote un-grading.

Instead of grades, for instance, psychology professor Barbara Rogoff’s students get narrative evaluations that assess their work as, among other things, “impressive,” “extremely well developed” or “uneven.” Only at the end of the quarter does she assign required letter grades.

“I can say, ‘This student did really well in their contributions to the class, but they struggled with their writing.’ If it’s a grade, you have to average those two,” said Rogoff, who specializes in cultural variations in learning. “It makes the teachers, the professors, look at themselves more as guides rather than evaluators.”

As for the students, they learn better if they’re not focused on grades, she said. Grades “make students concerned about how they look rather than dealing with the material.”

That’s to say nothing of students who can game the system, said Talbert, at Grand Valley State. “When you see a grade on an assignment or report card, it tends not to convey a lot of information about what a student actually has learned. The grade itself has turned into the target. Learning is just a vehicle by which to earn a grade.”

But while he likes the idea of un-grading, Talbert’s own experience has made him question whether it’s necessarily a solution to inequity. Since the students in the algebra class in which he tried it were required to evaluate their own performance, he said, “What I found is that un-grading as a system is exactly as good as my students’ ability to self-assess. Those from more privileged backgrounds feel more competent to self-reflect, whereas other students struggle with that.”

Other realities also make it hard to change the longstanding tradition of letter grades. It’s how faculty themselves were largely judged as they went through college. Parents, high schools and university admissions offices put a premium on grade-point averages — an even greater one as many institutions make the SAT and ACT optional. Even car insurance companies give “good-grades discounts” to student-age drivers.

“It’s built into the system,” Rogoff said. “These are big forces that are working against getting rid of grades.”

But grades may not be the real problem, said Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. He pointed out that only 25 percent of high school students who took the ACT test last year , which gauge the likelihood that they’ll succeed in first-year college courses; 38 percent met none. The composite score was the lowest in more than a decade.

By getting rid of grades, “I really fear that we’re shooting the messenger because we don’t like what we’re hearing,” Poliakoff said. It’s just setting up students “to slam into the wall, ultimately,” and end up with a “ticket-to-nowhere diploma that doesn’t represent the mastery of skills that will equip the person for success.”

Colleges and universities are already losing the confidence of the country, said his colleague Jackson. “To the extent that they take away standards and take away these objective indices of performance and reliability, they’re going to decrease the value of their own degrees.”

But Greene, the UCSC special adviser to the provost, said that grades “are terrible motivators for doing sustained and deep learning. And so if we were to shift our focus on to learning and away from grades, we would be able to tell whether we were graduating people with the skills that we say we’re graduating them with.”

Rogoff compares this to her own hobby: dancing.

“I got stiffer when I thought I was being watched and evaluated for how I was dancing,” she said. “It’s that sort of performance anxiety when you think people are watching you, and especially if you think you’re probably going to be judged badly.”

She added: “I learned how to get past the self-judgment and the judgment of other people and just enjoy the dancing for the dancing. And I think that’s what my students experience in my class, where I’m helping them see that there is something important about what we’re learning in this class and that that’s a bigger thing” than grades.

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Between 2016 and 2021, the average GPA for students taking the test increased from 3.22 to 3.39. But scores on the ACT I — reflecting performance in English, math, reading and science — declined slightly, from 20.8 to 20.3. The trend was especially noticeable among Black students and those from low- to moderate-income homes.

The results, based on a sample of over 4 million students in almost 4,800 schools, reflect “persistent, systemic,” grade inflation, wrote the authors, both researchers at ACT. Following a recent from the National Assessment of Educational Progress — or NAEP — the ACT analysis provides further evidence that grades, which often include points for effort and class participation, don’t reflect objective measures of academic achievement.

The study found more grade inflation in higher-poverty schools. Edgar Sanchez, a lead research scientist at ACT, said it’s unclear why that’s the case and called the study “a starting point.”

But Seth Gershenson, an American University researcher who has the issue, attributed the problem to what President George W. Bush “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Schools, Gershenson said, award passing grades “and let someone else deal with the lack of learning later on.”

His research also showed growing grade inflation over time in wealthier schools, where “more entitled parents and students” are putting pressure on teachers to give A’s so students can get into top colleges.

It’s unclear to what extent the relaxation of grading standards during the pandemic affected the study’s outcome, wrote the ACT researchers. California students, for example, were allowed to change their lowest grades. And reduced how much scores on end-of-course tests counted in students’ final grades. The authors noted that students who tested in the middle of a pandemic, especially the spring after schools shut down, “could be different from typical tested students” and also from those who didn’t test until 2021.  

At a time when more colleges and universities are making both the ACT and SAT for admission, ACT CEO Janet Godwin acknowledged the risk that the paper’s argument in support of standardized testing might seem self-serving, 

But she said the company has “a responsibility” to contribute to the conversation.

“We have the means and the data to do this kind of research,” she said.

Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank that has published Gershenson’s work, agreed that ACT has “a big dog in that fight.” Regardless, he agreed that current trends in grading are leaving students less prepared for higher education.

“The heart of the problem is that there aren’t any standards or guidelines for grading in most places,” Petrilli said. “Teachers are on their own, and don’t get much, if any, guidance. Nor do they get much training in [education] schools.”

‘In the dark’

Parents rely on grades to give them an accurate portrait of their children’s performance — especially since they are given more frequently than annual state tests, said Bibb Hubbard, founder and president of Learning Heroes, a nonprofit that helps parents become better informed about their children’s progress. 

But many parents might not understand that grades are sometimes more about effort than knowledge, she said. 

“When we ask teachers why they don’t share more with parents about student achievement, they report it is fear-based — fear of not being believed, of being blamed and of their principals not having their back,” she said. “The system is designed to keep parents in the dark about their child’s grade-level performance.”

In recent years, some districts have adopted an approach known as “standards-based grading” that educators say offers a more accurate measure of whether students are meeting expectations. It takes the emphasis off non-academic factors like turning in assignments early and attendance — practices that can vary from teacher to teacher.

The 3,000-student Pewaukee School District in Wisconsin, outside Milwaukee, implemented such a model in 2015. Students are graded on a one-to-four system, with one representing below expectations and four indicating advanced performance. 

“We didn’t want students’ grades dependent on whether they brought in a box of Kleenex,” said Danielle Bosanec, the district’s chief academic officer. “We wanted kids to stop chasing grades and start chasing learning.”

Parents bought into the plan because it allows students more than one chance at a passing grade on an assignment or test so long as they can demonstrate the additional work they did after their first try. The district agreed to convert final scores into letter grades for transcripts.

Bosanec also conducted her own research to test the connection between the new grading model and ACT scores. In general, she found that in a standards-based model, “as students’ grades go up or down, the impact on ACT scores follows suit.”

Despite the studies pointing to grade inflation, there’s no “widespread evidence that institutions have lost trust in GPAs,” said David Hawkins, chief education and policy officer at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. What colleges crave, he said, is more context. 

In the future, he thinks, like research projects or class presentations — used widely in some states like New Hampshire in lieu of tests — could become part of the admissions process.

“There is more to be mined from the student’s high school record than we’re currently getting,” he said. “We’re missing a lot of data about what students can do.”

Districts across the state reported they did not receive nearly as many applicants as anticipated and, as a result, there is some legislative momentum right now to extend the deadline.

School officials attributed the weak response to a number of factors, including summer communication lags and a concern among students that having pass/no pass outcomes on their transcripts would hurt their college prospects.

“Sometimes it feels like our families have some school messenger fatigue, where they don’t always hear them or listen to them,” said Tess Seay, head counselor at Fresno High School in the state’s Central Valley. Of their over 2,000 students, roughly 50 requested grade changes before their district’s Aug. 17 deadline, five days after their first day of school. They expected at least 100.

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The ability to purge a low letter grade from your record has very real consequences. For two students on the cusp of 2.0 GPAs, Seay said the grade change option pushed them over that eligibility threshold for Cal Grants, the state’s loan-free financial aid. Some Cal Grants could provide for college tuition, making a significant financial impact for low-income students.

California legislators in July designed to not penalize students for the challenges that came with remote learning during the pandemic. In addition to the pass/no pass option, families could also request that their child repeat a grade or waive particular high school graduation requirements not mandated by the state.

The law required that districts notify families by Aug. 2 and provide a two-week application period. Many have questioned whether the timeline adequately enabled families — particularly those without regular internet access, or who may have been offline during the summer — to seriously consider their grade change options.

In San Bernardino, students returned to in-person learning Aug. 2 for the first time since March 2020. Anticipating a more hectic than usual back-to-school season as a result, the district opened English and Spanish-language grade-change on Aug. 16 for their 14,911 high schoolers, weeks after many other districts.

By Aug. 31, the district east of Los Angeles received 256 applications — just under 2 percent of those eligible.

“By design, we planned to start [the application window] the third week of school, allowing students, families, and counselors to focus on [the new state policy] and not overlook it in the rush of the start of the school year. This way students were settled into a routine before we brought it to their attention,” Maria Garcia, the district’s communications officer, said in an email to The 74.

Each San Bernardino high school website flags the policy and directs families to . Families were also notified via their district’s phone app [Parent Square], social media and email newsletters.

Nancy Witrado, director of counseling and guidance with Fresno Unified School District, said their application was made available via a fillable PDF, available in Hmong, Spanish and English. While they did not track the demographic details of who applied, she told The 74 that many originated from a high school in northern Fresno county with a history of high parental engagement.

Many Fresno families filled out applications incorrectly, asking to change Bs or Fs to pass; the former would not benefit students and the latter would be impossible. The district is now paying overtime to several registrar and counseling employees to meet about 200 requests.

“We have a lot of follow-up to do, and to try to connect with parents to make sure that they have a full understanding of what it is they’re asking for,” Witrado said.

Fresno Unified stuck to its Aug. 17 cutoff, though Witrado says not many families have reached out after-the-fact. One instance, of an application mistakenly submitted to a student’s teacher, will be honored because it came in before the deadline.

Problems reaching families may not be the only driver behind fewer grade-change requests — some college-bound students were warded off by the worry that a pass/no pass grade carried negative connotations with admissions officers.

Cecilia Roeder Chang, a senior at Gunn High School in affluent Palo Alto, said her district and school did a great job of getting the word out online, and her peers even posted about it on Instagram. Last school year she earned two Cs, in physics and foreign policy, that she considered changing to pass.

“I originally had decided that I was going to. Then I emailed my school counselor, and they replied back that colleges didn’t like that as much. So I decided against [it],” she said.

Roeder Chang, who is applying to both in- and out-of-state schools, was not made aware that all California State Universities and all campuses within the University of California system must grades, or that some Cal Grants require a minimum 2.0 GPA. Her peers did not apply for grade changes, she said, given that they had mostly As and Bs.

The knowledge that some are able to change low grades for the better, after the school year’s end, has garnered mixed feelings.

“I sort of feel conflicted because on one hand, if you do have like lower grades it is helpful, but also on the other hand, if you are one of those people who are getting consistently like higher grades, you can feel like, I don’t want to say annoyance — maybe a little frustration.”

North of Roeder Chang’s Palo Alto, Oakland Unified School District received 660 applications in Chinese, Arabic, English, Spanish and Vietnamese. All of the district’s 13 high schools were represented, and the highest volume of applications were submitted by students at Skyline, Oakland Tech and Oakland High, the largest schools. Only two families have reached out after the district’s Aug. 16 deadline.

“Given this was the first legislation of its kind, we didn’t anticipate a certain number of requests and made sure we were prepared to handle a large number,” John Sasaki, the district’s communications director, told The 74 by email.

From a policy standpoint, advocates caution against permanent alternative grading. The , a national nonprofit that aims to make students prepared for post-secondary education, expressed concern for pass/no pass policies over longer periods, saying they may lead to decreased expectations for students and less accurate student data.

Short-term adjustments to grading policies can be beneficial for students who may need to heal from collective trauma, said one former high school math teacher who now works with the Collaborative. Recalling how his Las Vegas school let up on requirements after a mass shooting in October 2017, he said changing grading policies provided students with needed flexibility.

He said that other supports — like removing deadlines or penalties for late work — may adequately support students without overhauling A-F grading, which feeds into many other systems like financial aid, school report cards and state reporting.

San Diego Unified — the state’s second-largest district — during the pandemic. Only 290 of their 36,000 high schoolers applied for grade changes. The in its communications — recommending instead that the grade be “suppressed” by repeating the class.

Because of low application rates and school capacity to process applications at the start of the school year, San Diego state Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, who authored the state law, is now recommending districts extend deadlines voluntarily and is pursuing legislation to formally extend the deadline to October.

“I will say we’re a little disappointed with the lack of flexibility with some of the districts,” . “If you feel like you missed [the deadline], contact the school district. Really push.”