I hope you read Tim Kalich’s column “Grades cannot be trusted” in the Nov. 30 edition of this paper.
Kalich, publisher of the Greenwood Commonwealth, refered to the complaint that standardized tests are unfair and that the way to gauge students’ success is to look at their grades in their actual classes.
Kalich’s reply was, “The grades that students receive from their teachers can’t be fully trusted. Students showing the same level of mastery of a subject can get much different marks depending on the expectations and standards of their teacher, their school and their district.”
He had the results of a survey that showed many cases of “good” school-issued grades but low performance on state testing.
His point is that students may have A’s and B’s in high school classes, but if they perform poorly on state tests and standardized college entrance tests like the ACT, their grades in class were probably higher than they deserved for the quality of work they produced.
In other words, their teachers or their school inflated their grades. That makes the students look good and maybe feel good temporarily, but grade inflation deceives them into believing that they mastered something they didn’t master.
In plain language, a high school student with an A average who makes a 15 or even a 20 on the ACT has been given inflated grades.
The state tests were written by human beings, so of course they are flawed in some ways. But teachers have been “teaching the test” long enough now that those tests are probably fairly predictive of real student ability.
The ACT is often accused of being “unfair” because for many students the questions are much harder to answer than anything they have encountered in their own local classes. But the ACT material simply shows what students will be expected to deal with in college, and a low score predicts that they are unready for the next level.
Why would administrators or teachers inflate grades, giving students higher rewards than they have earned?
The answer in public education often comes down to keeping their jobs and keeping their schools open. The State Department of Education keeps a close eye on grades and graduation rates and blames the school when teachers turn in too many failures or when too large a percentage of a school’s students score below the Proficient level on state tests.
Our own school district automatically inflated grades a few years ago when they changed the grading scale so that what had always been an F became a D, what had been a D became a C, and so on.
Teachers may inflate grades sometimes for a variety of reasons.
I’ve known teachers whose kowledge of their subject was so limited that they could only teach it on the most basic level, yet because of staffing or scheduling issues they were forced to teach above their own level of mastery. Such a teacher doesn’t know the subject well enough to explain or give examples. That teacher is going to make out very easy test questions on that information, give higher grades because he/she isn’t sure what the standards are — and set the students up to miss harder questions on a standardized test of that subject.
Some teachers grade “high” out of sympathy. They feel sorry for the kids. As I was told even “back in the day” as an English teacher, “If you want to know why your students struggle, follow their school bus to their homes.” The implication was that sympathy for their deprivations should determine what I required in an English class or how I graded them, rather than my desire to help them overcome their circumstances. But the result of sympathetic grading would be to leave them exactly as uneducated and unready to succeed as they had come to me.
Some schools have adopted the idea that unearned higher grades will improve self-esteem and leave students better off in the long run.
Kalich says, “They believe if they just make students feel good about themselves, even through false praise and inflated grades, those students will try harder and eventually raise their performance. Most likely, the opposite happens. If you tell a student that mediocrity is good, they get comfortable with mediocrity.”
And, of course, teachers who give higher grades and make class easy are more popular than those who hold their students to a standard. Maybe some teachers just want to be loved.
Whatever the reason, grade inflation is a fact in Mississippi, and we are doing our students a terrible disservice as long as it continues.
Maybe the State Department of Education needs to come to our districts not with the goal of punishing low-performing schools and teachers but with more effective training for teachers to help students reach the higher standards that lead to success after high school.
