Translating to a letter grade

I apologize for not posting anything assessment related in awhile even though this is ostensibly an assessment blog. A post by Edumacation snapped me back into things.

As you know, I separate my different standards into topics. At the end of the trimester I usually end up with 4 to 6 topics. These need to be combined into a single grade for our traditional A-F report card. At the end of the trimester I might have scores that look like this:

Motion	Graphing	Forces	Forces in Fluids
2.5	3.0	4.0	2.0

In my ideal world I could leave those as is. Throw some snazzy bullet graphs and charts onto the report card and send it on home.

I use a method called conjunctive scoring that I learned about in a Marzano book. The basic idea behind conjunctive scoring is that good scores can't make up for bad ones. No averages. This is how my scores are currently translated:

Grade	Lowest score	At least one
A	3.0	4.0
B	2.5	3
C	2.0
D	1.5
F	less than 1.5

So in my above example the student's final grade would be C because their lowest score is a 2.0.

Motion	Graphing	Forces	Forces in Fluids
2.5	3.0	2.5	3.0

This student would finish with a B because her lowest score is a 2.5 and she has at least one 3.

Against:
Clearly this is very different. There are no averages so it takes awhile for students to get it. You also really need to set aside time to circle back and allow students to go back and learn something they missed. This also requires a certain amount of balance in your topics. Obviously a killer topic can destroy grades. I would argue that some balance in the topics is something to strive for but there are ways to remedy this. The first year I tried SBG, the Motion topic killed kids because of all the math and because I just threw too much stuff into it. I tried to remedy this by separating out Graphing into a separate topic. That worked to chunk it a little more and helped focus my instruction.

For:
I chose this method precisely because high scores wouldn't make up for lower ones. One of the problems with averaging is that you can accumulate enough points that the rest of the course is irrelevant.We've all had students who realize they're so far into A territory that they can coast the last few weeks of school. I've (hopefully) distilled my many, many standards into a few big ideas. In my view, it's ALL important. I like that a student can have all 4s and one 2 and she'll need to work those last few weeks on that one topic.

If the ultimate purpose of grades is to communicate, then an A should be clearly defined. If an A means a student has mastered or surpassed the standards set for the class, it follows that they should master or surpass every single one.

Side bonuses:
We're in our last week of school before the trimester ends and I always notice it's very focusing for a student to take a look at their concept scores, zero in on the lowest, and start working away at it. It's a lot more nebulous to say, "You need 8% more for a C."

There's also this interesting psychological component. If you look at the first example, she only needs to bring up two scores and she can immediately move from a C to an A. Mentally, students feel this is easier to obtain than needing 14% more or 150 more points to move up two grades. I'm sure it goes back to topic scores being more focusing than percentages.

How did I arrive at that scale?
It came through negotiation. My scale was slightly tougher last year. For example, I allowed only one 2.5 for a B. This year, another teacher is trying standards-based grading and we decided on a common scale. I'm reasonably happy with the new scale. There's an interesting passage in the blog I linked to earlier about what an A or B should mean in comparison to meeting standards. Those are the same arguments we had. We thought of it in terms of our state tests. Anyone with an A or B should be advanced or proficient and a C student should have a reasonably good shot.

What about non-academic scores?
I actually don't use them, but I have no problem with them. Again, ideally you'd want to keep those separate. Most schools have a citizenship grade or something similar, if you redefine that you're all set.
If you can't, you'll need to weight them. You would arrive at a score for your academic topics using the conjunctive method. For non-academic scores, the conjunctive method can be used, but in this case I think averaging is the way to go. Going back to the killer topic idea, imagine your non-academic scores are organization, participation, behavior, and work completion. There's really no reason for any of those to kill the entire non-academic score. For your final grade you take your academic score, let's say 90%, and weight it against your 10% non-academic. There are classes that would have much higher non-academic weights (P.E. comes to mind) but for the most part, keep the academic portion high.

The take home is that it's possible to translate your standards-based scores into a traditional letter grade and I'm reasonably happy with the outcome. If translating to a final grade is holding you back, I think conjunctive scoring is a good solution.

Non-academic grades

In my ongoing fight to help reform the grading system at my school one of the big sticking points are the non-academic factors. I'm an advocate of standards-based assessment and in this style you only grade based on the level of achievement on standards or topics. When I bring this up, I always hear three things:

1. Due dates and homework are important because we need to teach responsibility.
2. It's not just content I'm teaching, I want them to have skills they'll need for school success.
3. (Writing/Reading/Math/etc) are important even though I don't teach it.

Except for the first one, I can agree with both.  Number 3, I'm not going to directly address now except to say, if you don't teach it, you can't grade it. If you want to grade them for writing in your science class, you need to take time out of your class to teach them how to write and have clear criteria for mastery. If you don't, you can't.

Number 2 boils down to different non-academic factors that teachers value but don't show up on the standards. Organization, neatness, and all that other stuff. Those are perfectly fine to include in their grades but you should separate them out. There always needs to be a chunk (a sizeable one) of your grades that are purely representative of how much the students have learned.

What does that look like? Well for me I'm a science teacher so the topics my students receive grades for this trimester are:

• Forces in fluids
• Atoms
• Chemical reactions
• Periodic Table
• Review (I take the main ideas from previous topics and lump them)

Those are my academic grades and are untouched by anything like work completion or neatness. By the way, if I were to include something like Science Literacy or Writing in Science I would separate it out as a grade from the other topics because ability to read/write tends to be such a limiting factor in the expression of knowledge. It's hard to tell what students know about science when you stress them out about punctuation and grammar and being able to write a "correct" hypothesis.

I don't do non-academic grades but if you're big on them, here are some examples:

• Work completion
• Organization
• Behavior
• Participation
• Group work

So if you're Sam Shah and you have this great binder check system, go for it. But you should separate it out into an Organization category.

Why separate?

Ultimately if the purpose of grades are to communicate, you need something to communicate how much the student has actually learned.

Completing work does not mean they've learned. A well-organized binder does not mean they've learned. Behaving in class does not mean they've learned. Does it help? Certainly. But it's just like principal checklists that are used for evaluating teachers. Learning goal posted? Check. Bulletin board organized? Check.

I can do that stuff, but that definitely doesn't mean I'm automatically a good teacher.

The non-academic factors are just indicators, just like those checklists we make fun of. We need to separate out the actual learning a student has achieved.