Educational Buzzwords...F: 15 Fixes for Broken Grades

From the back cover:

Ken O'Connor

A Repair Kit for Grading: Fifteen Fixes for Broken Grades, 2/e

Communicating about student achievement requires accurate, consistent and meaningful grades.
Educators interested in examining and improving grading practices should ask the following questions:

• Am I confident that students in my classroom receive consistent, accurate and meaningful grades that support learning? 
• Am I confident that the grades I assign students accurately reflect my school or district’s published performance standards and desired learning outcomes?

In many schools, the answers to these questions often range from "not very" to "not at all." When that’s the case, grades are "broken" and teachers and schools need a "repair kit" to fix them. A Repair Kit for Grading: 15 Fixes for Broken Grades, 2/e gives teachers and administrators 15 ways to make the necessary repairs.

The "fixes" are in four categories that reflect common grading challenges: distorted achievement, low-quality or poorly organized evidence, inappropriate grade calculation and linking grades more closely to student learning. Student achievement isn’t only about "doing the work" or accumulating points. But, when students receive points for merely turning in work on time, or when teachers put a mark on everything students do and simply count them up to determine a grade, the message is clear: success is determined by the quantity of points earned, not the quality of the learning taking place. In fact, messages about learning quality get lost.  Grades are artifacts of learning, and students need to receive grades that reflect what they’ve actually learned. That’s why this book advocates the implementation of grading systems based strictly on student achievement – and shows educators how to create them.


Ken O’Connor is a former Curriculum Coordinator with the Scarborough Board of Education in Ontario, Canada. He is an expert on grading and reporting with a particular emphasis on using these techniques to improve student achievement through student involvement. With over twenty years of teaching experience in secondary schools in Australia and Ontario, he has presented hundreds of workshops for teachers at every grade level, and is the author of the very successful How to Grade for Learning.

The Fifteen Fixes:
With comments about each in, um, green...

1. Don’t include student behaviors (effort, participation, adherence to class rules, etc) in grades; include only achievement. I'm not sure why this one is even a problem. Of course, grades should be about achievement!
2. Don’t reduce marks on ‘work’ submitted late; provide support for the learner. I love this one, but our school hasn't really gotten on board. I understand the reservation. I also understand having whole building rules about this just muddies the waters.
3. Don’t give points for extra credit or use bonus points; seek only evidence that more work has resulted in a higher level of achievement. Um, isn't this just a fancy way of assigning extra credit or bonus points...
4. Don’t punish academic dishonesty with reduced grades; apply other consequences and reassess to determine actual level of achievement. This makes sense, as academic dishonesty is a behavior not lack of mastery in a given standard...
5. Don’t consider attendance in grade determination; report absences separately. Um, duh...and, yet, colleges and universities are BIG, FAT MEANIES about this!
6. Don’t include group scores in grades; use only individual achievement evidence. Definitely unfair otherwise!
7. Don’t organize information in grading records by assessment methods or simply summarize into a single grade; organize and report evidence by standards/ learning goals. I'm not really sure how to do this, if my grading system isn't aligned in that way, sure I can find things free online, but I find they are full of glitches and I still have to translate those into grades for our building online grade-book...
8. Don’t assign grades using inappropriate or unclear performance standards; provide clear descriptions of achievement expectations.Duh...
9. Don’t assign grades based on student’s achievement compared to other students; compare each student’s performance to preset standards. Duh...
10. Don’t rely on evidence gathered from assessments that fail to meet standards of quality; rely only on quality assessments. Duh...
11. Don’t rely on the mean; consider other measures of central tendency and use professional
judgment. With online grade-books this just makes sense, weighing grades works out for everyone...
12. Don’t include zeros in grade determination when evidence is missing or as punishment; use alternatives, such as reassessing to determine real achievement or use “I” for Incomplete or Insufficient evidence. This is the one I have the most problems with, knowing that fair isn't always equal I believe that sometimes it is fair to give a zero or two or five. If I've done all I can to get a kid to do the work/assignment and they don't when is it appropriate to say enough? For some kids the end is never...for others...a zero is motivation...I think it helps to know when, as a teacher I must know when. I also don't mind changes zeroes into passing grades. Obviously, I'm still stewing on this one...
13. Don’t use information from formative assessments and practice to determine grades; use only summative evidence. Duh...
14. Don’t summarize evidence accumulated over time when learning is developmental and will
grow with time and repeated opportunities; in those instances emphasize more recent achievement. I'd like to see how this looks, I think I do aspects of this, I'd like to know how I can do this with more alacrity...
15. Don’t leave students out of the grading process. Involve students - they can - and should - play key roles in assessment and grading that promote achievement. I'd like to do this one better and all of the time.