Assessment should be an integral part of the learning process, whereby it is a process that both teacher and student use to help find out where the learning or our teaching practice needs to go next. If it isn’t doing this, then it’s largely a waste of time. I know there are arguments that there are many reasons why purely summative assessment has a place, and even how testing at the district, provincial or national level is important data for us to gather. I do agree with that it can be good, if and only if, that data translates to positive and meaningful change, which fulfills the above criteria of assessment being used to change professional practice. If we determine that as a district, or region, that we are performing poorly in certain areas, then policy and/or curriculum should change as a reflection of that, otherwise it is not meaningful assessment data. 

I have heard different educators make claims that the exam situation itself, rather than the data, is beneficial in that it helps prepare students or gives them something to work through. I would counter this with the notion that there are a variety of ways we can create more meaningful events if we are trying to teach students coping skills that are much more relevant to their ‘real life.’ As well, if we were concerned about this then it would make more sense to have a ‘post-secondary prep course’ where these situations and exams could be modeled, rather than administer them to all students, some of which will never write another exam once they leave grade school. Now, some may be concerned that that we skew our practices towards the lower performing students, but no one seems to complain as much that we are skewing it towards a different, higher achieving group.

In the game of percentage scales we set ourselves and our students up to compare to one another more so than comparing against themselves. Unfortunately, it can also give a false impression that giving a number is the same as giving meaningful feedback, which is simply not the case.

Let's assume there are two students, each with 60% and one is working hard to ability and one is not, how does that 60% reflect that? It tells nothing about the student’s work ethic or ability by itself. But perhaps that isn’t something that we are even trying to measure in schools. If we are simply measuring ‘achieved’ or ‘not-achieved,’ then the personal growth on how they got there is largely irrelevant. However, for an educational institution focused on student learning, not caring about progress or growth seems counter-intuitive.

These percentage scales are also easily manipulated and don’t really say anything about what things the student knows and doesn’t know. Combined with practices like deducting marks for late assignments, bonus marks for early ones, zeroes for unsubmitted work, etc, then they become even less informative since it becomes difficult to unravel how that score came to be. If they are parts of the whole, they are still meaningless since it doesn’t delineate which parts are which. If a unit in math is comprised of adding and subtracting fractions and a student gets 50%, have they mastered adding or subtracting? Have they learned only parts of both?

Let's take another example, this time something musical. There are 12 notes on the major music scale:

             A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#

If a student learning how to play guitar knows 50% of them, can they play a song containing G,C,D or A, B, E? Or even any song at all? The obvious answer is to give them a piece of music and you will find out, but the less obvious part is that we normally do not send home accompanying performances with written report cards.

A colleague told me that they viewed the percentage scale in terms of probability. If a student knew 60% of the material, and they were familiar with the curriculum, they could make a pretty good estimate about what the student did and did not know. My thinking on that is, maybe but wouldn’t it be better to just explicitly outline what they do and do not know? If we are playing guesswork with our student’s learning, what are we even reporting on? Better to abandon the percentile-based scoring system and replace it with a standards-based grading or mastery-oriented grading instead. Using a system like this would allow students to track their own progress and measure against themselves rather than others. It would also help both the student and teacher to see what topics had been mastered and which they have not by providing meaningful feedback.

But that takes time and changes in mindset for a system that has been locked in a percentile grading scheme. It is also widely used and understood by the world at large so there is a familiarity and ease-of-use factor that makes continued use appealing. We would need to bring educators, students and families onboard to make changes. Though, if we keep waiting for the perfect time to make that happen we will be waiting a long time. Change happens when we take steps to make it happen. When you keep taking a single step forward one after another, it doesn’t take too long to really cover some distance. 

The problem is, while we keep waiting to take those steps, we are spending a lot of time grading student work that is often not leading to meaningful change in behaviour of neither student nor teacher, making grading largely a process of recording scores. Given how much time grading consumes, and the absolute scarcity of time for educators, we must makes changes to ensure that it is impactful and helps to foster the learning that should.