Concord High School Competency Education

Competency based education is a New Hampshire law (RSA 193-C:3). It is also a Department of Education policy (306:261).

Competency based grading communicates how students are performing on a set of clearly defined learning targets called competencies. The purpose of competency based grading is to identify what a student knows, or is able to do in relation to pre-established learning targets, as opposed to simply averaging grades/scores over the course of a grading period which can mask what a student has learned, or not learned, in a specific course.

There are several but the overarching reason is that educators in the Concord School District are constantly following the mission and vision which states in part that we should teach our students to become lifelong learners. Other important principles are:

• The Concord High School mission which mirrors that of the school district.
• The beliefs of Concord High School.
• More than 20 years of experience with Understanding by Design -- the predominant way of designing curriculum in the United States and beyond.
• The lessons we have learned from our involvement with PACE -- the program for assessment of competency education.

The 1-100% grading system that we have been using for the last several decades has a number of flaws. By mixing together things like behavior and homework with content knowledge, those traditional grades often obscure how well students have actually learned course material. In addition, if one thinks about the 1-100 scale, more than half of the available scores would apply only to failing work. This is not helpful in portraying what students know or are able to do. A change to competency grading should more accurately portray where a student is in terms of his or her learning.

Yes. This has been an ever present issue that we have discussed as we have looked at any changes. For this reason we have implemented every improvement to communication of student achievement but we have also worked carefully to make sure that the transcript continues to clearly communicate to colleges how students are doing. In fact we are improving the clarity of our transcript and the explanatory document called the school profile that accompanies it.

Grading is communication of a student’s progress toward stated learning goals. A competency-based system is designed to report out three kinds of information to parents and students:

1. A student’s level of competency in various academic skills
2. A student’s overall grade for the course

A student’s performance on Work-Study Practices (communication, creativity, collaboration, and self-direction) will also be included on a future transcript to provide a better picture of what are the strengths of each student.

Competency-based grading considers student work in relation to a rubric that is shown to students before any work is begun. The teacher compares the work the student has created to the work and awards a score based on the rubric. This allows a student to clearly see where they are in relation to the target.

In traditional grading work was often averaged together to create a score that included many factors including behavior. When traditional grading was done in this way the tendency was to cloud what students knew into one overall grade.

Competency based grading ensures that feedback is accurate, consistent, meaningful, and supportive of learning. When a student’s grade is based on specific criteria and does not include factors not related to learning it is more accurate.

No. The conversions were part of the transition and will not be used beginning in 2020-2021. We want students and parents/guardians to have one system to ensure clarity and transparency.

As the number of categories go up the ability of two or more individual raters (teachers) to assign the same score to the same work. More categories initially seems good because there are lots of them but it actually makes grading and reporting less fair and less useful for learning.

It is also important for students and parents that a score means the same thing across the school. A 100 point scale offers too much variability in scoring and we owe it to students and parents to communicate clearly with them. Research shows that “the probable error on the 0 to 100 scale is plus or minus 5-6 points or greater. This occurs largely because the 0 to 100 scale is more precise than it really is. Another way of expressing his range of probable error is to say that teachers can’t make reliable distinctions with about 10 to 2 points on a scale that includes 101 distinct levels of performance”

In June 2013, NH Senate Bill 48 was passed and included a requirement for students to be assessed on their Work Study Practices. The bill defines Work-Study Practices (WSP) as “those behaviors that enhance learning achievement and promote a positive work ethic such as, but not limited to, listening and following directions, accepting responsibility, staying on task, completing work accurately, managing time wisely, showing initiative, and being cooperative.”

Work Study Practices are assessed based on a student’s ability to meet pre-established behavioral guidelines in the following areas: cooperation, assertion, responsibility, empathy, self-regulation/control (for elementary schools) and communication, creativity, collaboration and self-direction (middle and high school). All students receive work study practice grades separate from their academic grade in order to provide parents with a more accurate and complete picture of student learning and progress.

No. The student would need to remediate that single competency to earn credit for the course and be considered “competent.”

If the calculation of all competencies for a course is below a 2.0 then the whole course must be retaken.

Yes. In June 2018 we invited admissions directors from Northeastern, NHTI, Dartmouth, Plymouth State, UNH, St. Anselm, Colby Sawyer, to meet with our entire faculty. They roundly agreed that their job is to interpret any transcript and that competency based transcripts are something that they are well prepared to accept. Paul Sundae from Dartmouth even reminded teachers that 85 New England colleges, including Dartmouth have signed a statement that competency grades do not disadvantage students in any way. Part of it reads;

“Colleges and universities simply do not discriminate against students based on the academic program and policies of the sending school, as long as those programs and policies are accurately presented and clearly described.”

Other schools that signed this statement and created statements of their own include Yale, Amherst, Williams, Harvard, Brown, Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, University of New Hampshire, University of Maine, NHTI, Middlebury, University of Vermont, Plymouth State, and Keene State.

Students who receive a final overall course score of below 2.5 (failing) and who fail all of the course competencies need to repeat the whole course. Students who receive a final overall course score below 2.5 but who have passed some course competencies do not need to retake the whole course but they do need to demonstrate proficiency by passing the competencies that they did not.

Class rank will still be calculated for at least the next two graduating classes. After that CHS will begin to move away from class rank. There are three main reasons for moving away from class rank. First, it can introduce an unhealthy competition in the student body that can place the focus of learning on an accumulation of points rather than deeper learning. Second, there are ways of celebrating achievement that do not include ranking students against one another but that do still show a student’s achievement relative to their class. Third, only about 20% of colleges still want to see class rank as part of an application.

With the removal of class rank we will most likely transition to another system that honors high student achievement. An example of this would be the Latin Honors system that some high schools and many colleges use now.

The transcript for the classes of 2020 and 2021 will have the same transcript that we use now. The first new transcript will be for the class of 2022 but it will most likely be a gradual change.

Similar to how grades work now, there will be set times throughout the year when students will have to be at a certain level in order to play sports or participate in extracurricular activities. There will certainly be an academic component to becoming eligible but the committee working on the details has also expressed interest in using work study practices and or citizenship in some way.