All NHS students know the feeling; it’s a sunny day in August, and your family is laying down towels and chairs at the beach, ordering ice cream from Junction, or grilling burgers in the backyard. However, your mind is elsewhere and your eyes glued to the open Powerschool app, as your schedule for the new school year should be rolling in at any moment. Of course, the first thing you do once the schedule finally arrives is send it to your best friends, acquaintances, and the random genius who you sat with in physics last year, hoping for a familiar face in one of your new classes.
Once schedules have been compared, you turn your attention to the names of the teachers who will determine what the next 10 months of your life look like. You search for names that are notorious for the good reasons and the bad ones, the names that supposedly write the best college recommendations, and the names that you’ve heard stories about. You post your schedule on your Instagram story and desperately text upperclassmen friends hoping for some words of wisdom, but if you're stuck with one of those teachers who has given out one singular A in their entire career, you’re filled with dread before the school year even starts. Never mind if this teacher has a vast amount of wisdom to share, or a unique approach to educating students that might inspire you, or is incredibly kind to students who might be struggling. Your perspective on them has been tainted, as has your opportunity to form a positive relationship with an educator, before the school year has even begun because of their supposedly tough grading policies. This is why we at the Hilltopper feel that the grading of homework, assignments, and tests across classes of the same level should be standardized across all teachers of each level of each subject.
The grading system that we currently have in place might, on the surface, seem like an excellent way to train students to work with all different types of future colleagues or to receive all different types of feedback. In reality, it is teaching students to write in the style that their teacher prefers, to make sure that their writing always reflects the opinions that the teacher has expressed, and to alter their patterns of thinking to that of their teacher in order to optimize their chances of receiving the best grade possible. Students are further stripped of their individuality and have little opportunity to take risks and explore nuances in their work. The hard work of a student who is not naturally skilled in a certain subject area is ignored in favor of the student whose work is naturally more suited to the teachers’ preferred writing style, and between calculating which topic sentences our teacher will prefer and practicing the specific types questions that we know they always grade the most harshly on high-stakes tests, when are we supposed to have time to truly engage with and understand the material holistically?
In a conversation about standardized grades, it’s essential to consider the goals of each student and of the education system as a whole. Many of the students in accelerated or AP classes intend on taking an AP test in the spring or in future years, and when the difficulty of questions and harshness of grading differs from teacher to teacher, each student is not given an equal opportunity to succeed on these types of tests. For example, this year there are two different A.P. U.S. History teachers who give different unit tests; one closely bases their multiple choice questions off of those on the AP exam, and the other spends more time on the units that are most likely to appear on the exam. These teachers clearly have different strengths and teaching philosophies, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but what happens in the spring, when half of the APUSH students are ready to ace their multiple choice quiz, while the other half is much more confident in their historical knowledge of social history in the United States? And if certain students intend on pursuing a career in history, their levels of preparedness for college classes and ultimately for the workforce will be dependent on the testing and grading preferences of their teacher.
Of course, teachers spend so much time planning out course curriculum, creating agreed-upon grading rubrics, setting expectations for assignments, and working unbelievably hard to ensure that their classroom is equitable and fair. The Hilltopper staff is beyond grateful for all of the incredible teachers, and as we continue to ensure that all classes are equitable, we must continue to acknowledge all of the time and effort that our wonderful teachers dedicate to helping each and every student learn.
And what would this new grading system look like? Perhaps all of the teachers of a certain level of a certain subject would each create and grade one assessment or paper per term, or perhaps using the same exact exam with the same points awarded per question in every class would eliminate these issues. Much of this work, as well as the issues of favoritism and internalized bias, could be eliminated with the adoption of a singular testing and grading system across courses, and more positive, fulfilling interactions between students and students would be soon to follow. And who knows, maybe that fateful day in August would become a day of celebration and excitement for all students.