Following KO’s midsemester on Oct. 25, students are preparing to see their quarter grades and comments from their teachers. This is meant to be a snapshot of a student’s progress in the first two months of school. While this report isn’t sent to any colleges for Forms 3 to 5, the midsemester proves to be a valuable time for students to reflect and set goals for improvement. For seniors, they can choose to send their midsemester grades to college if they want.
“The grade is an indication of your progress,” Head of the Upper School Lisa Loeb said. “The feedback is an explanation for the student of what to continue doing well, and then what next steps to take.”
The word that best describes grading at KO is “varied.” Teachers use different grading systems to assess their students, with some adding their own personal twists. Some of the most prominent grading styles are percentage-based grading, standards-based grading, and letter-based grading. Percentage-based grading revolves around students having different assignments and assessments that are each worth a specific number of points. The overall grade is based on the points you earned divided by the total points you could have gotten. For example, a homework assignment might be three to four points while a quiz could be 25 to 30 points. Percentage-based grading is a popular choice in the math and science departments.
Category-based grading is similar to percentage-based grading, but each category has its own point total and each category is a certain percentage of the total grade. One popular structure among KO teachers is having tests be worth 30%, projects also be worth 30%, quizzes amount to 15%, major exams (like the midterm or final) account for another 15%, and homework or classwork to be worth 10% of your total grade.
Standards-based grading is another common structure among KO teachers. This is where the goals of the class are split into separate standards, or skills, that will be assessed. Tests, essays, and projects are all evaluated using different parts of the standards rubric. Usually, each standard is weighted the same, where all assessments of a specific standard form the average score for that skill, and the final grade is the average of a student’s scores across all standards. This tends to be a popular choice among all departments. Some advantages to standards-based grading are that it encourages a student to improve on a wide variety of things that they must be able to master. One downside to the standards-based grading system is the generally low impact of each assessment on a standard. For example, a student could perform very well on an assessment but have their grade go up minimally due to their previous grades in other assessed standards dragging their average standard score down.
Letter-based grading is one of the simplest forms of grading and is typically used by teachers who grade fewer assignments and give them similar weight. Each assignment is only given a letter grade with no percentage. This system of grading involves simply taking the average of your letter grades in the class. It has been the main system of grading for a long time.
The KO community has been quite divided in their grading opinions. In a Google Form sent out by the investigative department of the KO News, data was collected regarding the grading preferences of students and their thoughts. Out of 54 responses, 48% of students ranked the percentage-based grading system as their favorite. Furthermore, 83% of students responded with a general favorability toward this grading system. The next highest-liked was standards-based grading at 21%. However, 56% of the responses also said that standards-based grading at its current state is their least favorite style. Overall, many students felt slightly positive or neutral toward the current grading system at KO with 90% believing it was between those two intervals.
Latin teacher Stephen Sullivan has worked hard to create a grading system relevant to his classes. “I’m trying to find a system where it works for me and the student,” Mr. Sullivan said. “I want the student to be part of the process. I want them to always know where they got their grade and not be left in the dark as to how all of this happened.” Mr. Sullivan also believes in providing opportunities for retakes for his students. “I always believe in reassessment,” Mr. Sullivan said. “If someone’s not at their best, they deserve an opportunity to retake.”
Transparency is a key issue for Mr. Sullivan and for teachers in the KO community. Access, or lack thereof, to grades is also a point of frustration for students. In our anonymous survey, many students shared their grievances regarding ambiguity in their grades and where to see them. “I do not appreciate that every teacher has a different place to view your grade,” one student said. Currently, some teachers give students access to their grades on Google Classroom, while others like to upload them periodically on Blackbaud, KO’s online scheduling and directory portal. Many teachers also give students their grades on specific assignments, but often students are unable to understand their cumulative grade throughout the class and are left to speculate until a midsemester or semester report when grades and comments are released.
In her tenure as Head of the Upper School at KO, Mrs. Loeb has focused on creating an environment where teachers can collaborate and use their experience to make the school a better place. “Mrs. Loeb is great with shared leadership,” English teacher Caitlin Moriarty said. Last year, Mrs. Loeb established a series of committees to discuss new issues at KO such as the AI committee, which was discussed in a deep-dive investigative piece last month. Another one of these committees is the grading committee. The grading committee was led by former science teacher Kathleen DiSanto last year, a task Ms. Moriarty has taken on this year. The committee has representatives from all departments and from both the Upper and Middle Schools, including Upper School science teacher Alex Kraus, Upper School math teacher Ryan Harris, Upper School English teacher Catherine Schieffelin, Director of College Counseling Jami Silver, Middle School Spanish teacher Duncan Insuik, and Middle School English teacher Kyle Chapman.
The committee has a variety of goals for the 2024-2025 school year. One of Ms. Moriarty’s primary objectives is to make the transition for incoming freshmen regarding grading smoother. “We are trying to make this transition small,” Ms. Moriarty said. This is part of KO’s larger initiative to better connect the Upper and Middle Schools.
Another goal of the committee is to encourage the use of rubrics. “We want to provide resources in experience and research into elements of standard-based grading and the usage of well-constructed rubrics,” Ms. Moriarty said. The committee is working to create a universal grading system that teachers throughout the entire school can adhere to. While departments will implement the universal system differently, the goal is to align grading policies schoolwide. “So far, it feels like we are all in the same country in terms of grading,” Ms. Moriarty said. “We would like to be in the same state.” Increasing communication and collaboration in creating this universal grading system has become a priority for the grading committee.
The grading committee aims to create a practice applicable to the entire school. One core part of this common structure will be rubrics. Rubrics are key in assisting students with what is expected of them during classes and on assignments. They are also crucial to standards-based grading, as each standard has a rubric describing what is needed from a student to achieve a certain score within a standard.
This group of faculty has explored a variety of ideas in their work of creating a universal grading system, using standards-based grading as a blueprint. “Standards-based grading is more of a philosophy rather than a practice,” Ms. Moriarty said. “Standards-based is about mastery of skills rather than vague assessment of learning, something you can measure.” This is one of the main reasons why standards are favorable to administration at KO. As stated before, standards-based grading is quite unfavorable among students included in our survey. However, the committee did a series of focus groups last year which analyzed student views on grading practices at KO. They also sent out a survey which received 246 responses from students in the Upper School and Middle School. Their findings determined that grading practices at KO were quite varied and should be open to change.
Another idea that has floated around the grading committee is the idea of “decaying weights.” This idea has to do with the weight of assignments changing when they are completed. For example, it proposes that an essay written in September would have a lower weightage than an identical essay in November on a student’s cumulative grade. “The goal is to allow improvement from students,” Ms. Moriarty said. “We want to assess how students take material they have learned and apply it.” This also raises the issue of weighing final or midterm exams for students. Currently, these exams are worth approximately 15% of a student’s semester grades. This could be changed in the future after deliberation by the grading committee.
Allowing improvement to be realized throughout the school year in grading has also been a key priority for Mrs. Loeb. “I believe that students should have more than one opportunity to demonstrate their learning,” Mrs. Loeb said. “I believe in a formative to a summative assessment process.” This means that students should receive feedback on their first and second draft, and then work to implement this feedback. “Students would have two or three days to refine their work, and then probably the next class, or the class after that, they would do their summative, which is their final,” Mrs. Loeb said.
Grades play a big factor in the college admissions process. They show how consistently well a student performs throughout a course, as opposed to one or two single tests like the ACT or SAT. While grades are important, the exact method in which students are graded doesn’t matter to colleges, as long as they understand it. “I don’t have a preference one way or the other,” Ms. Silver said. “There are schools that use a five-point scale. There are other schools that use four, five and six as their grade. Every school does it differently, and it does not matter how it is done, as long as it’s consistent, transparent, and equitable.” Colleges receive a full page from the school, showing the average grade in the class, your grade, and a few other details to help clarify, to colleges, all grading systems are the same.
Grading isn’t the only thing representative of a student’s success, and while important, it isn’t the be-all and end-all. To colleges, getting to know a student is also important, though grades are an easy way for colleges to get a glance at a student’s academic life. “Grades are easy because they are quantitative data,” Ms. Silver said. “The non-quantitative actually matters too.” Colleges want to know the type of person they are letting into their community, and if a student would shine in that environment or not. If you spend all your time studying and taking the hardest classes, you might lose out on your high school years, so enjoy your time at KO before it’s too late.
