Handouts are available below.

Big Idea

In the world of assessment, just because teachers assess standards using rubrics and not content using traditional grading methods (ie. points scored on a test) doesn’t make Standards-Based Grading (SBG) any less effective. In fact, SBG is meant to assess things that traditional grading doesn’t typically address – such as science skills like communication, application, and analysis. In fact, a traditional grading system would struggle with assessing skills accurately.

Episode Notes

Here are a couple of big ideas from the video:

1. As imperfect as a rubric in SBG may appear, rubrics do a fairly accurate job at assessing standards – if the rubric is defined well. The key thing, always, is to define our rubrics in a detailed and fair way: “detailed”, so we can distinguish each level clearly, and “fair” in that our expectations at each level matches the grade level.

2. On a rubric (ie. proficiency scale), a proficient is considered a “low A” while an extending is considered a “high A”. Both are A’s.

3. If we tried to score a standard using traditional grading, how many points would we assign? We could assign 4 points – similar to a 4 level rubric – but the problem there is that a student who got proficient would be getting a 75% (3 out of 4) – a low B in our system, which doesn’t quite denotes a “complete understanding” that is associated with Proficient.

4. If we decide to assign more points to assess standards via Traditional Grading – for example, make the question out of 10 marks -then we’d have to distinguish between a 6 and a 7 and a 7 and an 8 and an 8 and etc. This becomes more of a headache.

Resources

Handout(s): Ep98 Handout – How Traditional Grading is Less Accurate Than Standards-Based Grading

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