Research Digest: "The Arguments and Data in Favor of Minimum Grading" by Carifio and Carey (2013)

Today's study is: "The Arguments and Data in Favor of Minimum Grading" by Carifio and Carey (2013)

One of the concepts that always ends up being a hot topic in the staff room is this concept of setting a minimum allowable grade. Usually you hear this as "no student can score below a 50 out of 100 no matter what." Then the inevitable grumbling comes about about how "kids these days have it so easy" and "back in my day if you didn't do any work, you didn't get paid." The problematic compensation/work analogy aside, this misses the point. 

The article published by James Carifio and Thodore Carey titled, "The Arguments and Data in Favor of Minimum Grading," dig into the thinking and the data behind the minimum grading policy. 

Before we dig in, a few things that are important to note:

1. While the article does reference a large body of work, the specific study they conducted had a relatively small sample size, even though it does span over ten years in looking at the impact of a minimum grading policy. 
2. I am not a scientist with a research background. I'm not looking to present new findings from some original research I did. I'm not doing that. I'm simply a teacher who's spent countless hours reading and reviewing research and applying it in my classroom. My goal is to identify what was found in the study and then talk about how it can impact the teaching and learning we do every day. 
3. The title of the article itself points to the possibility of bias. That should always be noted as we start.

Explanation:

To start, minimum grading is the act of setting a minimum grade that a student can receive. Seems pretty self-explanatory so far. The authors note that minimum grading is not a holistic grading reform, but simply one policy that affects one specific area of grading and one specific subset of students. This is actually an important piece that's overlooked often during this conversation. 

Minimum grading policies are designed to prevent what the authors call "catastrophic failure," or the idea that failing marks early on can be so heavily weighted that they eliminate the possibility for success later on. That's the specific area it addresses, and the specific group of students are your intermittently failing students. By that I mean the student who generally does okay, but every once in a while they completely bomb or miss an assignment. Minimum grading is not designed for students who consistently pass or consistently fail. It's for that specific group in the middle, and that will become important later on. 

Here's the first thing that stood out to me that will help set the stage for this conversation. When the 100-point scale was invented, an average-performing student would typically receive marks around a 50. Let that sink in for a second. I didn't believe it at first, but I dug into it a bunch because I thought, "There's no way that's correct." But it is. 

(If you want to read some interesting history about grades, check out this document.)

Here's why that matters: our grading scale has been sliding and shifting as an arbitrary measure of performance for as long as we've had it. 

If you read through "An A In Not An A Is Not An A: A History of Grading," Mark Durm points out that at one point Harvard used a 100-point scale and broke students into six classifications (letter grades didn't exist) with the lowest one being a 40% or below. Seven years later they got rid of the 100-point system and then brought it back thirteen years later with a failing grade being anything below a 75%. 

I bring this up to make an important point in how we approach grading systems: we made them up, they've always been in flux, and there is no established correct way to do it. 

Now that we've taken the deep-rooted beliefs that grades are infallible and never to be questioned and thrown it out the window, why does that matter?

Here's where they dig into the math of grading a little bit. It gets complex, but I want to really break it down to its simplest form. Here's a fact: if a student gets a 0 on their first assignment in a 100-point system, they would have to get above a 90% on their next two assignments in a row simply to get back up to a passing grade of a 60%. Miss two assignments? Better ace the next three or four. This is what the authors mean when they describe catastrophic failure.

The way our grading system is set up, an F has the potential to carry more weight than an A. It skews grades and rigs the system, making it easier to fail than to pass. 

This is where the pros and cons of the article come in. I want to start with the con, actually. Opponents of the minimum grading policies see them as leading to grade inflation. At first glance, this sounds very likely. If you take away the lower half of the grading scale, it seems pretty obvious that grades would all go up. Right?

Well, that's not what their study found. Essentially, their study found that the students who consistently failed still ended up failing while the student who consistently passed received passing marks. It's the specific subset of students, the ones described earlier, that showed changes in their grades, though not all of them. In fact, only 0.3% of students started the term by being assigned a minimum grade and then went on to pass the course. 

While that seems small, that's sort of the point. They found that for most students, it didn't impact their final grade. Now, when I read this, my brain went, "So, this seems like it doesn't make a difference."

Except that it does for that 0.3%. Think about it. In a class load of 120, that's almost one student per term. Too often we think about education stats as just numbers, but when we think about them in terms of the kids we know and care about, it starts to feel a lot more significant. This means that minimum grading policies, which require nearly no investment of time, relearning, energy, etc. could result in having one of your students who wouldn't have made it, actually end up making it. We all have those kids every year. If we knew there was something that could make a difference without disrupting everything else, why not do it?

Now, the big question is why it actually would make a difference for that student, that 0.3%. This is where the authors address the proponents of minimum grading. 

For the pro side, proponents of minimum grading say that it increases motivation. To support this, they cite a 2010 study that says, "Research shows that students who sustain effort, even in failure, are more likely to see failure as temporary and as part of the learning process and will indeed learn from their mistakes when the failure is not crushing."

Pair this with Daniel Pink's work around the value of mastery in promoting intrinsic motivation, and this makes perfect sense. If a student begins to see success as unattainable, there goes their motivation. In the previous example where the student gets a 0 on their first assignment, digging themselves out by getting two 90% scores on their next assignment sounds attainable. But now picture the student who has been conditioned by their previous years of school that an A is out of their reach. Now it feels unattainable. 

Key Takeaway:

This is where I see a major takeaway: Does your grading system allow student the potential to recover if they make a mistake? 

This really is the goal of the minimum grading policy. How does it happen in the classroom? Maybe you are uncomfortable with the idea of a minimum grade. While it absolutely depends on your grading system, but here are some other ways to minimize the effect of catastrophic failure in the classroom:

1. Drop the lowest scores, especially if you use a category weighting method of grading. Just be sure that you still have a record of how the student performed on that specific skill.
2. Gather multiple instances of evidence of learning that you can use to determine the student's trend, and then provide a summative score for the skill. This is the method I use and have fallen in love with it.  
3. Allow student to complete late work or retake assessments. Now, this doesn't mean your class becomes a free-for-all, but how can you allow students opportunities to fail, learn, and try again?

Final Thoughts:

Accurate reporting is important. If you've read any of my other work, you know this is a hill I will die on. This means that artificially inflating grades isn't okay. It doesn't help learning. However, if you can do something that won't artificially inflate grades that would take next to no effort and could make a huge difference for a couple students without negatively impacting the rest, why not do it? 

Now, I recognize that this is one study, and as with everything, one study doesn't completely prove anything, but what I hope it does do is to make you think a bit more about how too often grading policies can create holes so deep that kids can't climb out. Where do you see that in your school, your team, your classroom? What could you do about it? 

If you need a place to start, minimum grading might be something worth checking out.