To Average or Not to Average? Calculating Final Grades

Let's start by tossing an idea out there. 

At the end of your career, what if your retirement pay was calculated by averaging your salary from your entire career? Yes, this includes your first year where you made $30,000 and the years where the budget was frozen so you didn't get a raise the whole time, and it even includes the year where you had a major life event and were only on a half-time contract. 

I imagine that wouldn't go over well. 

Let's try another scenario. 

You're training for a marathon. You were never much of a runner, but you finally get yourself to a spot where you can run the full thing. As you cross the finish line, the timekeeper pulls up the app you use to track your training, uses that to average your time, and then determines your final time for the marathon by using the average with your initial training times as a factor. You know, those first few runs where you could hardly hit a 14-minute pace averaged out with your final 8-minute mile pace that you just ran in the marathon.  

Again, wouldn't go over well. 

Okay, third time's the charm, right?

Imagine for a second that students start the year not knowing what they are supposed to have learned by the end of the year. They struggle with early assignments while they are learning. By the end, they finally understand the concepts and begin to do really well on their assessments. Then, and this is where things get ridiculous, we average out their scores from the whole course (yes, even the ones at the beginning where they got low scores), and we use that to determine their final grade. 

I imagine that one would go over...well, perfectly fine. I mean, I don't even have to imagine that it would go over fine, because it actually does go over fine every single year for kids all across the school system. 

Let me illustrate this a little bit more by trying to make this concrete. Below is an image of a sample grade book. Take a second to look through it. 

Let's break this down a little bit, focusing specifically on how this calculates the final grade. Obviously, this uses the mean to determine the score, but look at how that impacts specific students. 

Student A showed the most overall growth, and yet they ended up with one of the lowest grades. Student B showed absolutely zero growth, but they ended with the highest grade in the class. What message does this send to students? It tells students that school isn't about learning. It tells students that growth is not valuable. It tells students that where they start is more important than where they end, so if they are starting a little bit behind, they might as well not try at all. 

I may be going a bit overboard, but on some level that truly is the message we are sending those students. 

Look at student C and student D. Did they both end with scores of proficient or above? Absolutely, and yet one receives a failing grade while the other is just barely hanging on. Why? Because they didn't follow along as well as the rest. At its core, that's the reason. Their grade is a reflection simply of how well they do what we want them to do, not how well they learn what they need to learn. The message? Don't take risks. Don't make mistakes. Your personal life and all of the complexities around it will impact your grade more than your learning will. 

I know this sounds like I'm blowing this way out of proportion. Some of your reading this are thinking, "Is he really getting this worked up about using the mean to determine course grades?"

You're damn right I am. 

I am because we aren't talking about numbers. We're talking about the kids those numbers often hide. We're talking about kids those numbers often harm. We're talking about the kids who we're supposed to serve, and with this one tiny decision of how to calculate grades, we're holding kids back from their potential. Worse, we're simply holding kids back from seeing their reality and being able to celebrate it. 

So, what now?

If it isn't obvious to you yet, the answer to that question is to stop averaging scores over time and using that to determine a final grade. We can't preach growth mindset if we penalize the growth. We can't tell students that mistakes are valuable experiences and then devalue them in the grade book. 

What's the alternative? Well, it's really not that difficult of an idea, though it does require some shifts to happen beforehand. 

First off, your grading needs to be standards-based. Now, everyone has their own definition of what that means, so let's define and simplify it. When I say standards-based, I mean that evidence of learning is categorized based on the skill that it aligns to instead of being categorized exclusively by the assignment. It's helpful to see this, so below is a picture that compares the two ideas. 

The left one is an example of task-aligned, and the right one is learning-aligned. When I say standards-based, I simply mean that data looks more like what's on the right. What this does is a couple of things. First, it allows you to see trends and growth in learning, but second, and most importantly for this post, it allows you to truly determine where a student is at in their learning. 

That's shift number one – move to more standards-based grading. 

Shift number two is connected, but this is a shift in terminology that has been so valuable for me. Instead of talking about formative assessments and summative assessments, I now talk about formative scores and summative scores. This might seem like a simply distinction, but it's been so valuable for me in terms of how I view each. When I was using the term summative assessment, I was thinking about a big, one-shot assessment that counted for most of their grade. That's honestly what I was trained to think. 

Now, however, I use the term summative score, and what that means to me is that I'm using all available data to determine a summative score. This isn't a one-shot thing. It isn't a task. It's essentially a culmination of learning, a portfolio of sorts. The student and I sit down and talk about where they are truly at in their learning based on their demonstrations, feedback, and reflections. 

This is how we get out of the mindset of simply averaging scores over time. We do that when we have tasks that aren't clearly aligned to learning outcomes. In that situation, we can't use them to determine levels of understanding for specific skills, so our only option is to average, despite the inequity buried in it, despite the inaccuracy of that approach. It's all we can do.

However, if we can shift to aligning our record-keeping to learning so that we can see growth and trends for specific skills, then we have an opening to move away from this outdated and plainly harmful method of calculating grades that tells students that it matters just as much where you start as where you end, that your mistakes will always be held against you, that a growth mindset will still involve penalties long-term.

We can shift to calculating final grades that accurately reflect where the student is truly at in their learning. 

That's the goal. It's not the ideal, but in our current environment where we are beholden to grades, this is the goal – to allow students the opportunity to grow and see that valued at the end of the term. 

If we aren't doing that, then what's the point of education?