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Grading on a (Squashed) Curve

This article in the 19 May McNews USA Today attempts to make a case for changing the way that schools account for failing grades. In a nutshell, the idea is, given a 10-point scale (e.g. 90-100 is an A, and so forth), all failing grades below 50 should be rounded up to 50 for purposes of calculating grade averages.

The main argument here is that very low performing students can't catch up. (Mathematically, that's true in some cases. The article shows some examples - one is a student with 0, 70, 70, and 70 as quarter grades, that averages out to a failing 52.5 under the standard grading scale, but when the 0 is replaced with a 50, it becomes a passing (barely) 65.)

Whether or not this is really a bad thing is a discussion for another day. What I'm more interested in is the misinformation and fear-mongering present in these two paragraphs from the article:

Their argument: Other letter grades A, B, C and D are broken down in increments of 10 from 60 to 100, but there is a 59-point spread between D and F, a gap that can often make it mathematically impossible for some failing students to ever catch up.

"It's a classic mathematical dilemma: that the students have a six times greater chance of getting an F," says Douglas Reeves, founder of The Leadership and Learning Center, a Colorado-based educational think tank who has written on the topic. "The statistical tweak of saying the F is now 50 instead of zero is a tiny part of how we can have better grading practices to encourage student performance."

First off, let's look at the way the grades discussed here actually break out:

• 90 - 100 = A
• 80 - 89 = B
• 70 - 79 = C
• 60 - 69 = D
• 59 and below = F

A couple of things jump out right away. Reeves' statement - students have a six times greater chance of getting an F - makes no sense whatsoever. Six times greater than what? Passing? Were this the case, our schools across the nation should be failing 86% of their students, which clearly isn't the case. Than getting any other specific grade? Only if students get graded by random draw and don't actually have to do any work. As the founder of an educational think tank, one would expect Reeves to demonstrate a better grasp of the grading system he's working to change. Reeves also makes a subtle shift in his second sentence - The statistical tweak of saying the F is now 50 instead of zero is a tiny part of how we can have better grading practices to encourage student performance. (Emphasis mine.) He's now made the implication that all failing students under currently common grading systems get get zeroes, which of course they don't. The net effect of his statements seems to be to convince parents that their kids are passing school by the skin of their teeth, and that setting a lower limit on failing grades will dramatically change the situation.

Now it could be that Mr. Reeves is more interested in selling his books. The Leadership and Learning Center website is basically a front end to sell their publications, training, and seminars. There isn't, so far as I could find, any way to gain further insight into Reeves' research other than to buy his DVD seminars on the subject. (To be fair, there's certainly nothing wrong with the man trying to sell his work. What bothers me is that he's made some fairly dramatic statements without providing anything to back them up.)

What's missing from the article, and what Thomas Guskey, the Georgetown College professor quoted in the article, alludes to, are hard statistics.

There are a couple of things that need to be looked at:

Of the kids that are failing, what is the distribution of the failing grades? How many of those kids would actually benefit by the proposed approach? Perhaps most importantly, does passing kids who really don't know the material really benefit them in the long run? Are other techniques, such as extra tutoring or smaller class sizes, more effective in increasing performance in poorly achieving students than setting an artificial lower limit on failure?

The fact of the matter is that kids don't fail suddenly. There are indicators - declining day-to-day performance, missed classes, attention issues - that teachers, parents, and indeed the students themselves should be sensitive to, which can be acted upon before a student has gotten to a point of no return. Early identification of problems and effective intervention will make far more of a difference than silly math tricks, methinks.

Clever Badger