Athenian’s Everlasting Debate: The Math Grading System

[Editors’ Note: This article was completed just before the Town Hall meeting that resulted in several changes being made to the system described in the article.]

During the 2022-2023 school year, the Athenian Math Department used the “1, 2, 3, 4” math grading system. However, this system garnered a negative response from the student body, causing it to be brought up to the Math Department and Town Hall leaders for review.

“I think the grading system last year was too intimidating, because one single mistake on a test could ruin your entire year,” said 10th-grader Kyle Ko. “The only redeemable quality was the retakes because it gave students more chances to do better.” As a result, many students who shared the same opinion sent proposals to the Town Meeting officers and talked to teachers. This message led to the creation of the new grading system used in all math classes, the “emerging, developing, proficient, exemplary” system.

When asked about the ideas that had gone into the construction of the new grading system, Howard Kaplan, math teacher and Math Department Chair, said, “We thought that there should be a way for students to not be penalized for taking longer to learn something right. If you didn’t know it on that first time we assessed you, we provided you another opportunity to show that you knew it.”

Another issue that the math department tried to solve with the new grading system was the overcrowded C&C periods spent on reassessments. “Every C&C was just busy. C&C was developed to give students a chance to go and get help and it’s not that doing a reassessment can't be helpful to your understanding, but all of a sudden managing [reassessments] took away from students who wanted to show up and get help,” said Howard.

Math teacher and Co-dean of New Faculty Jamie Julin said, “Last year, we were all talking about, how are we going to look at progress and growth in our classes? We found out that we were looking at individual skills, and had kind of lost focus on the larger learning objectives. We wanted to look at it as more of a progression. We also found that 90% of C&Cs were spent giving reassessments, and that’s not really a good use of a teacher’s time.”

With that new grading system in place, Jamie said, “I’m already finding myself actually talking with students about math during C&C, which is what we want to be doing, but a flip side of that is we know that students still need a way to show growth like that. So it’s not simple a matter like, let’s just take away reassessments then so we can talk to students more about math, but like, how do we reframe the way we’re looking at growth.”

12th-grader and Town Meeting Officer Katie Cooper said, “I do believe that there’s some issues within the implementation of the current grading system, especially the discrepancies between different classrooms on the rigidity of rubrics and the way teachers grade. I also think that there’s the issue of supporting students’ engagement and students who don’t perform well on the assessments which have almost entirely been on-paper tests. It’s not the only way to assess those skills and I think that if the system is intended to be equitable, there needs to be alternatives beyond the paper test.  I have seen improvements throughout Athenian’s development of its standard-based system and that I think students are and will continue to feel and grow more supported as the kinks in the system are worked out.”

Katie and the other Town Meeting Officers met with the math department last year in order to discuss students’ frustrations with the previous grading system. This meeting led to the creation of a new system, one not wholly based on student input. Katie said, “I’m not entirely sure which pieces of feedback were taken, but I know some of it was integrated and that the faculty as a whole is going to make efforts to integrate student feedback. The math department meeting [with] Town Hall meeting officers didn’t seem to have much impact on the system.”

10th-grader Blake Jarvis said, “Last year, the grading system was not cumulative and it allowed for reassessments. While the subjects did build on each other, your actual grade was not determined by one final exam,” he said. “And I supported that system a lot more, even though I thought it was minorly flawed.

“I think that the current grading system doesn’t do what it’s intended to. I think that what it’s doing right now is causing a lot of stress for students. Because every test now, your grade doesn't really matter. Your homework grade doesn’t matter. Your listening grade doesn’t matter. And only your final exam determines how you did on topics that you learned four to five months prior,” Blake said.

In order to find out what grading system would suit students best, Blake said, Athenian needs “a grading system where each test’s grade remains and builds upon itself, for example, last year’s system, or even a few years before that system, where you got tests and a regular letter grade, those systems allow each of your test’s grade to continue without being fully replaced would be ideal.”          

“The current system is definitely a work in progress; I appreciate the intentions and I think it emphasizes the fact that students need to learn skills and meet goals, which should be the uniform goal of most grading systems,” said Katie.