SRL grading system thoughts

Hello, I am a sophomore in high school right now and our school has been working to implement a standards reference grading system, to the chagrin of many of my peers. There is a lot of debate going on right now and the school is going to form a team (including students) to figure out how we will proceed going forward. I think it would be nice to have more information about this system, how it has been implemented at other schools, and things like that from the perspective of educators that this subreddit may offer. Any information or thoughts would be appreciated.

I know there may be some variance how the system works, so this is how it is at my school. Grades are done at a 4 point scale, where 1 is emerging, 2 is approaching, 3 is meets, and 4 exceeds the “standard.” There are various categories for each class, each with their own grade which is the average of all your grades in that category. Your overall grade is the average of those grades.

One thing that I do think is pretty weird is that the most recent assignment is weighted 65% of your overall grade. This is done so that you’re graded by your performance at the end of the class, not the beginning. But 65% seems too much to me..

Classes that implement SRL generally seem to have grades for less assignments overall. Homework is much less likely to be graded, for example. Also, it seems common (though this may not be the case in all classes) that late work has no penalty.

We need a GPA, so the SRL points get converted to letter grades. An A is 3.25 to 4. A B is 2.5 to 3.25. A C is 2 to 2.5. A D is 1.5 to 2

Now here are the criticisms I hear of SRL: People are upset about their grades being lower. Some of our classes have high standards for “exceeding expectations” and it makes it difficult for people to get 4. This upsets them insofar as it gets converted to a letter grade which goes into their GPA. If you meet expectations you are going to get a B, and if you are approaching them you’ll get a C-. The people I hang out with are worried about college admissions (because that’s all that anyone really cares about) since they think their GPA will look bad if they don’t get all “A”s. Now I’m sceptical of this. There is so much variance in how grading is done throughout the country, I feel like colleges must be able to adjust for this. A more difficult school than ours may give out As more sparingly; this certainly shouldn’t hurt those students when it comes to applications. I think if the colleges are smart they should be able to see that we’re using a different grading system, and also look at our class rank to understand that our GPAs are just going to be a bit lower. But if anyone has any information about how colleges actually deal with things like this, that would be very helpful.

The next complaint I hear is that some kids (who maybe have some learning disabilities or something) are having trouble doing well, despite putting in very large amounts of effort. Maybe homework doesn’t need to be graded since it’s just practice, but kids who might not do well on tests often have their grades aided by the completion points on things like homework. Now on the one hand, there’s a part of me that thinks that this is kind of the point of grading. Colleges want to know if a student cannot perform well at school. But of course, effort/participation is another important thing and having that be a part of your grade makes sense. I also think that this may be more a problem with the standards/grade-conversions being too high rather than with SRL itself.

I’ve also heard worries about students losing interest in actually trying at school or going to college if they put in effort and still get what they consider to be low grades. Now that is an issue I can get behind. I think maybe the problem is the conversion from SRL to traditional grades. If there was no conversion and we just said 2, people may be more satisfied. But it seems like there has to be a conversion somewhere to get a GPA. And then that conversion happens and people get discouraged.

Then there’s the issues that arise as we implement the system. The point of SRL is to make things more standardised, but at the moment at our school that seems to be the opposite of the case. Different teachers interpret “exceeds expectations” differently; some think you need to be at a practically unreachable level to get it, others less so. Of course, there are rubrics, but even with the rubrics things are so subjective and “up to the teacher”.

I also have a suspicion that some teachers gave lower scores early on in the year to create an appearance of growth.

I do think SRL makes sense in theory. Percent grading is a little weird when you think about it, and going in terms of standards makes sense. But right now, as we are implementing it in our school, there are a good number of issues. Any insight on this issue would be appreciated!

Submitted November 21, 2023 at 07:03AM by jjcihu_23410 https://ift.tt/pQ4wqG6