A History of Grades

In the past few weeks, there has been much talk and discussion among the tweets as to what constitutes grades, how do we assess student work, and what do the grades assigned truly mean.  What does an A really mean, and so forth?  Of course, this got me to thinking.  

How did the world of education first come up with a system of grades?  Why the particular letters A, B, C, D, E, F, G, S, and U?  Why a particular grouping of numbers?  In most schools, Pre-K through first grade may use the E (excellent), G (good), S (satisfactory) or U (unsatisfactory) delineations. Beyond second grade it is the A, B, C, D, and F combinations.  How do policymakers decide the grouping of numbers to accompany those letters?

I thought I’d do a little investigating and find out.  So, like any good doctoral student, I went online and began to investigate through the services offered by the university library.  There was much information available, and a good portion of the information I have used in this post comes from an article written in 1993 by Mark W. Durm.  The article, titled “An A Is Not An A Is Not An A: A History of Grading” was published in The Educational Forum, 57.   

Before this nation ever had secondary schools, we had colleges, and much of the first grading systems seemed to be not based around the quality of work presented by students, but more around social class.  For example, in the early years of Harvard, students were not arranged alphabetically but were listed according to the social position of their families, and grades reflected (Eliot, 1935).

Mary Lovett Smallwood wrote Examinations and Grading Systems in Early American Universities (1935).  In her book she related that marking grades to students was first instituted at Yale University.  She quoted Yale’s President, Erza Stiles (1778–1795), as writing in his diary that 58 students were present at an examination, and they were graded as follows: “Twenty Optimi, sixteen second Optimi, 12 Inferiores (Boni), ten Pejores.”

Between those years and the mid-nineteenth century it seemed that, for the most part, letters were used for the grades and there was no particular method of grading.  Each institution determined its own assessment formula, along with descriptive adjectives in reporting the performance of its students.  In 1877, Harvard appears to have set the bar for determining numerical grades.  The faculty designed a system of grades based on 100 percent.  Division 1 - 90 or more on a scale of 100; Division 2 - 89 to 75; Division 3 - 74 to 60; Division 4 - 59 to 50; Division 5 - 49 to 40; and Division 6 - below 40.  Students making marks in Division 5 or 6 were considered to have failed.

The system that American currently uses, although slightly changed in the numerical equivalents, was the brain-child of Mount Holyoke.  The College, in 1897, adopted letters for marking students and correlated those letters to a certain grouping of numbers.  Their scale: A, Excellent, equivalent to percents 95-100; B, Good, equivalent to percents 85-94(inclusive); C, Fair, equivalent to percents 76-84 (inclusive); D, Passed (barely), equivalent to percent 75; E, Failed (below75). In 1898, they changed the scale to reflect the following: A - 95-100; B - 90-94; C - 85-89; D - 80-84; E - 75-79; F - Failed.

These schools came up with a system of grading, but they did not leave a record behind that indicated what constituted each letter or numerical grade.  What quality of work must the student submit to earn each grade?  The question seemed hard to answer then and we find it hard to still answer today.

Education is not static.  Every aspect of instruction is different.  Students are different.  Teachers teach differently.  Systems have different expectations and standards.  There is not a national curriculum (yet, and I hope there never is).  Therefore, the debate of what constitutes an A will be forever ongoing.