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. 

Summer Learning

Being one day away from finishing my third week on the road at various workshops it is interesting to see many of this weeks tweets focus toward personal learning and passion for the profession.  For those in the non-teaching world, the summers of teachers are supposed to lounging around the pool, sipping cold drinks, reading books, and just being lazy.  Just one perusal of twitter will prove that many teachers break the stereotypical mold, many of them tweeting about education issues while on vacation.

In quite the stereotyped fashion, teachers often spend summers revamping their classes or preparing for entirely new classes, and continuing their professional growth.  Last week thousands of teachers attended ISTE 2010 in Denver.  In various cities across the country (and world) hundreds, if not thousands, of teachers have attended seminars sponsored by ISTE, NCSS, NEH, Gilder Lehrman, the AP College Board and many other discipline organizations.  This is how we spend our summers! 

For many who attend these workshops, we do so because we are lifelong learners and they are the way we rejuvenate ourselves and prepare for the upcoming year.  As John Cotton Dana stated, “Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.”  What we learn during the summer allows up to continue the passion we have for educating students in the classroom.  The rejuvenation received during the summer is often passed on to our students, making them lifelong learners in the process.  To be the best teachers we can be we should be intuitive and remember that the knowledge we have must constantly be improved, challenged, and increased.  

That is exactly what I have done since I began my second career of teaching ten years ago.  Each workshop provides me with new content knowledge, teaching methods, and professional contacts.  This summer I have gained a considerable amount of content knowledge and pedagogy by attending my local Teaching American History Program, the Gilder Lehrman workshop, The Sixties in Historical Perspective at Georgetown, and the AP Psychology workshop at Oglethorpe University.  I must say a sincere thank you to all the people involved in making sure these workshops happened.