It’s no secret that teachers have their own, distinct styles of teaching. The same course with the same content can feel drastically different when taught by another teacher. As a result, students at IHS often discuss and compare their grade averages with one another because they differ based on their teachers’ grading policies and expectations of work quality. A system to ensure uniformity in the grading policies and the courses themselves already exists, but it fails to address certain glaring differences between classes that may put some students at a disadvantage.
In order to combat this problem, teachers must investigate new ways to ensure that grading is fair for all students. Teachers at IHS attend regular Professional Learning Community (PLC) meetings in which teachers of the same course work together to standardize their classes and policies as best as possible. Ms. Augustine, one of the three Participation in Government (Gov) teachers, said that the goal of PLC’s is to make each class “uniform so that it’s not harder if you end up with one teacher.” During these meetings, teachers determine what they want their students to know and how to assess their knowledge.
All Gov classes follow the state’s standards for its curriculum and have the same units, projects, and classwork, as well as the same rubrics and point values for each. The three classes are most aligned in terms of homework and the final paper. That is to say, most of the skills and expectations are the same, but each teacher can still maintain their autonomy by choosing the topics for each unit; certainly, they don’t teach the same exact things on the same days.
Standardizing a single-level course that all students are required to take in order to graduate such as Gov is especially important, but despite the efforts to standardize the classes, some variation in grading persists. “A
certain wiggle room exists when you’re assessing things like participation, writing, or debates,” Ms. Augustine said. While this is true, there is a clear problem when one student in one class adequately completes all of the expected work and receives a mediocre grade, while another student in a different class doesn’t put in as much work, yet receives a free 100. It seems that despite the PLC’s, teachers may not have the same standards for quality after all. One Gov student said, “I do all of my work and my teacher still refuses to give me full credit.” Another student with a different teacher said, “Our assignments were graded based on completion.”
In some cases, teachers have not been able to attend PLC’s. One such case is AP English Language, where the two teachers have not had opportunities to formally communicate with each other. As a result, clear differences in grading standards between the two classes have emerged. The subjective nature of the requirements lead to different grading standards that impact a student’s grade on an assignment. Minute distinctions in the language used in rubrics, such as “flawlessly” and “successfully” analyzing a work, or the difference between using “precise” and “appropriate” language, lead to teachers placing more emphasis on different skills. With subjective assignments like these, a clear issue emerges as differences in how a teacher wants to approach a skill interfere with creating a level playing field.
Assigning numbers to students and coordinating them across teachers is difficult, but some teachers have very inconsistent standards that could be easily resolved with a little more communication. For instance, in terms of class participation, some social studies teachers are satisfied with students simply getting to class on time and not being disruptive, whereas others require students to raise their hands a certain number of times. Similarly, some English teachers do not give full credit for student work such as silent reading due to their belief that students cannot perfectly read silently.
Some math classes at IHS follow the flipped-classroom model where students do most of their learning outside of class, while others at the same level follow a conventional teaching style. Classes with a fundamentally different structure may significantly impact how students learn, as well as their grades.
Other factors that may contribute to noticeable differences in grade averages between classes include substantial extra-credit opportunities provided by one teacher but none by the other. Some students have also pointed out that within the same math course, one teacher assigns take home tests whereas the other teacher does not. These result in unequal advantages that impact students’ grade averages.
A first step that teachers could take to assess how students perceive their class would be to conduct surveys in which students rate the difficulty or the fairness of the grading. Teachers could also find the average of all of their students’ grades and compare them with those of other teachers of the same course, which would help them identify problems with inconsistent grading, and if there are, to consider what may be their causes. Some actions that they could take to collaborate on grading would be to randomly swap student work between the two teachers for larger assignments to ensure that teachers are not biased toward or against their own students, and to make up for drastically different grading approaches.
While considering these solutions, it’s important to recognize that teachers want some independence and the right to teach their class how they want to. However, they must strike a balance between autonomy and regulation. Although allowing teachers to have a sense of autonomy in their curricula allows them to maintain an engaging and productive
classroom environment, better communication between the teachers will minimize the disadvantages created by the existing system.