Where Flexibility and Rigor Co-Exist: How Standards-Based Gradebooks Empower Students and Teachers

For decades in the edtech space we’ve been counting down to the end of grades, yet report cards still come out like clockwork.

Grading is a cornerstone of life in schools. It’s how educators communicate growth. It’s how students make plans and tackle goals for their futures. Grades are still a big deal!

Grades never ended, gradebooks just got smarter: more precise, and more flexible. More instructive to instructional teams, and better aligned to education standards. So what changed? The gradebook technology evolved and families had an opportunity to be more involved. But first, let’s dive into how standards-based gradebooks came to be.

How did we go from traditional letters to trend scoring?

Straight As may have been peak parental bribery material in the 1900s, but a shift occurred as schools moved past Y2K and into a digital age.

Educators using a traditional A–F scale were essentially calculating like so: points earned divided by points possible. The resulting percentage was assigned a letter grade and reported as progress. Families were accustomed to seeing letter grades but were not immediately privy to which skills students may have already mastered and which they were missing. While the standards had always existed, mastery, and how far the student had yet to go to achieve it, was masked behind traditional letter grading.

Then the 2010s ushered in an idea. Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were designed to give K12 schools a unified measure of what standards-aligned skills mastery looked like in the United States. While the movement stopped short of unifying all 50 states, the seed of standards-based grading (SBG) had been planted. States could accept CCSS or write their own standards to equal grade-level mastery.

What shifted was palpable: Teachers needed to share progress toward individual standards, rather than reporting the points achieved out of points possible. Cue pivoting to formative assessment, a less formal test geared toward measuring incremental daily growth, and grading as we knew it changed forever.

Standards are a framework to communicate what students need

At its best, a standards-based approach can alleviate some of the uncertainty and pressure for students, especially perfectionists.

Criterion-referenced grading keeps students focused on their own progress toward skills mastery rather than peers’ abilities or the mythical Average Child’s scores. Teachers begin by defining the standard and then measuring growth after practice (in class or at home) and scaffolding, using formative assessment.

Standards-based grading bypasses one of the great education debates: assigning homework. SBG can take into consideration homework assignments as a constant source of information about progress toward learning goals, or homework can be treated more like practice. In this case, teachers may give less weight to homework assignments and expect to measure progress at the next formative assessment.

One misconception? Standards-based grades are not synonymous with standardized tests.

Standardized tests occur infrequently and with great formality and are a good way to measure district-level accountability.

Standards-based grading does the opposite on a granular scale: it lets teachers and families know how an individual student is progressing toward mastering the concepts expected for their grade level.

Districts, teachers can be as precise as possible about student growth with standards-based gradebooks

In “A Didactic Explanation of Standards-based Grading,” author and researcher Dr. Bo Zhang described the process of developing education standards as “seeking excellence and reaching proficiency.” In this case, he was speaking of the historical impact of CCSS, but this phrase encapsulates the important work of teaching and learning. You may have even heard similar phrases at the elementary level: “Shoot for the moon, if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

Very few school districts shorten their field when aiming for success. We might wager a significant bet that many even use the phrase “excellence” in their mission, vision, or impact statements. So it makes sense that educators are looking for gradebook solutions that fit multiple needs, paths, and equitable access to excellence in grading.

Standards-based gradebooks can use multiple methods to average student work and produce a precise picture of what students have and have not yet mastered.

Standards-based measures student abilities using proficiency levels. Proficiency report cards typically use a 1–4 scale and list many individual standards, but do not average unrelated tasks. Validity of academic ability is the priority.

Standards-referenced approach blends well with a traditional approach, which makes the approach a popular one for districts who are moving toward fully standards-based grading. Students are graded using percentages, but standards are connected to reveal proficiency levels. Report cards use a 1–4 scale for individual standards but also include an averaged or overall proficiency of grade level. Validity is important, but behavior and attendance data can be considered as they would be in a traditional approach.

Mastery-based grading asks teachers to evaluate whether a student has reached mastery of a particular standard or skill. This approach is another transitional option as schools move beyond traditional grading. Rubrics are crucial, as is strong communication between school and home.

Competency-based grading is very similar to mastery-based, but goes a little deeper into the hierarchy of skills, knowledge, and ability students must demonstrate in order to receive a proficient grade. This approach can take a tiered approach, reporting on proficiency in subject reporting statements for the standard in question, eventually drilling down to an “I can” statement.

Growth-oriented emphasizes individual student progress on their own learning trajectory over time rather than a report of final achievement. This approach uses trend scoring, which can include decaying average, power law, and other ways to fairly and accurately weight students’ work to show a more precise picture of ability without weighing down the final grade with the lower scores of early attempts. For a deep dive into decaying average, this video explains it all.

Evidence-based offers a holistic and fair way to quantify a body of student work while prioritizing teachers’ professional judgment (warning: this approach asks for a lot of documentation). Teachers use student artifacts (quizzes, assignments, portfolios, etc.) offered as evidence of mastery to aligned standards, along with rubrics; recency calculations including power law, decaying average, and mode; last assignment; or occurrence rules.

From the early days of teaching and learning, gradebooks were simply the way teachers tracked their evidence of students’ growth. These modern methods ensure teachers can track, tally, and report a student’s progress in a fair and thorough way. This means accounting for the natural changes in a student’s abilities and measuring their day-to-day progress alongside benchmark tests.

Grades are not one-size-fits-all. Nor should your modern gradebook be!