The Northern Cass school district in North Dakota last spring graduated its first class of seniors who went through most of high school without receiving letter grades.
Instead, their report cards listed the specific skills their teachers expected them to learn in each class and how much progress they made on each one.
In other words, rather than receiving a single letter grade for each class, students received one mark for each skill. A separate section rated students’ “habits of work”—the nonacademic items that often are factored into letter grades, such as classroom behavior, on-time homework submission, and effort.
Today, on Northern Cass’ report cards, a 1 or 2 shows a student has more work to do before mastering a skill while a 3 means they’re proficient. A 4 shows they’ve gone beyond proficiency.
The goal is to provide students—and parents—with detailed information on their academic performance, along with actionable feedback, said Cory Steiner, the superintendent of the 700-student, one-building district located northwest of Fargo. That’s not something traditional letter grades could deliver, he said.
“Ultimately, what I tell people is, a grade or a report of a score should tell us what they do know, what they don’t know, and then be able to give us a plan to help fill in those gaps,” Steiner said. The district’s shift to what’s often called proficiency-based grading—but is also referred to as standards- and mastery-based grading—“put the emphasis on learning and not obtaining something that is ambiguous at best.”
Grading has come under the microscope in recent years amid concerns about growing grade inflation and a widening disconnect between students’ grades and their scores on standardized exams like the ACT and SAT. Some have also raised concerns that traditional letter and percentage grades reflect educator biases and circumstances beyond students’ control, such as whether they have reliable internet access to complete assignments. And only a small portion of educators in an EdWeek Research Center survey last year—13 percent—thought letter and percentage grades were a “very effective way” of providing feedback to students.
Yet, such grades remain entrenched. Abandoning letter grades is fraught with challenges. And even when a district drops them, it still must negotiate elements of the grading regime that has been dominant in U.S. schools for over a century.
“One thing everybody has in common is they all had a letter grade at some point,” Steiner said.
How does a school system switch to proficiency-based grades?
The switch to proficiency-based grades in Northern Cass came only after the district had already begun to shift to personalized, competency-based instruction, designing classes around students mastering specific skills, incorporating more outside-the-classroom learning and student-directed projects, and offering flexibility and customization.
Steiner is frank about the challenges the district faced and early missteps. For example, he said, the district deployed the new grading system without first consulting with colleges.
“Of course, you can imagine, parents were not happy,” he said. “They thought, ‘My kid won’t get into college. You’re ruining my kid’s life.’”
A note about this model of instruction
Competency-based education, proficiency-based learning, mastery-based learning, personalized learning, student-centered education, and standards-based education are all terms that refer to the same instructional model: one in which students make choices about how they learn and demonstrate their knowledge, learn at a pace that might differ from their classmates’, receive individualized support based on their needs, and progress based on their mastery of course material instead of seat time.
See the Aurora Institute’s definition of competency-based education for more details.
So Steiner and the district’s director of personalized learning went on a “roadshow,” visiting the colleges and universities throughout North Dakota and western Minnesota that Northern Cass students most commonly attend to explain the grading system.
The message? Universities were fine with it. But they still wanted students to come out of high school with a grade point average, mainly because that was the basis for awarding some scholarships. They didn’t want Northern Cass students to potentially miss out, Steiner said.
Today, Northern Cass’ transcripts list students’ final grades for each class on the 1-4 scale, with 3 as the most common grade because of the competency-based model’s emphasis on all students reaching proficiency. The district uses those marks to calculate the GPA.
“I always say, we’re an insurance company’s worst nightmare because every kid will have a minimum of a 3.0 because we get every kid to proficiency,” Steiner said. “So everybody gets the good driver discount.”
Some students end up with a handful of A’s and B’s on their transcripts. That’s because the district converts proficiency-based scores to letter grades for courses students take for college credit through a partnership with Valley City State University, one of North Dakota’s public universities.
The grading shift was “really hard,” Steiner said, but he likes the result.
Students haven’t been universally happy, but he notices less anxiety because they don’t depend on a make-or-break test or paper that determines the bulk of their grade. Plus, at any point before graduation, Steiner said, a student who wants a higher grade can return to any subject and do additional work.
What he sees is more learning, including among students who otherwise would have been resigned to merely passing classes with C’s and D’s—marks that don’t signal proficiency.
“They actually feel success because they grow and there’s not an endpoint like there used to be,” Steiner said.
What are grades supposed to do?
Colleges and some employers have traditionally looked to students’ letter grades and GPAs to assess whether they’re prepared for the next step after high school.
But researchers have repeatedly found them to be inconsistent and unreliable measures of students’ academic performance, according to Thomas Guskey, a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky’s college of education who specializes in assessment and grading.
That’s because the typical course grade is what researchers have come to call the “hodgepodge” grade, he said. It blends students’ performance on tests and papers and a range of other factors—whether they completed homework, showed up on time, participated in discussions, behaved well, and turned in extra credit assignments—into a single number or letter. The exact method varies from teacher to teacher.
“It’s impossible to interpret. The highly responsible low achiever gets the same grade as the irresponsible high achiever,” said Guskey, who has written that the 0-100 numeric scale merely provides “the illusion of precision” and increases the potential for subjectivity.
Standards-based grading takes the opposite approach, with teachers awarding separate grades for individual skills as well as for factors that don’t directly reflect students’ achievement, such as effort and on-time homework submission. There are only three to five potential marks—the 1-4 scale is especially common—rather than 100, according to Guskey.
One thing everybody has in common is they all had a letter grade at some point.
Cory Steiner, superintendent, Northern Cass school district in Hunter, N.D.
Even though it’s separate from the achievement grade, homework should still count, Guskey said.
“Talk to a 14-year-old, because as soon as you say homework doesn’t count, they’re not going to do homework anymore,” he said.
The goal is clarity about a student’s progress, he said. And while awarding multiple grades for a single class might appear to take more work, Guskey counters that teachers using standards-based grading don’t have to combine such a wide variety of elements at different statistical weights into a single grade.
Grading shouldn’t be the first thing districts change when switching to competency-based education, Guskey warns, and no one should expect a grading system on its own to improve student achievement. The instruction needs to be aligned with the grading system, so it doesn’t merely become a replacement for A-F or percentage marks, he writes.
As with traditional grades, some studies have found that standards-based grades are only moderately predictive of students’ scores on standardized exams. But teachers who implemented the system more faithfully produced grades that hewed more closely to the high-stakes exam scores, researchers found.
More recently, a 2022 study found that high-performing geometry students were less likely to complete practice work after the switch to a standards-based system that didn’t factor homework completion into final course performance grades. The students’ overall performance also suffered, the study found.
But in a 2019 study on teachers’ views of standards-based grades, teachers reported that standards-based instruction and grading helped them better understand their students’ needs so they could customize instruction, that classmates were less inclined to competitively compare grades, and that students became more comfortable making mistakes.
Some reported that they had to convert standards-based grades back to letter grades and percentages in their schools, however, leading parents and students to complain that the conversion resulted in lower grades.
Seventy-two percent of educators in a recent, nationally representative EdWeek Research Center survey said they at least partly supported replacing traditional grades with reports of students’ progress toward specific objectives. (The survey, conducted May 29 to June 19, included responses from 868 educators.)
Traditional grades were built upon outdated beliefs that few educators hold today, said Joe Feldman, a former teacher and principal whose book, Grading for Equity, has been used by districts around the country to revamp grading practices.
Those include that students have a fixed ability level beyond which they can’t grow; that they should be sorted according to perceived ability; and that extrinsic motivation, such as extra points for good behavior, is the most effective way to motivate students, he said.
Standards-based grading addresses some of those problems, Feldman said.
But he still disagrees with awarding marks for behavior and homework completion, even if they’re separate, because of their potential to introduce bias and rate students for factors beyond their control. If standards-based districts retain such ratings, he recommends that they carefully define what it takes to earn a 1, 2, 3, or 4—as they do for academic skills—to remove as much potential for bias as possible, he said.
“What’s most important is that it be reported distinct from academic performance,” Feldman said.
What happens when students apply for college with proficiency-based grades?
Despite the goal of clarity, a common worry persists among students and parents about standards-based grades: that the measures will put students at a disadvantage in college admissions. Colleges and universities, however, have refuted that idea.
For example, as the push for proficiency-based education picked up in New England over the past decade-plus, 85 public and private colleges in the region—including some of the most selective, like Harvard University—released public statements affirming that applicants with proficiency-based transcripts wouldn’t be at a disadvantage.
In addition, since 2020, nearly 500 colleges and universities have accepted students supplying the Mastery Transcript Consortium’s transcript, a digital academic record designed specifically for competency-based education. It doesn’t list course grades. Rather, it lays out the broad skills schools want their students to gain—such as the abilities to work in a team, communicate effectively, think critically, and problem-solve—and students supply evidence demonstrating their capacities, such as in-class and community service projects they’ve completed and internships.
“The responsibility is on us as an admissions office to use whatever grades that the [high] school provides for us,” said Edward Pickett III, the senior associate dean of admissions and director of recruitment at Pomona College in California and a board director with the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “I also think that it is a responsible choice on the school’s part to be able to explain, if they don’t have a typical grading scale, what the grades mean.”
Some schools convert proficiency-based grades to letter grades
In Casie Maekawa’s 8th grade math class at Juab Junior High School in Utah, the tests that students take are organized into sets of questions marked levels 1, 2, 3, and 4.
Their final score isn’t based on the percentage of questions they answer correctly. Instead, if they can answer all the Level 2 questions about writing and graphing linear equations but not the Level 3 questions, they still haven’t reached proficiency and need more time and instruction, Maekawa said.
In English/language arts, rubrics that teachers have developed together outline what it looks like for a student to earn a 1, 2, 3, or 4 for a specific skill, such as analyzing a character, said Angie Hall, an instructional coach in the Juab district who previously taught 7th and 8th grade English/language arts there.
As a result, teachers’ grade books don’t list specific assignments and students’ scores. Instead, they list specific skills, which are based on Utah’s state standards, and whether students have reached proficiency in each.
Where grading gets complicated in the 2,700-student district south of Provo is that students’ marks are then converted into letter grades. Maintaining letter grades has been the preference of community and school board members, even as teachers have worked for years on converting to competency-based instruction, said Royd Darrington, the Juab district’s assistant superintendent.
“That always will create some ambiguity,” Darrington said.
With students receiving traditional letter grades, some parents naturally want to find out how their child can raise a B-plus to an A-minus, said Natalie Darrington, an instructional coach in the district who previously taught 7th and 8th grade math.
Some ask whether their child can complete extra credit or if they can send in additional school supplies to boost a grade. But those options aren’t available in a grading system that strictly reflects students’ understanding of the material.
“It would just be so much easier if I could just give them a worksheet and then I could give them the grade. And then their parents would be happy, and I would be happy, and the student would be happy,” Natalie Darrington said. “But it doesn’t necessarily mean that this student learned anything.”
