Editor’s Note: Three weeks ago, the Prep News published an article about the school’s Strategic Summit initiative. The Strategic Summit is focused on five areas of the school and seeks to understand how that area can improve. Over the coming weeks, the Prep News will publish a more comprehensive overview of each of those five charters. The following article concerns the Grading Policy and Communication charter of the Strategic Summit. 

Grades are never far from the front of students' minds during the school year. Now, with the help of the Strategic Summit Grading Policy and Communication, SLUH is looking to update its grading policy for the first time in over 30 years. Led by committee chair Steve Missey and co-chair Mary Russo, the group also includes fine arts teacher Addie Akin, theology teacher Mike Lally, college counselor Kate Kindbom, and math teacher Nicholas Ehlman. The committee’s work involves creating a new grading policy that accuracy, fairness, and student motivation.

The first thing the committee noticed was that they were a first of a kind. SLUH has never before done a school wide review of the grading scale.

“The strategic summit was struck by the fact that we have never done an assessment or review of how grading is done,” said Lally. “We're assessing how everyone grades right now, and looking at the strengths of how we grade, the independence and flexible nature of it, but also the weaknesses of doing it.”

The committee’s work will involve several main points.

“The official goal of the committee is to create a grading policy grounded in a shared understanding of academic rigor that promotes accuracy, fairness, and student motivation and ownership,” said Russo. “We want to frame out a plan for associated practices of communicating grades that are clear and understandable to teachers and students as well as parents, counselors, administrators, colleges, and other community partners.”

It has been over 30 years since the last time there were institutional conversations about or consideration of the current grading policy. Teachers institute their own grading strategies, which can create inconsistency between classes.  

“The way one teacher grades is radically different from how another teacher grades, and that can be a confusing and disorienting experience for students,” said Lally. “Unfortunately, what sometimes happens is students have very varying and different experiences across their seven classes.”

Between different classes, the rules regarding late work, test grades, and how much each assignment is worth are often different, and the committee is looking to find some common ground for every teacher and every class to understand.

“These things are very open to interpretation,” said Kindbom. “And so I think the idea behind the Grading Policy committee is to help give teachers some kind of unified understanding about what the grading scale is, what it means, and to possibly have some language around that.”

Over the summer, the committee members read and a book called Grading for Equity and discussed how the ideas they encountered there could be adapted to fit into SLUH’s context.

“We spent the summer reading Grading for Equity and deciding what it is that fits us best. We are a unique place and we need to figure out what's going to work best for us. What are the wonderful parts of our current grading policy, and what are the parts where we could be more clear, more so to promote accuracy or more fair and that will relate to student motivation,” said Russo.

The committee members are exploring how grading practices and policy can work to help make students better learners so they can have more success after they graduate. 

“We're not doing this because we're looking to inflate grades because we want you to get into better schools. Getting into the schools is great, but it's more about the success you're having when you're at the schools,” said Russo. “It's what a high functioning school does, and it's what we're doing.”

The committee is also exploring how grades and grading affect the relationship between students and their teacher.

“What's more important in the end is is trying to build a place of authentic learning, where grading happens in the end to assess if you've done the authentic learning, but that it has not made the relationship between student teachers so oppositional where it's like the student feels like they're trying to take as many points as they can from the teacher,” said Lally. “Rather, we want to see cooperation and collaboration and learning between teacher and student.”

For most SLUH students, effort revolves around their grades and GPA, because that is what will have the greatest effect on where they attend college. The committee hopes that if the emphasis moves from grades to learning, students and teachers will be more satisfied with their academic work, and students will have the opportunity to be more successful in and beyond high school.

“I think if we can go from being a points culture to a learning culture, where you can still get a good grade by failing, I think that would be a game changer here,” said Kindbom. “It's gonna take a long time, but we're working on it.”