Letter grades get an F, but likely to stay

Some educators say the system no longer fits in a standardised information age.

Will American schools ever end their long romance with As, Bs, Cs and so on? Some educators say letter grades no longer fit in a standardised information age.

They say letter grades are too simplistic and vary too much from system to system, school to school and even classroom to classroom.

"I'd like to think that we will have some better form of assessing and evaluating," said Daniel McMahon, principal of DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, Maryland. He suggested something more descriptive, like a job evaluation.

But some educators and experts think students will be getting letter grades for many years to come, a tradition as resilient as baseball, comic strips and other 19th-century products.

"Letter grades are convenient, simple and easy to manage, store and transmit," said Dan Verner, a recently retired Fairfax County, Virginia, high school English teacher. "Those are important factors when dealing with masses of students."

Chester Finn, president of the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, said he thinks colleges also will stick with letter grades.

"This is a habit hard to break, and nothing changes fast in higher ed," he said. "High schools will keep using them if college admissions offices keep requiring them, which they likely will."

It was the colleges, after all, that started the letter grade system, according to research by Mark Durm, professor of psychology at Athens State University in Alabama.

A 1785 diary entry reveals Yale examination grades in Latin, such as "optimi" for the highest mark.

A College of William & Mary faculty report in 1817 classified students simply by numbers. The names listed under No. 1 were "the first in their respective classes." Those under No. 2 were "orderly, correct and attentive".

Students like it

College students today are still comfortable seeing these letters, whether on paper or computer screens.

And many don't see much reason to follow such letter-grade-abolishing schools as the New College of Florida in Sarasota and Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, which use narrative evaluations to assess students.

"An A at one school might be an A-minus or B-plus at another school," said Lauren Reliford, a junior at Boston College, but "for the most part, people all over this nation understand that an A is much, much better than an F."

The occasionally erratic letter grading system still gets less criticism than the standardised tests used to assess students and schools, mainly because the machine-scored exams lack the human touch.

"The standardised tests present an impersonal but universally known target," said Robert Snee, principal of George Mason High School in Virginia.

"A single teacher is only grading 125 students this year, and she has a personal relationship with each one of them."

Finn said a likely outcome is that letter grades will stay but continue to be inflated and trivialised because of what he called "the therapeutic ethic, the aversion to competition, anxiety about self-esteem and simple marketing pressures."

Jason Busby, a history and government teacher at Agoura High School in Agoura Hills, California, said, "Letter grades are hopelessly inaccurate and lack meaningful feedback for the student, but students and parents are just as reluctant to listen to or read long, drawn-out analyses of students' work as teachers are to deliver it.

Grades are simple. Grades are easy. Grades are understood because parents had them when they were students.

"Ask any number of parents and students what they are hoping to get out of a given class and they will tell you, 'A good grade,' " Busby said.

"Ask them, as I do every year of my students, if they would accept an A at the cost of learning nothing about the subject in class. ... The answer is 99 per cent yes."

- Los Angeles Times-Washington Post

The letter grade system

After a stray reference to a B at Harvard in 1883, the first full-scale letter grade system for which there is documented proof was adopted at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts in 1897, said Mark Durm, professor of psychology at Athens State University in Alabama, USA.

- A = excellent, equivalent to 95 to 100 per cent
- B = good, 85 to 94 per cent
- C = fair, 76 to 84 per cent
- D = barely passed, 75 per cent
- E = failed, below 75 per cent

The percentage equivalents were tougher than most systems today. The next year, Mount Holyoke tightened them further. A sixth grade, the soon-to-be-famous F, was added.

- B = 90 to 94 per cent
- C = 85 to 89 per cent
- D = 80 to 84 per cent
- E = 75 to 79 per cent
- F = Below 75 per cent

The case

For:
- Letter grades are convenient, simple and easy to manage, store and transmit
- College students today are still comfortable seeing these letters, whether on paper or computer screens

Against:
- Letter grades are too simplistic and vary too much from system to system, school to school and even classroom to classroom
- They lack meaningful feedback for the student