Competency Based Grading

Written by Dr. Lynne Shipley, Hickman Mills Instructional Coach

History of Grading

The grading system in the United States has a dubious history. The debate over our current grading system can be traced back over 175 years when Yale and Harvard began experimenting with a system to evaluate a student’s understanding of assignments. It was not until 1897 when Mt. Holyoke, a small women’s college merged the various grading theories and came up with the current system. We are now celebrating the 127th year that the A, B, C, etc. system came into being.

Still, the current 100-point system has had its distractors and disadvantages. The main disadvantage to the A, B system is that passing grades reflect 40% of the scale. The ability to fail ranges from 0 – 59%, and for many students, constitutes a difficult hill to overcome. In fact, in the early 1900s, John Dewey influenced many educational reformists who believed the grading scale produced dubious results that were heavily influenced by other factors. In 1918, Thorsten Velben stated the “system of academic grading and credit… bends more and more of the current instruction to its mechanical tests and progressively sterilizes all personal initiative and ambition that comes within its sweep.” Needless to say, the grading system that most schools employ stayed intact.

Competency-Based Grading/Competency-Based Learning

Currently, there is a national movement to look at various competencies to find whether a student has mastered an instructional strategy, skill-based concept, or one of the analyzation skills that will make her or him academically successful. Competency-based grading (CBE) examines a student’s ability to apply skills and knowledge to a scenario as opposed to rote memorization, testing, and working through traditional problems. 

CBE is not a new concept. Benjamin Bloom was tasked with looking at how diverse learners acquire knowledge in the 1960’s. He believed that by using feedback and corrective measures, teachers would strategize with students to develop the skills needed to achieve success in the classroom. This looked different from traditional grading scales. This type of assessment takes into account a student’s strengths and weaknesses and provides individualized instruction, which recognizes all students don’t learn the same nor at the same pace. 

Concept-Based Learning is currently being touted as a way to engage students in the 21st century in the state of Missouri. According to the Success Ready School Network, this Missouri framework encompasses eight unique identifiers.

1. Students are empowered daily to make important decisions about their learning experiences, how they will create and apply knowledge, and how they will demonstrate their learning.
2. Assessment is a meaningful, positive, and empowering learning experience for students that yields timely, relevant, and actionable evidence.
3. Students receive timely, differentiated support based on their individual learning needs.
4. Students progress based on evidence of mastery, not seat time.
5. Students learn actively using different pathways and varied pacing.
6. Strategies to ensure equity for all students are embedded in the culture, structure, and pedagogy of schools and education systems.
7. Rigorous, common expectations for learning (knowledge, skills, and dispositions) are explicit, transparent, measurable, and transferable.
8. Students engage in Real World Learning experiences that support high school, college, career, and workplace readiness.

New Grading Practices

There are several measures in which to evaluate a student’s success and completion of a competency. Using a rubric to outline a student’s achievement level is one way to measure if a student understands the assignment or problem in which they were tasked to solve. Using a proficiency scale (4 = advanced proficiency; 3 = proficient; 2 = not yet proficient; 1 = well below proficient) to evaluate a student’s performance is another way to measure a student’s readiness to move to the next level. 

Many districts create their unique competency measures, but there are at least two companies that provide competency measures. XQ Competencies at https://xqsuperschool.org/ provides models and framework tools. ReDesign at https://www.redesignu.org/ also offers what they call the Future9 competencies.

References

Bloom, B. S. (1968). Learning for mastery. Evaluation Comment (UCLA-CSIEP), 1(2), 1-12. 

McNutt, Chris. (2022). A brief history of grades and gradeless learning. (n.d.). Humanrestorationproject.org. Retrieved November 14, 2024, from https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/writing/a-brief-history-of-grades-and-gradeless-learning

https://www.srsnmo.org/page/framework, retrieved November 14, 2024.

Townsend, M., Schmid, D. (2020). Alternative grading practices: An entry point for faculty in competency-based education. Journal of Competency Based Education, Vol 5, Iss, 3.  https://doi.org/10.1002/cbe2.1219