No More Letter Grades for the Surrey School District? [Revised Post]

Recently, the Surrey School District has gotten rid of letter grades in thirty-nine elementary schools in Surrey, replacing them with detailed feedback about what the student is excelling in and what the student may need improvement in. Instead of evaluating a child's progress with the "traditional" A/B/C format, report cards will offer information about how they are doing on each task or project. This way, both parents and their children get a better understanding of the student's strengths and weaknesses. Many teachers and parents believe that this new way of writing report cards would be a good one, since they think feedback could lead to more discussions on education than the standard letter grade. However, many also disagree with this opinion.

People who disliked the idea of removing letter grades thought that a student would be more "motivated" to do better in school if they saw an F or a D on their report card. Students knew what the consequences would be if they got a low mark on their report card, and would strive to improve that mark. Getting an A was like a "goal" to a student -- if they wanted to reach that goal, they would work harder to achieve it (in other words, trying their best to get an A). Parents could also see how their child is doing in school at a quick glance, and would be able to help, even without the "in-depth constructive feedback." It's also a lot more work for teachers, since they need to constantly keep track of how each of their many students are doing in a certain assignment and subject; they would need to pay close attention to each student they teach in order to evaluate them with the "constructive feedback" system, something that would take a lot of work to accomplish.

However, the people that agree with this new system disagree with the idea of keeping letter grades. Some think that the letter grade system prevents conversation about "learning" -- instead, the topic of interest is focused on what grade the child has gotten, rather than how to improve in one's learning. They think constructive feedback is better because it gives a more specific outline about the student's strengths and weaknesses, helping parents better pinpoint what to improve on. For example, one could be good at understanding some of the information taught in Science, but not all of it; getting constructive feedback would let the parent know exactly what the child is misunderstanding, and they could get help on just that one topic, instead of re-learning everything.

In my opinion, both letter grades and constructive feedback should be given. Letter grades are more effective when a student wants to know what he or she needs to improve on in general, but constructive feedback gives you the specifics on what a student needs to improve on. Having letter grades tells a child in a quick glance what they may need to improve on (which makes them want to get better) and to let them know what they're excelling at, as well. Having a balance between constructive criticism -- which tells you where exactly to improve on your work -- and letter grades -- which tells you what you need to improve on your work in general -- is the best option.


A link to the article -- here.
A link to my original post -- here.

Here is a webpage about the history of letter grades. This post helps us understand more about letter grades in general, and why they have been used for so long.

This webpage shows a debate centering around whether or not letter grades should be eliminated. It's particularly interesting to see that 50% of adults agree with removing letter grades while the other 50% don't.

Lastly, this article talks about why constructive feedback just won't work, and why letter grades do. This was interesting to read because the man who wrote this article mentioned a lot of points that argued against having constructive feedback that many other articles hadn't touched upon.