Proficiency Grading

    Proficiency grading has taken over the traditional system of letter grading. This brings some large improvements but also some major flaws. Proficiency grading is meant to help colleges get a good estimate of what you know. It helps teachers stay unbiased towards their students too. A minor help is that it lets students see their GPA in real time instead of on their report card when it is too late to fix it. With these positive changes come some problems too. Before proficiency grading, there was a deadline for every assignment and if you missed that assignment, you failed it, with no make ups. This sudden change to proficiency grading also affects how students view their grades.

    Proficiency grading was intended to help colleges know how good you are at a subject. This has been successful in the fact that it is a more accurate report of how the student does in school. Instead of letters like A, B, C, D, and F with complicated percentages there are now numbers like  4, 3, 2, 1, and 0. This gives a simpler report of how good a student is in any specific subject. Doing this was a step in the right direction.

    Grading like this also helps teachers stay unbiased. If the scale is 0-100 it wouldn’t be hard to add a percent or two to a student who you like. It wouldn’t even be a conscious choice. In a study by the Department of Education  over 2,000 teachers gave the same writing test to their students. After the test was graded it was handed over to specially trained “moderators”. They judged that in 10% of the cases the test was graded too favorably and in 5% it was graded too harshly. This led to the belief that teachers were unintentionally biasing their grades based on their beliefs of the student. With a 0-4 scale there are still percentages but they are eliminated from the final grade. A slip from 83% to 81% is still a 3. This helps colleges too because before proficiency grading students who were getting accepted into colleges for having A’s were actually B level students who were just nice to their teachers, which was bad for the colleges.

    A small help for students is that they can now see their GPA in real time. Before proficiency grading calculating your own GPA could be hard and students would only see their GPA after the fact on a report card. Now you simply add all of your classes together and divide by the number of classes you have because GPA is also a 0-4 scale. This can help students see more how individual classes GPAs are affecting their overall GPA.

    Even though proficiency grading has some good side effects, in the future its negative side effects are very bad for students seeking to graduate from a university or college. In traditional letter grading there is a hard due date. This means that if you turned in anything late, you would get little to no credit for an assignment that you did very well on but turned in late. This established rule meant that students on track for college always turned in their work on time, even if it wasn’t perfect because even a C on an assignment is better than an F. That meant in college where missing an assignment means an F or a 0 students always turned in their work, no matter how bad it was.

With proficiency grading there is a soft deadline. A soft deadline means that the teacher is going to grade it. You can still turn it in late and get full points because you only need to know how to do it. Colleges and universities don’t use proficiency grading. They still have hard deadlines. This generation is being taught that it is okay to turn in work at any time to still get full credit. When they get to college they will have a huge wakeup call because in college it is not okay to turn in assignments late.

This also applies in life after college. You won’t turn in a newspaper article to be published after it has already gone to paper. That is a good way to get fired. You will have hard deadlines in real life no matter what job you have. Another example would be in paying your bills. Bills have hard deadlines that if you miss can cause real life problems like loss of a job or eviction from where you live or even no water or power.  

Another reason proficiency grading is bad is because it changes how students view their grades. Before the thought process was like, “Oh no, I have a bad grade. I need to to get a good grade on the rest of my assignments.” Now it is more like, “Oh no, I have a bad grade. I need to go back and do my old work over again AND do any new work that is assigned too.” This causes stress that can drive a person insane, essentially doubling their workload. This stress leads into unhealthy habits that help a person cope with all of their stress.

Proficiency grading is like a poisonous snake disguised as the cure for cancer. It helps colleges analyze students grades better. It also helps teachers remain unbiased as well as help students find their GPA faster. It would seem the perfect ‘cure’ for the school system’s ‘cancer’. The cure turns into a slow poison though. After the first generation of students gets to college they will face deadlines they cannot miss. After that later in life they could struggle with keeping a job and finding housing because of being taught that it is okay to turn things late. It also reinforces unhealthy habits that help a person deal with the stress they are placed under. Proficiency grading needs to be removed or changed heavily to deal with these enormous problems.