Carin Aquiline sat down to grade a stack of papers, she wondered what grades really meant. She even wondered whether they conveyed useful information to anybody-to students, parents, or teachers. After a lot of hard work and time, she demonstrated the proficiencies to earn D's. And she was trying. I had another student who was capable of doing B work when he put his mind to it, but he very rarely did the work.
Practitioners face such questions almost daily.
Researchers have been more reluctant to take them on because without commonly accepted yardsticks for student achievement, assessing the relative value and effectiveness of grades is so difficult. Opinions about what teachers do evaluate with grades often conflict with those about what teachers should evaluate. Grades are often based on a mish-mash of conflicting criteria, according to a 1997 survey by H. Parker Blount of Georgia State University. For 86 percent of the teachers questioned, student effort was a factor in their grading. Eighty-two percent said they used grades to motivate students.