End of Year Grade: Incomplete

As typical, my doctorate program classes are dredging up some deeply existential questions about education, teaching, learning, feedback, leadership, and workplace dynamics. Which I suppose is precisely the point.

For my psychological perspectives on learning course this summer, we're building out a solutions portfolio. As I've begun identifying my problem of practice, I have all the May things swimming around in my head. Graduation. End-of-year report cards. And everyone's favorite—the inbox arrival of standardized testing results.

Somewhere along the way—five years ago? Ten? Twenty? Maybe since we were founded?—the apparent disconnect between our gradebooks and our test results, and quite frankly our often lived experience in the classroom, seems to have grown wider and wider. And I know it's not just an Advent challenge. Just this week I was reading about the upcoming faculty vote at Harvard on whether to limit the number of top grades that can be given.

Seems like an easy solution. But what is that actually fixing?

All of this led me down my typical research rabbit hole. And what I found was fascinating.

The very first recorded use of a grading scale in American education was at Yale in 1785. Faculty evaluated students using Latin descriptors—not to reflect mastery or effort, but to reflect rank. Yale needed a way to sort students for recitation order and honors. The grade was born not as a learning signal, but as a sorting mechanism.

Sound familiar?

By the late 1800s, numerical percentages emerged to manage the growing number of students moving through public schools. By 1897, Mount Holyoke introduced the A–F scale. But when we move in any one direction, we can almost always expect a swing back. In the early 1900s, progressive education reformers like John Dewey argued that grades were antithetical to genuine learning. So the conversation we're having today? Not a new one.

Ultimately, Frederick Taylor's ideas about scientific management cemented grades into American schooling. Schools were reimagined as factories, and grades became the currency of access.

What I see is this—the grade was never designed to be a learning signal. And yet somewhere along the way, we retrofitted the mastery narrative onto the system.

So as Harvard debates a cap on top grades—are they perhaps actually reckoning all the way back to 1785?

What does this mean for K–12 education? What does this mean for what teaching and learning looks like? As someone leading a school, I'm wrestling with these questions in big ways.

I'm also thinking about the long-term implications grades have had on our motivations and behaviors. It's hard not to see the grade emerge as a social transaction as much as an academic measurement.

And maybe that's the part worth sitting with longest. Because those of us who went through school—who were sorted and ranked and assigned a number—didn't leave that system behind when we graduated. We internalized it. I find myself wondering how much of the way I measure my own success is actually about mastery, and how much is about where I fall in relation to someone else. Whether I'm performing well enough. Whether the invisible grade is an A.

The system was never designed to tell us who we are. But somewhere along the way, a lot of us let it.

The question I keep coming back to—as a school leader, as someone still inside the system — is what we do with that now. What do we build for the kids who are still in the middle of being sorted?

Update: As this post was going out, I came across a headline from the Yale Daily News. GPA cutoffs for Latin honors at Yale have hit a new record high—summa cum laude now requires a 3.99. The faculty committee reviewing the situation recently concluded that grade inflation and compression have rendered the grading system "almost meaningless as an academic measure."

Yale invented the American grading scale in 1785 to sort its students. It can no longer sort its students.

Still in draft, indeed.