Many schools across Vermont have introduced a newer teaching and grading technique, standards-based grading, following the Vermont Board of Education’s new standards, adopted in 2014.
Our administration has recently started to enact standards-based grading into BHS, switching from a letter-based grading system to a standards-based grading system. Standards-based grading can be implemented in a variety of ways in schools, and our administration is still in the process of deciding what aspects of it to include in our new grading system.
In 2014, the Vermont Board of Education established proficiency-based standards, also known as standard-based grading as a graduation requirement for all public high schools, starting with the Class of 2020. This shift moved schools away from relying on credit hours to determine graduation eligibility, instead emphasizing student mastery of skills and concepts.
BHS English Department Head Jill Kelley said these standards were going to be carried out at BHS in 2020 along with the bill, but they were delayed.
“We were poised to start reporting out on those proficiencies when COVID hit, and we lost our building, and there was a lot of turnover, and so we didn’t fully go to the implementation stage of reporting,” Kelley said.
BHS is currently in a letter-based grading system, meaning that students are assessed from A through F, but if this plan is administered, our grades might not be letters and instead be on a scale of 1-4, but our administration is still deciding whether or not to change how our grades look. Standard-based grading is a method of grading that emphasizes what you actually learn rather than just how many points you earn. According to the Vermont Board of Education, the goals of standard-based grading are to focus on the students comprehending ideas instead of memorizing facts, to make it easier to understand the standard of students knowledge and to give students increased control over their own education. This means that instead of getting letter grades based on test scores and homework, you are graded on how well you understand specific skills or standards by the end of the year. That way, if a student doesn’t do very well on a few assessments at the start of the year, as long as they understand the concepts by the end of the year, they can still get an A in the class. Because of this, grades will more accurately reflect a student’s ability by the end of the year.
These grades can be number grades, but they can also stay as letter grades. Champlain Valley Union High School made the switch to standards-based grading and kept their letter grades, so there is a possibility that we will do the same. We are still in the early stages of transitioning, so our grades might stay as letter grades even if the skills that the teachers grade for and how the teachers grade changes.
BHS teacher Ben Heintz explained that if [for example] Ms. Fialko gives you an essay and you write it, and it’s well written, it might be a B plus or an A minus, that’s what a three should be, and then in that context, getting a four, which is exceeding the standard, is difficult.
Some students have been concerned about how this plan might affect their GPA.
“I think if you went around Vermont and interviewed people at 20 schools, you would hear a lot of different stories about GPAs,” Heintz said. “At U32 they never really quite answered what a four was, it was hard to get a four, so kids’ GPAs didn’t have enough fours in the mix, and there were too many threes and twos, even for really good students, and the GPAs there were lower than they had been before, but that’s just one story.”
That being said,
“It may effectively have no impact on how GPA is calculated. It would have an impact on how the grade is assigned to begin with,” Westdijk said.
Also, BHS has the benefit of transitioning to standards-based grading after many other schools, so we can learn from their mistakes. Champlain Valley Union High School has already made the transition to standards-based learning and grading, and it seems to be a pretty smooth system for them. Because of that, we can look at their current system to get an idea of what our school might look like in a few years. CVU’s grading, for instance, is still on a letter grade scale, but every course has what they describe on the CVU website as “KUDs”, which explain what students should “Know, Understand, and be able to Do by the end of the course”.
BHS is on a three-year plan to apply this plan to the curriculum. If everything goes according to schedule, by 2028 we will be at the last step, analyzing data. Currently, we are on the first step of this process, planning for proficiencies and developing and refining proficiencies as shown in the image.
