Teachers giving grades students haven’t earned is rampant, staggering in its increasing frequency.
Why is this happening?
A few reasons. First, the pandemic and accompanying learning loss has added pressure on teachers to get students caught up. This has caused the standards for earning grades to drop.
Second is the growing and pervasive view that objective standards for reading, writing, math, and science are discriminatory and thus must be adjusted by the teacher to make them “fair.”
The result is that an ‘A’ for one student can look very different from an ‘A’ given to another.
Finally, in public schools in particular, the performance and ability levels of many students are so low that more than half would be failing if not for the fudging, winking, and unlimited and alternative opportunities to raise their grades.
None of these reasons are justifiable. In fact, lowering standards for any reason and for any student is not only wrong and dishonest, but it’s also terrible for students.
Here’s why:
1. They can’t hide.
The bill will eventually come due. A person can only fake what is falsely written down on paper for so long. Maybe it comes the first month of college when they realize they don’t have the skills to make through one semester.
Maybe it comes when they can’t pass a basic reading or writing exam for their desired career or don’t have the work ethic to keep a job. Maybe it’s when they find themselves in a dank apartment contemplating a criminal act.
One day, inevitably, reality will smack them in the face.
2. They believe the lie.
Most students aren’t sophisticated enough to realize that their ‘A’ isn’t close to the ‘A’ of the student across town, a decade past, or even in their own class.
They’re so pumped full of praise and phony appraisal of their abilities that when the truth sets in it’s devastating. Their whole world is upended. Their dreams die.
And without past failures, accountability, and real-world maturity and understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, they can’t overcome it. They have no wellspring of fortitude to dip into and reverse course.
3. They learn nothing.
The result of inflated grades is that they learn nothing, or very little, academically. This is bad enough. But the biggest sin is that they don’t know how far down in the hole they are. It’s sad to watch them so unconcerned and unaware.
They also don’t know what they’re capable of deep inside. How could they? They’ve not been challenged enough, overcome enough, or faced with reality early enough to do something about it.
They have no grit, no toughness, no resiliency. They’ve been given excuses for so long that that’s all they have. Excuses. Excuses for everything. Whether or not they’ve had early advantages or none at all. It gets them nowhere.
Before It’s Too Late
To best prepare your students for a realistic future, you must be great at your job—which is to provide excellent instruction. Pursue your own excellence first. Become an expert in classroom management. Build rapport. Create a classroom your students love being part of.
Focus on this.
Yes, provide support. Yes, check thoroughly for understanding. Yes, be passionate. Yes, believe in your students and their ability to overcome their circumstances, which often aren’t fair. Encourage. Praise their good work.
Give them every tool they need to succeed on their own.
But set your standards in cement. Let your students fail if that’s where they fall. Let them feel disappointment. Let them know the truth about where they really are academically and behaviorally.
Be straight with them. Do not give chance after chance after chance. It is in the face of hard truth that change happens. It is confrontation with being knocked down that provides the purchase to begin standing back up.
Never, ever deny them of this powerful, life-changing experience—which they need again and again and again. Your “compassion” and excuse-making is only hurting them.
Instead, let them feel it. Allow your students to develop fight and perseverance and the tenacity to go out into the world on their own and succeed through the struggle.
While they still can.
Before it’s too late.
PS – We’ll be taking next weekend off but will be back with a new article on June 3rd. Also, if you haven’t done so already, please join us. It’s free! Click here and begin receiving classroom management articles like this one in your email box every week.
This is exactly the message that everyone needs to hear: teachers, students, parents! Grades must be the result of content knowledge and working to learn the content. Empowering students to take responsibility for their learning is going to serve them better in the long run as you said. Somehow the idea persists that it’s only up to the teacher to take responsibility. I’ve seen firsthand how proud students feel when they work hard to make the good grades. They learn to rely on their own efforts rather than make excuses or blame the teacher or the rigor of the test and work. We have to be willing to let students experience the results of their choices early on. Thanks for highlighting the importance of this issue!
One issue you left off…if a kid isn’t doing well, especially in elementary, it becomes the teacher’s problem. If one of my students is earning below a 70% in any area, I must start an intervention plan and it is now a legal document that binds me to provide research based interventions which I need to assess, fastidiously document, update using smart goals and more documentation and assessment every six weeks, plus meet with that student a certain number of minutes a day. All while trying to teach a whole class of students. This is generally 5-8 a class, without inflating anyone’s grade. It’s exhausting. And then there’s parents pushing back and seeking even more support from you, the teacher. I had a student legitimately earning a B- in spelling and parents were asking what more we can do support him because he was “struggling”. No, I cannot give anymore time to a B- student.
I entirely agree with you, Heather. The pressure on teachers is relentless especially with interventions. Parents and SLT asking what are you doing to improve the situation? No wonder students are unaware of their own responsibility for learning and teachers are faking grades. Besides I was disillusioned when very young students were getting distressed about how they were going to get top grades in public exams when they had only just started senior phase. A recipe for mental heath crisis in the making compounded by the pursuit of top grades.
The root of this crisis is the constant assessment and target setting. As the old saying goes – you don’t fatten a pig for market by constantly weighing it. I’m happily retired now after 35 years and with low ability sets I sometimes faked the odd grade to boost morale and self belief to help students feel they had a chance. I’m not talking about giving them grade A but a gentle inflation to take the edge of reality at that moment in time. It worked! I have evidence of student success in exams because they were encouraged to try and they knew that YOU, their teacher, believed in their potential.
As we approach the end of the school year, this is very timely post. I work with many teachers who no longer grade work. As long as it is submitted on time, they get 100% even if it is incorrect. As an ELA teacher, I read and grade everything with a specific rubric. Parents don’t understand why their child is getting a C+ in my class and As in all their other classes. I explain this day in and day out to students and parents. I am sticking to my grading because I know it will benefit my student in the long run.
Hi Rosie,
I feel it is very wrong to just give the students 100% if they submit their work on time. This contradicts the purpose of schools. Another thing is giving a student 50% just because you are not allowed to fail them. But, giving them 100% if they just submit whatever? How is this fair for the student who actually is a level 4 and deserves 100%!
Well said, Rosie. How is it fair to hard-working students who earn their top marks?
Isn’t 50% failing? If you use rubrics to assess for learning and base scores and standards, then we as educators exit the 100% trap. The 100-percentage grade is a trap that skews toward failure (0-64%) and encourages behavioral/completion grading which is biased and not meaningful. Let’s stop thinking about students “earning” and instead start focusing on “Learning”.
It is very sad to give students a fake grade. It’s even worse when the authorities force it. As a teacher it becomes so heartbreaking to know but you cannot do anything about it.
What do you do when you are legally not allowed to fail a student because of an IEP or ELL? And the student knows you aren’t allowed to fail them, so they can’t be bothered to even try? I have a few that I’m lucky if they write their names on the paper, never mind try to answer the questions.
The secret to that is missing work. If they answer questions and get them wrong the 50% kicks in. But if there is no answer to grade then it remains missing work or incomplete.
This is what I do also.
Who said you can’t fail a student because they have an IEP? I am a special education teacher, and I have one student who won’t do anything and I am failing him. However, in my 15 years of teaching, this is the first time that I have ever failed a student.
I work really hard to give appropriate grades and focus mostly on their IEP goals as that is what we are tasked to do.
Thank you for this article. I appreciate it and I appreciate all you wonderful teachers do for our students.
Agreed.
It is a weird battle we are engaged in. The attempt to maintain high standards while not allowing negative consequences for actions. The lack of negative consequences breeds a lazy behavior and overconfidence in ability. The standards get lower to “meet them where they are”. When students achieve a lower standard with little to no effort, they lack the rewarding endorphins of internal motivation to perform at a higher more strenuous level.
Wow! Amazing insight on unfair grading. I am certainly learning so much being in my first year of teaching.
When I taught high school, I made sure that every student had multiple opportunity to earn a passing grade. Even with that students failed at a high rate. The problem was that because I didn’t give grades or curve test scores so that 70% was a perfect grade which made 49% a C, I had all of the worst classes and worst students dumped on me. That definitely wasn’t an incentive to be honest. I never changed but they ended up winning when I retired.
“They” didn’t win….they lost….a good teacher who loved and cared about the students and their future. I am so sorry that happened to you!
When I get an email from Smart Classroom, I read EVERYTHING because it is so helpful. Thank you for inspiring me as a teacher on so many levels. I enjoy all of the responses too. Thank you all!
Right on Michael!
Thank you for pointing this out!
It’s so important for students to learn the law of Cause and Effect. As many parents become more lenient and the teacher, more and more, has to parent as well as teach, the consequence has to be consistent and the student needs to see that he/she is responsible for the outcome.
Yes Hilary. I constantly tell students “Your behaviour tells me what consequence you get. Good or bad.”
Michael thanks for another helpful post esp at this time of year when we are testing children. I’d love your thoughts on homework. Kind regards.
Truly sad Esther! You are either compelled to upgrade scores or it is done behind you. I’m so disillusioned with the system!
Thank you Michael for spelling this out in a way that helps teachers understand how fake grades is harming students more than helping them. We also need our superintendents and state department of education people to understand it as well. If parents knew the discrepancy between their child’s grade and their knowledge I think there would be lawsuits everywhere. It’s malpractice for us to do this, but the pressure from above makes teachers do it. During a faculty meeting during teacher week of 2022-23, we were getting the usual data summaries from the previous year. They shared the breakdown of grades received by our students by percent and 50% of all grades given were A’s.
Last Christmas I said to my mid-30’s son, “When you were young you loved kicking a soccer ball so much that you insisted on taking 20 shots at me in the yard before we left for every game.”
He replied, “I did love kicking a soccer ball but the reason I wanted to practice before going to the games is that I had a fear of stinking.”
In a perfect utopia, children would be self-motivated to work hard–and optimize their lives and potential– solely due to to a positive reason: PRIDE in performance.
But here on Earth, we need to recognize that FEAR of stinking–for example, fear of a bad grade–is a genuine motivator towards life optimization.
We get fired if we don’t fake the data 🤷♂️ I hate to be confrontational in a lot of your comments sections
And teachers, don’t forget some of us are compensated based on grades. Thousands of dollars annually can be earned with good grades given to students who didn’t earn them. Can you take a pay cut of up to 5-10k per year (or more) for giving a “D” instead of an “A” or a “B?” Districts are making this mandatory now and it can hurt our wallets.
Posts like these are where you lose me. How do we get from “My teacher gave me an undeserved A” to “…in a dank apartment contemplating a criminal act?”
Numbers, scales, letter grades – all of these are crude and insufficient means of expressing what a child can and can’t do. Learning happens in the brain’s black box and no one can translate all that complexity. If we want to do a better job, we could start with descriptive feedback, scores that factor in growth, and dismantling the high stakes that incentivize poor teaching practices.
We all strive to improve in life- in our jobs, our relationships, our classroom management plans- and children, of all people, deserve grace and opportunities to master what they struggle with! Of course, we all work with deadlines. No teacher could be expected to provide unlimited chances if they tried because report card grades are always due. It is reasonable to work within defined limits for grade repair.
In reality, the reason why students get points for submission/completion/participation isn’t because teachers have low standards. It’s because we don’t have TIME. We have to churn out those numbers and percentages until we have enough grades to satisfy district policy. We are already overworked and underpaid, and we all have to figure out for ourselves what we can get relaxed with because administrators are burying us in demands.