Letter Grades Fail

In the article “Why some schools are giving letter grades a fail,” written by Erin Millar in April 2014 for the Globe and Mail newspaper, various perspectives of assessing students’ work is discussed. Millar begins by attributing the opinion of Ms. Wolfram, who is a parent of a student in Grade 2 as she states “some of were scared to change” after realizing that schools are slowly discontinuing to award letter grades in elementary schools. As technology continues to improve each year, the education system advances itself by giving feedbacks to children online. For instance, parents can check their kids’ portfolios in order to review their progress so they could see their needs of improvements and achievements instead of interacting with
the teacher every week. Also, the Surrey board of education set up this program to eradicate letter grades as it slowly develops over Canadian elementary schools. International schools are also investigating new methods to grade students’ work so they will discontinue using grades. Scientific studies have shown that children learn about their mistakes better by reading comments made by the teacher instead of putting a numeric letter grade. According to Paul Black and Dylan William who are British education researchers reveal to us the effectiveness of teacher feedback as it demonstrates academic success. Moreover, James Heckman, a Nobel Prize winning economist issued studies that numeric grades don’t result in life success such as employment or future prosperity. Furthermore, Leah Samson who is a Fraser Heights Secondary School teacher in Surrey spends most of the time teaching students to edit their work and give efficient feedback to one another which benefits student to learn and improve effectively in their academics. Students who are in dire need help as how they can improve drastically “once grades are removed, so they can learn for themselves rather than for their teachers.”