Last year, I was assigned to a history teacher whose class had a scary reputation — and with good reason. When I began her class, many of her multiple-choice tests seemed impossible. I found her to be an especially difficult grader, and I consistently bombed the first few tests, despite having spent numerous hours studying the material beforehand.
I had a friend who was taking the same course at another high school at that time, and although I tried to discuss my struggles with her, she couldn’t relate. Her class was blissfully free of the impossible tests and tremendously long textbook chapters that seemed to dominate mine.
As it turns out, that course ended up being one of the best classes I have ever taken. But during those late nights when I invested countless hours in trying to memorize chapters of endless dates, facts and details, I couldn’t help but think about how much easier it was for my friend, who only had to put in half the amount of effort as I had to in order to get the same grade in the same course.
Although a grade is supposed act as a tool in denoting how well a student has performed, the truth is that the value of a letter grade can vary significantly from school to school. There are differing degrees of grade inflation, different teachers, and varying grading standards.
Several college admissions offices have attempted to solve this issue by profiling high schools, which has allowed students to be evaluated within their own settings and contexts. Although this has remedied the issue to some extent, the difficulty of a course isn’t limited to variances between schools; it varies within schools as well. In larger schools, there are often several teachers teaching different periods of the same course. These teachers have their own methods of teaching and of grading, so naturally, there are certain classes of the course that are easier for students to do well in than others.
Many students consider themselves lucky if they sign up for a course like AP Chemistry and end up with the easier teacher.
Of course, the inequities stemming from this situation have led to resentment and indignation of many students, but it’s impossible to create a grading system that is truly fair. Although many ideas concerning revising current grading methods have been proposed, there will always be some inequity that can’t be accounted for.
Most schools already employ methods to reduce the subjectivity to some level. For example, teachers who give the same course collaborate to determine the curriculum and may even spend some time grading together. But there is still a lot of subjectivity that isn’t accounted for. Some people have expressed the need for schools to standardize curriculum in order to take the subjectivity out of grading. However, many oppose this idea because it makes it more difficult for teachers to respond to their students’ needs.
For example, if a class of students becomes more engaged in a certain part of the material, the teacher wouldn’t be able to pursue it because he or she would have to follow the standardized curriculum instead. Furthermore, students change from year to year and from class to class, and the way that a class is taught one year might be very different from how it is taught the next yearThis situation may not be as unjust as it initially seems. The inequities in this system ultimately seem to even out in the end. Even if their classmates got A’s in the easier course, the students enrolled in the more challenging one got much more out of the class. They learned more material, got to acquire better work ethics, and ended up being more prepared for future classes and opportunities. In the long run, our unfair grading system may very well be a disadvantage to the student with the easier course.
All this may not initially seem apparent. It certainly wasn’t to me; all I thought about during those long hours of memorizing history late at night was how envious I was of my friend who still did well in the course at her school without having to study. I suppose only time will reveal the true value of our grades.
Janet Chen (jchen5653@gmail.com) of Broomfield is a junior at Fairview High School in Boulder.
