By Stephanie Farley
When I was first introduced to competency- or mastery-based grading in 2017, it was an exceedingly undignified experience because it felt like everything I knew about grading was wrong.
I had been asked by my school to attend a conference of what was called the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC, now owned by ETS), as the school was considering joining the consortium. I was sent to learn what competency-based grading was all about, to assess the efficacy of this system for the school, and to report my findings.
Most of what I heard at the conference about grading made so much sense:
► Yes! “Competency” in a subject isn’t about the amount of time one sits in a class; rather, it should be demonstrated by performance tied to specific learning targets and standards.
► Yes! Performance tasks – applying the content and skills you’ve learned in a discipline-authentic fashion – are a more meaningful way to assess the extent to which learning is lasting and transferable.
► Yes! Averaging together all different kinds of performance measures – like effort, participation, homework, quiz scores, test scores, and projects – into one “catchall” grade obscures the extent to which a student has actually met the learning targets.
A few elements about competency-based grading, though, broke my brain:
► Effort should not be a part of the academic grade. This was a challenging idea for me to process, as I had taken in the notion that part of being a good teacher was to recognize and reward the effort I saw my students give their work, even if the results weren’t so great. Like many others, I’d read Carol Dweck’s Mindset and was convinced that, in fact, my rewarding of effort with a grade contributed to a growth mindset!
► Homework should not be graded. Like many teachers in the United States, at first I thought not grading homework, in practical terms, meant homework just wouldn’t be completed.* To be clear, I only assigned reading as homework – and stopped giving reading quizzes in 2000 – so I didn’t count homework in grades, anyway. But I wasn’t able to problem solve what not including a homework percentage in the term grade meant for my math teacher friends, who of course assigned homework with the intention of grading it. If they didn’t grade “page 340, problems 1-31, odd”…well, it was unthinkable. Learning wouldn’t happen!**
Then I dove deeper into the issue of grading
When I returned from the MTC conference, I read a stack of books recommended by the presenters. Steam wafted out of my ears as I worked to overcome all I thought I knew about grading after years in the classroom. Three books, in particular, made all the information I had consumed at MTC snap together in my brain:
- A Repair Kit for Grading: 15 Fixes for Broken Grades by Ken O’Connor
- On Your Mark: Challenging the Conventions of Grading and Reporting by Thomas Guskey
- Competency-Based Education: A New Architecture for K-12 Schooling by Rose Colby
It’s not an exaggeration to say that I experienced a moment of awe as the new grading ideas synthesized. It was an epiphany, and my particular transcendent moment sounded like this:
Unfortunately you’ve been doing grading wrong all of your life, but the good news is that you can fix it. Competency-based methods are the way.
I was in touch with the Force, but a force that would lead me to be a better teacher rather than a better Jedi.
I became a grading reform evangelist
Like any newly awoken fangirl, I couldn’t shut up about what I had just realized. I yapped at my principal, my English co-teachers, my math friends, and the guy who came by to fix the air conditioning.
I talked to my students and the office manager about why grading “effort” is completely biased, as I couldn’t truly know what it cost each student to produce work: some were dealing with a barrage of microaggressions; some were taking care of younger siblings in the afternoons and mornings; while some had poor executive function or other learning challenges. Screening for “effort” amidst the diversity of adolescents in my class was a recipe for unethical grades.
While some of my colleagues just smiled and politely nodded their heads at me, others probed my understanding and pushed me to think of the unintended consequences of such a grading shift. And thank goodness for these colleagues, as their interest and attention encouraged me to consider more of the possible negative outcomes.
Still, I persisted.
The following school year, I implemented several competency-based grading practices in my own classroom, like getting rid of grade averaging.
When we average grades in the traditional way, we fail to fully reward student progress and mastery. In competency-based grading you use either the most recent summative assessment or you can take the best summative performance of the term and make that the term grade.***
(This model assumes, of course, that the learning targets for each summative assessment are the same within that term, so that the “best” performance has captured the student’s highest achievement on the same set of skills being assessed and that the best performance isn’t a fluke.)
Shifting my grading practices also led to a welcome shift in my instructional practices. I began to seriously explore project-based learning, as I found PBL’s competency-based structure a helpful way to ensure students were applying the content and skills I was teaching to meaningful performance tasks. Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman came out that year, too, deepening my commitment to make grading accurate, equitable, and unbiased for all students…not just those in my own class.
After my year of dabbling, I made the full shift to competency-based grading – including listing competencies on the report card for my class! – and also ran a pilot at my school for other teachers to try this approach.
When I went all in, the results with students were spectacular. They understood what I was looking for in their work; they felt they had the tools to be successful; and they were motivated to improve their grades without prodding. I remember one student in particular told me they’d never felt they were a good writer until they took my class. It made my teacher heart swell with happiness and cemented the notion that competency-based grading was joyful in its ability to reveal students’ capacities.
Then along came Covid-19
The pandemic happened and suddenly we were online. The school tried a minimum grading policy, which was not well-loved or embraced. I could be wrong, but in my estimation those months of online learning curtailed the momentum toward grading policy shifts (I live in California, where we had about 10 months of online school).
Not only did minimum grading policies taint the well of competency-based grading, but teachers and administrators were “strained past the compass of their wits” (credit for this delicious phrase goes to Shakespeare) and understandably reluctant to rock the boat in any way. The vibe was, let’s just get back to regular school!
Six years and two schools later…
I remain committed to competency-based grading principles, and, in fact, part of my current job has been to introduce and/or strengthen grading practices that focus on learning and growth rather than behavior and compliance. If you’re interested, here is a list of the grading practices I use now:
- Every summative assessment is a performance task.
- Every summative assessment is accompanied by a rubric that outlines the progression of learning from beginning to mastery.
- The term grade is solely based on performance on the summative assessment.
- Students are allowed to improve their work based on feedback and earn a higher grade (I should mention that rewrites were always a part of my approach).
- Students evaluate their performance against the rubric. They explain why they think what they think and offer evidence from their work. Then we discuss a grade. The grade we talked about goes into the gradebook.
- In my class, the highest grade = term grade model works because each term is spent practicing the same skills (i.e., thesis/argument/evidence).
- I make no attempts to grade or comment upon effort. However, the school I’m at has a rubric for “habits of work,” and I use that rubric, combined with narrative comments, to offer feedback on class participation or other behaviors.
Competency-based grading is international
Since the 2017 MTC conference, I’ve discovered that education systems in other countries – Canada, Australia, Finland – use these same grading policies and have done so for years! The research already existed and was widely available. It was me that was behind; had I read more deeply or sought connections with schools abroad, I would have been generating ethical grades long before.
Finally, it’s worth repeating that the reason I’ve doubled down on competency-based grading is that in my experience it makes a quantitative and qualitative difference to students.
Not only do I see more growth of skill than when I used a traditional grading model, but I’ve observed greater competence overall, which increases confidence, which increases resilience (according to the work of positive psychology researchers listed below). Indeed, my students consistently report that they’ve grown as writers, are proud of their work, and are optimistic about writing in a way they hadn’t been before.
It’s awe-inspiring that, with a fairly simple change to grading practice, I can help young people discover that they’re good at writing, after all!
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Footnotes:
*According to EdWeek, by 2025 roughly 56% of teachers agreed homework should not be graded.
**The math teachers I know who’ve been successful in a competency-based system still assign homework and the students still complete it. The common element of success is creating a system that makes homework feel worthwhile, like scoring it and keeping a running tally of homework performance, even though the tally doesn’t “count” toward the term grade. Instead, the tally is evidence of consistency in work habits.
*** An example of this in action is if my students write 3 pieces of work within a term, earning scores of 85, 90, and 95, rather than average those scores, I’ll put the 95 on the report card, as the student has appropriately demonstrated the learning targets by the end of term…which is exactly what I want them to do.
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Works Cited
Fredrickson, Barbara L. “The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology.” American Psychologist, March 56:3, 218-226, 2001.
Tice, Dianne M., Baumeister, Roy F., Shmueli, Dikla, and Muraven, Mark. “Restoring the Self: Positive affect helps improve self-regulation following ego depletion.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 379-384, 2007.
Tugade, Michele M. and Fredrickson, Barbara L. “Regulation of Positive Emotions: Emotion Regulation Strategies that Promote Resilience.” Journal of Happiness Studies, 8:311-333, 2007.
Stephanie Farley has been an administrator/teacher for 30 years. Her current role is Director of Teaching and Learning at a school for gifted, neurodiverse students. She also teaches a ninth grade English class. Stephanie, who is interested in instructional design, assessment, feedback, and grading, has served as a Mastery Transcript Consortium Site Director and has been on a number of California Association of Independent Schools accreditation committees.
Stephanie’s first book is Joyful Learning: Tools to Infuse Your 6-12 Classroom with Meaning, Relevance, and Fun (Routledge/Eye On Education, 2023). She’s created professional development for schools around reading and curriculum and coached teachers in instruction, lesson planning, feedback, and assessment. Visit her website Joyful Learning and find her other MiddleWeb articles here.
Feature image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
Hand image by by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Globe image by Prawny from Pixabay
