By Patrick Adrian
Staff Writer
CLAREMONT — Stevens High School is planning to move on from its unpopular competency-centered grading system and back to a more traditional approach, citing years of confusion around the reporting of student grades, according to administrators.
In a presentation to the Claremont School Board, Stevens High School principal Pat Barry said the school will continue to use competencies — the main skills or concepts that students are expected to master in a course — to measure student growth.
However, teachers will be able to return to using point-accumulations and criteria such as projects, assignments, tests, and participation as the primary grade-determinant rather than scoring a student’s proficiency in each competency.
“I can honestly say that, in my seven years as principal, I have never once had a parent or a student say this is an awesome grading system,” Barry told the school board. “I’ve had hundreds if not thousands of comments and feedback to the opposite.”
For decades, educators have employed learning goals like competencies as professional tools, particularly in designing curriculum, lessons and assessments. To use a road trip analogy, the competencies are the desired destinations which dictates the teacher’s travel plan.
But new education policies over the last 10 years, aimed to establish more uniform standards for what students should know or demonstrate upon graduation, extended the use of competencies from the process of learning to the product.
Many school districts in New Hampshire, including Claremont, switched from traditional letter grades to “proficiency-based” ones. In this new system, for example, the traditional grade for satisfactory work changed from a “C” to a “P” for “proficient.”
Under the proposed system for next year, Stevens High School will restore a modified version of the letter grade system, which students and parents better understand.
In the modified proposal, the lowest passing grade would be a “C” and the minimal percentage to pass would be a 70% (formerly a 65%), explained Stevens High School teacher Charlie Gessner.
But the biggest change will be how teachers will be able to calculate and report grades, Barry explained.
For the past several years, Stevens High School’s grading system was based primarily on a student’s level of proficiency in each course competency. Each course project, assignment and test would be attached with related competencies from the course.
Currently, Stevens High School “grades learning targets,” Barry explained, saying that each course competency will contain several measurable learning targets or goals. A student’s proficiency in these goals collectively ultimately determine the student’s course grade.
But this system has proven problematic on multiple levels, according to Barry.
One major problem is the lack of a daily calculated point system to communicate how a student is doing.
“When the parent or student goes into [the online system] to check grades, all they see is a checkmark next to the assignment, [not] a grade,” Barry said. “A student can literally go [into their account] and have a proficiency with distinction, the highest grade they can get, today. And they could go in tomorrow, after teachers put in a variety of assessments, and that grade could go down to a substantially below proficiency. Within 24 hours.”
With a traditional point-based system, where each assignment or test receives a numerical value, students and parents can better identify where a student is excelling or where a student needs to increase his or her points to improve the cumulative average. A point-system is also easier for teachers to communicate where a student can improve his or her grade.
Teachers can still align specific learning targets to the assignments to assess student learning without those targets influencing the course grade, according to Gessner.
Gessner showed the school board an example from his Honors Economic class of a test with two course competencies: one for general economics concepts and one for the mathematical concepts. In the example the student scored a 75% on the test, received a proficiency with distinction (PWD) on the mathematical concepts but a below-proficiency on the general concepts.
The combined marks on the two competencies would still average to a 75%, according to Gessner. Meanwhile, the teacher will know that the student is fine on the mathematical concepts but needs more focus on the general concepts.
Stevens High School senior Prescott Herzog said he likes being evaluated on competencies because they show specific areas in which to develop, though a numerical-grading system will remove some of the subjectivity in which teachers sometimes interpret proficiency or mastery.
“I like how this proposed format continues on [with the competencies] but fixes the deviations with some of the teachers,” Herzog said. “With the PWD [for example], so many teachers have different definitions for what that is, and that can cause a lot of a lot of strife between students and teachers.”
Superintendent Michael Tempesta said the district will introduce this approach throughout Claremont’s schools with the initial focus being in Stevens and Claremont Middle School.
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