The practice of grading student work has mostly been an afterthought in teacher training and professional development. Grading remains idiosyncratic in most places—largely dependent on rubrics devised by individual teachers and usually rooted in century-old practices, even if they are calibrated using new technologies and software.
Letter-based grading became universal in U.S. public schools by the 1940s. Today, protocols for handing out grades of A–F on a 100-point scale vary from district to district and classroom to classroom. Generally, grading attempts to distill students’ performance on what education researcher Thomas R. Guskey calls a “hodgepodge” of measures—quizzes, tests, homework, conduct, participation, extra credit, and more—rather than gauging actual student learning.
