Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning

by Jack Schneider, Ethan L Hutt

Amid widespread concern that our approach to testing and grading undermines education, two experts explain how schools can use assessment to support, rather than compromise, learning.

Anyone who has ever crammed for a test, capitulated to a grade-grubbing student, or fretted over a child’s report card knows that the way we assess student learning in American schools is freighted with unintended consequences. But that’s not all. As experts agree, our primary assessment technologies—grading, rating, and ranking—don’t actually provide an accurate picture of how students are doing in school. Worse, they distort student and educator behavior in ways that undermine learning and exacerbate inequality. Yet despite widespread dissatisfaction, grades, test scores, and transcripts remain the currency of the realm.

In Off the Mark, Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt explain how we got into this predicament, why we remain beholden to our outmoded forms of assessment, and what we can do to change course. As they make clear, most current attempts at reform won’t solve the complex problems we face. Instead, Schneider and Hutt offer a range of practical reforms, like embracing multiple measures of performance and making the so-called permanent record “overwritable.” As they explain, we can remake our approach in ways that better advance the three different purposes that assessment currently motivating students to learn, communicating meaningful information about what young people know and can do, and synchronizing an otherwise fragmented educational system. Written in an accessible style for a broad audience, Off the Mark is a guide for everyone who wants to ensure that assessment serves the fundamental goal of education—helping students learn.

Genres: Education, Teaching, Nonfiction

280 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 8, 2023

Reviews

[Aaron Tang · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a really fantastic book because it spoke to me as a reader coming from multiple entry points. Whether you are a concerned parent, someone interested in schools from a policy perspective, or an educator, I highly recommend this book.

First, as the parent of two children in public schools, I found this book to be informative and level-headed in its critique of grades, tests, and transcripts. The authors persuasively point out the problems with our current approach to each of these issues, but they also recognize that grades, test, and transcripts do serve some valid and important purposes, such as providing information to parents. After reading the book, I felt as though I could be more clear-eyed in conveying to teachers and school officials the specific things that might be problematic, without having to rail against the entire system we've got. The book was also, in a way, reassuring: true, things can seem awfully broken from the perspective of a student who feels like they're drowning in tests. But the rest of the world hasn't figured out a magical solution, either -- which means we are hardly alone in searching for advances.

As someone who works somewhat in the education policy space (chiefly in the realm of education law), what I enjoyed most about this book was its measured tone and approach. Hutt and Schneider recognize that they do not have a magic, silver bullet solution to a problem that this is nuanced and omnipresent. At the same time, they do provide meaningful, concrete suggestions to dial down the stakes of assessment while also retaining the valuable communicative functions that grades and tests, for better or worse, do serve.

Finally, as a former middle school teacher in St. Louis, MO who taught during the rise of the standards and accountability movement, I found this book thoughtful in its recognition of who, at the end of the day, will need to buy-in before any kind of reform will be meaningfully implemented: teachers. Throughout the book, Hutt and Schneider treat teachers as important stakeholders whose voices are essential to shaping reform discussions, while also recognizing that change can sometimes be hard (and that doesn't make it bad or no longer worth pursuing).

All in all, this book is well-written, accessible, and important. Highly recommended!

[Alan Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

Off the Mark is an excellent critique of how our century-old grading systems oppose the educational goals stated in all school mission statements. The authors also provide a summary of alternative grading systems that have been developed, but, as the authors point out, most of these grading systems have failed to gain traction in school systems designed to achieve institutional goals--certification, ranking, standardization---rather than performance-based assessments. The book's weakness is offering strategies for school administrators to develop in their schools performance-based grading systems. As a former Principal, I can personally attest to the difficulties of inserting performance-based systems into an institutional grading system. That is not to say I had pockets of teachers and departments in the building that experimented and developed alternative assessment regimes, but the true effectiveness of these systems was blocked by institutional goals and practices, and to be honest, on how parents defined "real school"--- meaning grades, ranks, and tests.

[Janet Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting read with good examples, but definitely felt like Ivory Tower territory. I wish I’d had 5 classes of 20 students, though public school reality for traditional classrooms also means over 30 students at the secondary level. I would love to see some of their offerings put into practice, but it is hard to envision without major funding and policy change first. Within my own classroom, as well as my children’s experiences as students, I see a lot of truth in their writing. Good teachers have always incorporated many of the ideas, but in recent years, the testing frenzy and parent over involvement has squeezed out teacher ability to vary much from the school script.

[John Magee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unfortunately, despite their clear-eyed analysis of the driving forces behind our current systems of assessment, I feel that Schneider and Hutt miss the greatest force of all: capitalist/free-market society. As long as the value of our time is measured in the dollars we earn, we will focus on the exchange value of our education. They suggest some interesting changes, but parents and administrators won't have the political will to make them.

[Korey Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nailed it.