What's in a grade?

This question comes up countless times in a school year.  It comes up in faculty meetings, in classrooms, at PTA meetings, on the school bus, in the faculty room, at parent conferences, and so on.  Almost every conversation that concerns school, concerns grades or grading.  Why?  What is in a grade that makes it so important?

Let's start with the latter, grading.  What is grading?  It is the practice of placing a value on the ability of a student to relay to their teacher how much they know at a given point in time.  In short, grading is the practice of assigning a grade.  So, what is a grade?  In it's most basic sense, a grade is a symbol that a teacher uses to represent a students' understanding of what has been taught.  A grade is a teacher's way of showing the student how much the student has shown what they know to the teacher.

So why do students, parents, and some educators put such a high value on a grade?  Great question.  In my opinion, it comes down to competition.  Grades are a way for students to rank themselves against each other and for parents to determine how their child(ren) rank against other children.  Having two boys myself, I can see where parents could try to measure their children against others...not that I would ever do such a thing.  It's how we were raised and what we know of our own experiences in school.  However, teachers measuring students against other students is just not right.  Herein lies the problem.

Education is not a race or a competition, yet we treat it like one.  Many schools still select a valedictorian based on GPA, rigor of courses taken and/or class rank placing an even higher emphasis on grades and breeding deep competition among students (and parents for that matter) to "out-do" each other.  Within schools, students are encouraged, pressured in many cases, to take AP or Higher Level IBDP courses even if they are not ready or are not interested in the subject being offered simply "because it looks good" on their transcript.  WHAT??!!  We constantly tell students learning is what is important, but then in the next breath, we compare student work to student work to determine where the benchmark lies.  In his post Beware Normative Tendencies In The Classroom, Tom Schimmer talked about how Olympic judges leave room for higher scores when judging the first competitions because they want to see how the latter athletes perform.  As crazy as this sounds, there are teachers that do this with student work.  Again, deepening the competitive idea associated with grades, and flawing the grading practice.  Instead of using this inaccurate way to measure student learning, we should measure student work against learning targets and standards.  When the symbol on the report card is more representative of how many boxes a student has checked off or how many hoops the student has jumped through during that marking period, the symbol is meaningless.  When a student knows where they are in their learning of the presented Learning Targets and/or Standards, the learning is the focus and the final symbol is not only meaningful but more often than not more accurate as well.