Do Grades Measure Learning Or How Well Kids Follow Instructions? A Teacher’s Perspective
I sat at my kitchen table last Wednesday, stacking 4th grade science projects next to a half-empty mug of cold coffee, when I hit the two folders that made me pause. First was Mia’s: crisp, neon-bordered poster, seed packet taped exactly in the top right corner as instructed, observations written in neat bullet points on every date I’d assigned. Every requirement on the rubric was checked off, and she’d even used the blue-red-green color code for labels I’d mentioned once in a passing reminder. I marked an A without thinking, then flipped open Javi’s folder.
His project was crumpled notebook paper, turned in a day late, no poster, no group data table like I’d asked. The front was covered in doodles of bean roots winding around the margins. Per my old rubric, that was an automatic C for missing half the formatting requirements. But when I read his notes, I stopped. Javi wrote that he didn’t follow the watering schedule because he wanted to test what would happen if he watered his bean twice a day, like he’d watered his tomato plant over the summer. He compared his bean to one his mom watered once a day, measured mold growth on the soil, and wrote a full paragraph explaining why he thought too much water kept oxygen from getting to the seed. He’d gotten the core concept of plant growth exactly right—better than most kids who got A’s.
I pulled both kids aside after class the next day. When I asked Mia why she thought her bean never sprouted, she shrugged. “I followed the instructions exactly,” she said. “It’s not my mistake it didn’t grow.” When I asked Javi why he didn’t do the poster, he shrugged too. “I knew I’d get a bad grade,” he said. “I just wanted to see what would happen.”
That interaction drove home a question I’ve been turning over for 8 years of teaching elementary school: how much of what we grade is actually measuring learning, and how much is just measuring how well kids follow rules? I’ve looked at hundreds of graded papers over the years, and I’d guess that 15 to 20 percent of most final grades come down to compliance: turning work in on time, formatting it the right way, using the required number of sources, remembering to put your name on the top. None of those things have anything to do with how much a kid actually understands.
A lot of parents reach out to me confused every quarter, because their kid aces every quiz but gets Bs on projects because they forget the formatting. Or their kid can explain a concept out loud perfectly but gets a bad grade because they turned it in a day late. After the bean project, I adjusted my own rubric to fix this: I now write two separate scores at the top of every project, one for mastery of the learning goal, one for following the assignment rules. It takes 30 extra seconds per assignment, and it makes the gap between compliance and learning impossible to miss.
For parents, the change doesn’t have to be big. There are two small things I tell parents to try at home that make a huge difference. First, when your kid brings home a graded assignment, ask “What was the most interesting thing you learned doing this?” before you ask about the grade or why it’s lower than expected. Second, if the grade is dragged down by compliance issues (late turn-in, wrong formatting, missed requirements), split your conversation into two parts. First, talk through the actual material: ask them to explain the concept to you to confirm they get it, and celebrate that they learned it if they do. Then, problem-solve the compliance part separately: for example, if they lost points for turning it in late, add a shared calendar reminder for future assignments, or help them pack their project the night before it’s due. They’re two completely separate skills, and they don’t need to be lumped together in one measure of how “smart” or “successful” your kid is.
I saw this play out with my own 10-year-old last month. He got a C on a writing assignment because the teacher asked for a 3-page Google Doc, and he wrote a 12-page short story about a bookstore dragon and turned it into a Canva poster with a link to the story. The grade was for not following instructions, not for bad writing. We started by celebrating that he’d finished a whole story he was proud of—that’s the learning part. Then we talked about a simple fix for next time: turn in the Google Doc as requested, then add a link to the poster at the bottom so he can still share his creative work. He didn’t walk away thinking he was bad at writing, just that he needed to adjust one small thing to meet the class rules.
It’s not a perfect solution. I still have to follow school-wide grading policies that average compliance and mastery into one final letter grade. Some of my colleagues say splitting scores is extra unnecessary work, and some parents worry it will confuse kids when they get to middle school, where grades matter for high school placement. I don’t have all the answers. But last week, Javi stopped me after school to say he’s going to redo his bean experiment this summer, testing three different watering schedules just for fun. Three days later, Mia asked if she could stay in during recess to try to grow a new bean, to figure out why her first one didn’t sprout. That’s learning, right there—and it didn’t show up on any grade. That’s enough for me, for now.
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