Do Grades Measure Learning Or Just How Well Kids Follow Instructions? A Teacher’s Perspective
Last week, I sat across from Mia’s mom at my quarterly parent-teacher conference, a coffee ring blurring the edge of Mia’s math portfolio on my scuffed oak desk. Mia’s mom leaned forward, tapping the B- scrawled at the top of the page. “She divides up dessert for our whole family every Friday night. She even helped my husband figure out how much paint we needed for the living room last month. Why is she doing so bad in math?”
I pulled Mia’s latest fractions test out of the portfolio and slid it across the desk. She’d gotten every single answer correct. But 15 percentage points had been deducted: three points for no name at the top, five points for not showing each step of her work, four points for forgetting to write units after her final numbers, three points for stapling the pages in the wrong order. That’s what dropped her from an A to a B-.
I’ve seen the flip side too, of course. Last year I had a student named Javi, who turned in every assignment on time, colored every diagram neatly, never forgot a heading or a parent signature. He pulled straight A’s every quarter, no exceptions. But when we did our three-week plant growth project that spring, something else came through. Javi’s project checked every box on the rubric: he had a hypothesis, he had daily observation charts printed neatly, he had a conclusion that matched all the textbook points I’d asked for. It was a perfect A. But when I asked him why his plant’s stem was supposed to grow toward the sun, he stared at me for 10 seconds and then shrugged. He’d never actually planted the bean. He printed a photo of a grown bean off the internet, filled out the observation chart with made-up numbers, and followed every single instruction I’d written for the report format. He just didn’t have time to actually grow the plant between soccer practice and his other homework, he told me after class. Following the rubric got him the A, and that was all that mattered.
That’s when I started really asking the question that nags at me every grading period now: do grades actually measure how much a kid has learned, or just how good they are at following instructions? The answer, more often than not, is a little of both—but most of the time, the compliance side weighs a lot heavier than most parents or even teachers realize. When I first started teaching 10 years ago, I took off points for all those little procedural things automatically, because it kept assignments organized and made grading faster. I never stopped to think that half the points a kid loses on a test don’t have anything to do with whether they understand the material.
A couple years ago, I started making one small change to my grading that makes things a lot clearer for everyone. For every major assignment or test, I write two scores instead of one. One is for content: that’s how well the kid understands the topic. The other is for procedures: that’s how well they followed instructions about format, deadlines, showing work, all that little stuff. It takes me maybe 30 extra seconds per assignment, and it clears up almost all the confusion I get from parents.
For parents who are staring at a surprising bad grade on their kid’s report card, there’s a simple thing you can do tonight that doesn’t take much time. Pull out the assignment the grade is for, and add up where the points were lost. If most of the points are gone for missing names, late turn-in, missing steps, wrong format, that’s not a learning problem. That’s a habit problem. Instead of re-teaching the whole unit to your kid, pick one small habit to work on first. For Mia, we made a three-item checklist she taped inside her math folder: check for name, check for labels, check page order. That’s it. She still forgets about half the time, but it’s cut her point loss by two-thirds already. If most of the points are lost for wrong answers, that’s when you know you’re actually dealing with a learning gap that needs extra practice.
I’m not saying grades are totally useless. They still tell you something, especially when they’re split apart. But what a lot of people don’t talk about is that some of the best learners I’ve had are terrible at following every tiny instruction. They get so caught up in figuring out how the problem works that they forget to write their name at the top. They finish their essay three days early but forget to turn it in because they left it in their locker. They color outside the lines on their project because they’re more interested in getting their idea down than matching the rubric.
On the other side, you get kids like Javi who can nail every instruction perfectly without ever really engaging with what they’re supposed to be learning. It’s not their fault, really. The system rewards that. If following the rules gets you an A, why would you spend extra time actually doing the experiment?
After the conference, Mia’s mom told me she’d been re-teaching fractions to Mia for an hour every night for a month, worried she was falling behind. Now she’s just helping Mia go through her checklist before she turns in homework, and that’s it. Mia still gets B’s sometimes when she forgets the steps, but no one in that family is panicking anymore that she’s bad at math.
I still don’t have all the answers. We still need some way to measure progress, and grades are the easiest system we’ve got right now. But I’ve started telling every parent the same thing at conferences: the letter on the page tells you how well a kid followed the rules that grading period. It doesn’t tell you how much they learned, or how smart they are, or how successful they’ll be later. That part, you have to ask the kid about yourself.
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