The Community News Service is a program in which students work with professional editors to provide content for local news outlets at no cost.
Since 2017, the Slate Valley Unified School District has operated under a new system: proficiency-based learning (PBL). This new philosophy has been implemented in most public schools across the state by the Vermont Agency of Education.
A large part of PBL is proficiency-based grading (PBG). The traditional approach to grading is most familiar to people — grades are assigned zero through 100. In PBG, a zero-to-four scale is used. When a student understands the material, they achieve “proficiency,” or a three. Fully mastering the material equals a four. Because there are fewer points to work with, every grade in PBG is broader than using the specific 100-point scale.
Proficiency-based grading is a controversial topic in the world of education. While some teachers and students agree with the new grading system, many others disagree with the philosophy or the implementation.
Rubrics are an important characteristic of PBG — under each grade is a written description for what expectations should be met for that grade.
Casey O’Meara, director of curriculum at Slate Valley for the past seven years, has experience with both the traditional and the new systems of learning and grading. O’Meara said the rubrics allow teachers to be precise while grading.
“We’ve been able to better support students with those skills in ways that I hadn’t experienced before [in the traditional grading system],” O’Meara said.
According to O’Meara, the ability to set specific goals by studying the rubrics allows for better student-teacher communication.
“You hopefully would feel more comfortable having a conversation [with a teacher] as opposed to if you just had all these problems and… there was a score of an 83. [The rubrics] give you a better roadmap to figure out where to go,” said the curriculum director.
Kevin McCarthy is a science teacher at Fair Haven Union Middle and High School who also has experience with traditional and proficiency-based grading systems. He acknowledged that many aspects of PBG sound great on paper, including rubrics that help students set goals and the ability for students to retake tests. However, McCarthy’s opinion on PBG is overall negative.
McCarthy says that students “are in for a rude awakening” if they expect to have the same level of grade flexibility in college as they got in high school. PBG allowing students to retake tests can affect their desire to perform well on the first try.
“It’s not necessarily setting the kids up for failure, it’s just handicapping them going beyond high school. It’s just not preparing them enough,” McCarthy said.
“Formative” assignments, like homework and classwork, are a double-edged sword in PBG — they allow for valuable practice, but students can also take advantage of them, because formatives do not count toward one’s grade. O’Meara acknowledged both pros and cons of this, whereas McCarthy’s response was more frank.
“Students are given the knowledge and the skills needed to succeed on that summative and they’re not doing the practice,” said McCarthy. “It’s like showing up to a basketball game without practicing free throws — how are you gonna nail a free throw if you haven’t practiced it?”
PBL has also decreased academic competition in classrooms — once a much-used motivator. Because PBG allows students at different levels to receive the same grade, McCarthy sees a “lack of competition” as an outcome.
“‘I got more questions wrong, but I got the same grade. So, whatever,’” is a damaging attitude that many students can end up taking, explained McCarthy.
Academic competition is on the decline, especially when valedictorian and salutatorian distinctions are eliminated. At Fair Haven, those distinctions were last recognized in 2019. Many students agree that these distinctions are important.
“Achieving valedictorian or salutatorian is very remarkable and removing these titles deprives students of the positions they have worked incredibly hard to obtain,” said Elaina Allard, a sophomore at Fair Haven.
Though the school recognizes a “Green and Gold Scholar” as the first-ranked senior in a class, senior Clara Young — the Class of 2024 Green and Gold Scholar — feels that it does not replace the traditional distinctions, which recognize both the first and second in the class. In her opinion, they ought to be reinstituted.
“Either that, or we remove every recognition, which isn’t fair for the students who do work hard for all four years of high school to earn the right for that recognition,” Young said.
Despite many students’ negative feelings toward PBG, senior Katrin Shaw acknowledged that the grading system allows students to approach work with less stress.
“[It] doesn’t make students overly worried about getting an absolutely perfect grade… there is less emphasis on perfection,” Shaw said.
However, students can only receive a four when the teacher feels that their requirements have been met.
“Different teachers have different expectations for what constitutes a four… Some teachers also make it impossible to earn fours on some assignments, and I think that causes problems,” Young said.
As McCarthy noted, “The traditional method is based on math. [PBG] is based on teacher perception.”
Emmet MacKay, a junior at Fair Haven, said that PBG is often confusing.
“The way I see it, a four is the best possible grade, and 100 percent is typically the best you could score… However, to be ‘proficient,’ you may only need a 75 percent. This doesn’t particularly make much sense,” MacKay said. “Why would the school system encourage only partial success over complete?”
Kevin McCarthy has conducted research on PBG by surveying all of the teachers and high school students at Fair Haven. Questions included understanding of the grading system, as well as how PBG impacts student motivation, views towards academics, student behavior in the classroom and teacher performance. On average, teachers gave negative responses toward the grading system, while students were neutral.
According to the survey, many of the teachers at Fair Haven Union High School suggested having more incentives to the system. This can include something as simple as grading the assignments that fall under the “formative” category.
“If you bring more ‘juice,’ more reason to do these things, then the students will potentially have more buy-in,” explained McCarthy.
Reflecting on PBL, McCarthy said, “It has some perks…but there are a lot of flaws. And I’m not too sure if it’s because of how it’s just being run in our school or the state, or if it’s… a systematic problem that [only] looks good on paper.”
Despite the difficulties, O’Meara is hopeful that PBG can always be made better.
“Definitely, challenges [exist]. I don’t see them as something that can’t be overcome,” O’Meara said.