Getting Rid of Zeros Won’t Fix the Grade Book

In the past decade, there’s been a rapid rise in prominence in schools and districts looking at grading practices through the lens of equity, which means emphasizing practices that minimize the impact of outside environmental factors while increasing the accuracy in reporting student levels of learning.

This has led to criticism of the use of zeros in the grade book to represent missing assignments. Here’s the problem with the zero: It can ruin a student’s overall grade in a system that averages scores over time. If I receive a zero on my first assignment in a term, I have to score an 85 on the next 13 assignments just to get back to a B. My failure outweighs my success, and for many students, having to claw their way out of a hole that deep just isn’t worth the effort.

This is why a 50 percent minimum grading threshold has appeal.

There are two ways that schools approach this. With the first, schools use a quarter system to determine grades for a semester. A student gets one grade for the first quarter that is then averaged with their grade for the second quarter, and that determines their semester grade. A 50 percent minimum often means that a student’s grade can be no lower than a 50 in the first quarter to avoid their having a mathematically hopeless scenario when that grade is averaged with the next quarter’s.

The more common approach is to enact a policy where the lowest grade that can be entered in the grade book on any assignment is 50. This means that if a student fails to turn in an assignment, the score entered is a 50 instead of a zero. Again, the goal is to avoid the math that makes it nearly impossible for a student to bounce back and be successful.

Now, as someone who has researched the link between motivation and grading practices to the point that I’ve written a book on it, I want to say that these practices do have the potential to reduce the number of students who disengage from learning because they perceive that they can’t succeed.

This is where the discussion about minimum grading thresholds often stops, but there are potential problems that come up, and if you talk to teachers in schools with these policies, what I’m about to say will be echoed by them.

If you don’t pair it with new measures of student accountability, a 50 percent minimum policy will decrease engagement in work and eventually decrease learning.

Here’s why: Students are smarter than we sometimes give them credit for, and when they realize the math behind the new policy, they will respond to it. The math works like this: If a student receives a 95 percent on three assignments, they can just not turn in the next 10 assignments and still receive a passing grade—an A on 29 percent of their assignments means they don’t have to complete the other 71 percent to pass a course.

While there’s research claiming that a 50 percent minimum policy doesn’t lead to grade inflation or social promotion, so many educators are feeling the impact of losing a lever that, while it may not have been the most effective lever to support learning, did improve compliance in completing assignments. This can of course be frustrating for teachers.

So what do we do?

The most encouraging thing I can say is that a grade consequence is not the only measure of accountability, and honestly, there’s no research to suggest that using a grade penalty to impact behavior has any long-term results. For any educator who has implemented a 50 percent minimum policy to reduce the number of disengaged students, the most important question you can ask is, “Outside of the grading policy, how can we support students in engaging in productive behaviors in the classroom?”

A Better Lever: A Late Work Contract

The most effective lever or method I ever used to incentivize productive behaviors with assignments—even better than grade penalties—was a late work contract with students.

The way this worked was that when a student crossed a threshold of missing assignments, I would give them a late work contract and change their grade to an incomplete, making them ineligible for athletics and other activities. There were two stipulations in this contract. The first was that they would have to meet with me for tutoring during my contract hours twice, to address any academic concerns that were keeping them from feeling like they could successfully complete the work. The second stipulation was behavioral: We would identify behaviors keeping them from completing their work and then match a consequence to the behaviors. For example, prior to banning phones in my classroom, phones were common distractions, and the consequence often was that the student would have to turn over their phone to me during class for two weeks.

The goal with the late work contract was to design consequences to meet the needs—both academic and behavioral—identified by the missing work. This approach resulted in greater shifts in behavior than my previous academic penalties, and in the long run, there wasn’t any consequence on the student’s grade. Once they completed the contract, their grade went back to where it was before with no penalty.

My point is, in any system that takes away a lever that teachers use to hold students accountable, a new lever must be put in place. Ideally, this lever or consequence should be designed to break habits and patterns leading to incomplete or missing assignments and simultaneously help to build new patterns and habits that support students to engage in the work of learning.

While I believe equity is an important reason to examine our grading practices, if a proposed grading change results in less student engagement on assignments, we will end up with students who learn less and are less prepared for their future education and careers. Any solution that results in students not being prepared for the future isn’t equitable at all, so we need to design systems and structures that support students in engaging in productive behaviors that develop habits that will serve them in the long run.

Addressing Late and Missing Work as a School

If a school eliminates the lever of a zero as a way of encouraging students to turn in work, the question then should be, “What is being done at the school level to replace it?” As with any behavior policy, a cohesive schoolwide approach is often more effective than isolated, classroom-based practices.

The answer doesn’t have to be complex because often the system is already in place—it just needs to be tweaked. For example, where I taught previously, we had a 20-minute period before lunch called Grizzly Success for students who had any grades below 78 percent. What if, instead of basing an intervention period like this on grades (which could penalize a student trying their hardest but sitting at a 75 percent), it was based on missing assignments? Any student missing a predetermined percentage of assignments must use that intervention period to complete them.

Looking Beyond 50 Percent

I want to emphasize here that the 50 percent solution absolutely has value in a traditional averaging system of grading. It helps temporarily resolve the known problems with zeros, but it merely addresses a symptom of the problem—it doesn’t resolve the problem itself.

The problem with zeros is the fact that grades are being averaged over time, and that practice means that mistakes and earlier struggles outweigh the eventual success of a student.

If we really want to solve the problem of zeros in the grade book, we have to ask ourselves this question: “If I got rid of averaging in my grade book, what would I do?”

The way we answer that question has the potential to move us into a realm of truly equitable grading practices.