Why Linear Grading?

My co-teacher, partner teacher, and I tackled this idea together

The move toward standards-based grading means traditional grading scales need updating, too. Linear grading communicates to students and parents how close to Mastery in a skill the student is. Linear grading is a way to grade students based on Mastery, working within the traditional grading system.

Since 2020, I have been using a linear grading system, only giving grades in the grade book for assessments. In linear grading, the lowest score is a 50, which is still not passing, but not impossible to recover from. The overall grade isn’t weighed down from a couple poor grades. The rest of the scores are distributed between 50 and 100.

Examples

• If a skill only requires three questions to show Mastery, missing one (or getting 2/3 correct) is an 83%, which is close to Mastery, rather than the mathematical 67%, which indicates failure.
• When grading on a four point rubric scale—such as Exceeds Mastery, Mastery, Approaching Mastery, Below Mastery—linear grading works well. The grade book would have linear grading scores of 100, 88, 75, 63. 50 would indicate 0.
• Projects are graded with scores for each skill, rather than one unspecific grade for the whole project.
• After practice, students can retest and are graded on the same scale.

“Linear grading is a way to grade students based on Mastery, working within the traditional grading system.”