Report cards went out last Friday. In our schools, 17% of our students earned an “A-” in English. What does that mean, exactly? Did 17% of our students learn most (but not all) of the stuff they were supposed to learn? Did 17% of our students turn in most (but not all) of the work that was assigned to them? Did this group of students perform better, academically speaking, than the 55% of students who got worse grades, but not as well as the 28% of students who got better grades? Maybe this group of students showed a significant amount of academic growth in English since the beginning of the year, but not quite as much growth as they could have.

Most likely, it’s a combination of these. It’s tough to distill a student’s work in a class into a single letter, even if we add pluses and minuses to that letter. And without more information, it’s hard to derive any actionable goals from that grade. If my kid works 20% harder, or puts in 20% more time, or does 20% more work, will they get an A instead of an A-? If they focus more on Chemistry, where they got a C, how much can they slack off in English without getting lower than a B+? If we want to improve the English grade, should we spend more time on homework? Should we do some other supplemental work? Should we hire a tutor?

When my children were in school, we always told them that we cared more about the learning than about the grades. Schools have an unhealthy fascination with grades, and we’ve seen many cases where getting a high grade was prioritized above learning. I think we realized early on that we didn’t have any valedictorians living in our house. And, honestly, we also knew too many people growing up who prioritized their GPAs over everything else in high school. Many of them were neither happy nor well-adjusted. We didn’t want the pursuit of the grade to be the defining factor of school for our kids.

But that approach brought some challenges, especially as the kids got older. For one thing, we didn’t really have a better way to measure learning. While it’s nice to say that the learning is more important than the grade, how do we know that learning is happening unless we rely on the grade? If we diminish the importance of the ubiquitous A-F scale, what do we have left?

When I was a teacher, I didn’t really measure what my students learned. I measured what they did. Do the work. Show up. Complete the assignments. Turn in your work on time. You’ll be fine. Looking back, I think the grades my students earned reflected their willingness to pretend to care about the stuff they thought was important to me. They were either really good at hoop-jumping or they didn’t care about the hoops at all. I didn’t have many students who wanted to jump through the hoops but couldn’t.

When my kids were adolescents, schools were making a big deal about the difference between formative and summative assessment. Formative assessment is the work students do as part of learning. It’s practice. It helps the student develop knowledge and skills, and it helps the teacher identify areas where more focused instruction is needed. Formative activities shouldn’t have a detrimental effect on student grades. You wouldn’t judge an amateur pianist by the music made the first time they sit down with an unfamiliar score. You don’t determine a kicker’s potential on their first extra point try in middle school. We’re learners. We’re figuring this stuff out. Give us some time.

Summative activities are where we show off what we know. That’s the senior piano recital. That’s the field goal attempt at the end of the game to win the championship. That’s the stuff we should be using to measure our accomplishments.

The guideline for grades was (is) that summative assessment should comprise 80% of the student’s grade, while formative activities should be about 20%. That’s a compromise. That’s an acknowledgement that we’d like to emphasize what students have learned at the end, but we still need to have some mileposts along the way. And those mileposts have to count for something or students won’t do them. Yes. This counts. Yes. This is for a grade.

This is all intertwined with motivation as well. How do we get students to do the things we want them to do? In elementary school, it’s generally pretty easy. Primary students love their teachers. They want to please their teachers. They’ll do whatever Mrs. White asks them to do because they love Mrs. White and they want to make her happy. They write notes for her and bring her gifts. These are the same students who are sad because they don’t get to go to school on snow days. And the last day of school may mean summer is here, but there are a lot of tears as they say goodbye to the teacher they’re leaving.

As students get older, the adoration wears off. How do we get a high schooler to do what we want? Maybe they love their teachers, but that’s a lot less common. Maybe they’re passionate about the subject. But every student isn’t passionate about every subject. There’s a lot of work that we can do to make the learning more engaging for students. That’s one of the big things that technology can bring to the table. But it’s far more common to use grades to motivate them. They’re expected to bring home high marks. They need a high class rank. They need a decent GPA. They want to get into a good college, so they can have a successful life. So they’ll slog through photosynthesis or the Battle of Yorktown or MacBeth. Not because they love the subject. Not because they love the teacher. But because they need the grade.

As we venture into the unknown forest of artificial intelligence, some students are going to see AI as a way to get the grade without having to care about the subject or the teacher. That’s a threat to the way school works in the same way that calculators, spell check, Wikipedia, and Chegg were. Change is going to force us to be more intentional about what grades mean, find ways to motivate students in other ways, and hopefully deemphasize our fascination with them.