If You Want Good High School Grades, Move to Texas

When Hartranft began working on the problem in the summer of 2000, he noticed that SAT averages illumined different grading standards. For instance, Connecticut students who graduated in 2007 and reported an A-minus grade point average had an average math and reading score on the SAT of 1146. Texas students with that same grade point average had a SAT math and reading score of 1039. Why couldn't high schools that grade low add to their student transcripts and send to colleges a conversion chart showing how much higher the grades would be if they were pegged to a national standard based on SAT scores?

Simsbury High has been doing just that since 2003. But Hartranft and other people pushing the issue have had less luck persuading neighboring districts to do the same. Some of the high school educators they have approached have complained that their conversion chart is too hard to understand and might frustrate rather than impress college admissions officers.

Some researchers have been trying to educate school systems on this topic recently. Philip M. Sadler of Harvard and Robert H. Tai of the University of Virginia report in the latest issue of the College and University Journal that high schools would provide a fairer and more consistent assessment of science courses--about which Sadler and Tai have a unique collection of data--if they added half of a grade point for an honors course, one point for an Advanced Placement course and two points for passing an AP exam.

Grading expert Ken O'Connor's book "A Repair Kit for Grading: 15 Fixes for Broken Grades," published this year by the Educational Testing Service, argues for clear performance standards that each teacher and school would follow. He also recommends against grading on the curve, grading on attendance, grading on group work and several other common practices that help make report cards so confusing and so different.

Unfortunately, Sadler, Tai and O'Connor do not explain how frustrated parents such as Hartranft can persuade their schools to do any of these things. In Montgomery County, the school system attempted some grading reforms a few years ago--including reducing the influence of homework on grading decisions--and sparked a huge controversy that is likely to keep that school board from endorsing anything like Hartranft's plan any time soon.

My view is that despite these egregious inconsistencies, students' grade point averages in the end almost always reflect their high school work accurately enough to let colleges and scholarship committees reach fair decisions, particularly with SAT and ACT scores to provide national comparisons. But I share Hartranft's frustration with a system that forces students to accept assessment schemes as radically different as Gill's and Phillips's. Simsbury school district Superintendent Diane Ullman said she agrees and is working to standardize teacher grading in each subject, perhaps even having all of them give the same final exam.

Just being a teenager is enough to drive anyone over the edge. We ought to look for a way to persuade teachers to surrender some of their independence in this area in order to ease their students' psychic burdens so they can devote their energies to studying and not to figuring out how to be one kind of student in their math teacher's class and an entirely different person in social studies.