The Weakness of Norm-Referenced Grading in Measuring Student Achievement

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Research Proposal: The Weakness of Norm-Referenced Grading in Measuring Student Achievement
When a parent sees an F grade on a child’s report card, the immediate and logical reaction is to believe the teacher’s remarks; the student is a failure. However, few parents and teachers take into account the shortcomings of the assessment tools used to measure the child’s achievement level, and the inability of the commonly used grading systems to accurately describe learners’ competence levels.
The grading of standardized achievement tests is usually norm-referenced. Norm-referenced grading groups learners into categories used a pre-established formula, whereby a given percentage of the top performers is assigned an “excellent” performance grade, while the bottom performers receive a “poor” or “fail” grade regardless their test scores. For instance, in school X a student who scores 70 percent gets an A if that is the highest performance, and teachers may assign A’s to all students scoring in the range of 60-70 percent. In school Y, the highest score in the same test may be 90 percent, and students scoring between 80-90 percent are assigned an A grade, while those scoring in the range of 70-80 are assigned a B. This scenario exemplifies the shortcomings of the letter grading as a measure of student achievement. If the “A students” in school X did the test in school Y, they will no longer be regarded as A students, but C students. The parent whose child got an F for scoring 60 percent, which just happened to be the lowest score in school Y, will be surprised if he transferred the child to school X, where the child’s scoring range of 60 percent will transform him into an instant “A” student without learning anything new. Practically, norm-referenced grading requires teachers to lower standards to satisfy the need to have a group of “A performers” despite the fact that the performance is below par. In this regard, it is clear that the norm-referenced letter grading system is not an appropriate measure of student achievement because it creates false impressions of learners’ competencies.
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