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Marita Moll
Head of Research and Technology, Canadian Teachers' Federation
Although it seems like they have been around forever, formal testing and evaluation systems in education, and their grading practices, are a recent educational phenomenon.
The British Society of Apothecaries instituted the first professional qualifying examinations in 1817 to ensure that doctors were adequately trained. In the 1870s, the upper ranks of the mushrooming British civil service could no longer be filled through the long-standing practice of nomination and patronage. This led to the first public examination system—an attempt to broaden the process of recruitment to meet the increasing need for public servants. In conjunction with the onset of compulsory education, the practice spread quickly to the universities and schools.
In North America, as the population shift to large urban centres spelled the demise of the one-room schoolhouse in the early 1900s, one of the efficiencies created by the new administrative bureaucracies was the neatly printed, uniform report card. In 1911, researchers testing the reliability of the marks entered on these cards showed that the same material could be assigned widely different marks depending on the markers. However, the research findings changed nothing because the graded report card had taken firm root.
From 1911 to 1960, school systems experimented with various letter and number reporting conventions. Percentage grading was the most popular system during the latter half of the 19th and the early part of the 20th centuries. In this system, the teacher assigned each student a number between 0 and 100, the number supposedly reflecting the percentage of the material the student had learned. However, the full scale was hardly ever used because marks below 50 were rarely assigned and the difficulties of narrowing down to a single percentage point led to the grouping of scores in multiples of five. Eventually, more educational institutions switched from numerical to letter grades, which represented groups of percentages, during the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1960s, the struggle to humanize schools pushed some institutions to move to simple pass/fail grades and written evaluations. However, recent surveys have shown that letter grades (A, B, C, D and F) remain the most common grading practice currently in use in elementary/secondary schools.
Determining the proportion of students to receive each letter in a common set of letter grades has long been the subject of intense debate among experts in educational measurement. One well-known system, which evenly distributes the grades on either side of a bell-shaped curve, would automatically fail a certain proportion of any given group—even in a group composed of known high achievers. Research has shown that rigid adherence to such practices can be damaging to students.
Student evaluation is a complex process that takes many factors into account. Recognizing the limits of various grading practices and balancing these with common sense and good judgment are important components of the work of professional teachers.
