Good Riddance, I Say, to the Easy A

With my daughter’s first year of school now behind us, the family has fully embraced summer break. We’ve been camping. But as I look back on the year that was, I keep returning to one thing: the year-end kindergarten report card had no letter grades.

None of them did, I suppose. Last September, B.C.’s Education Ministry officially dispensed with letter grades for students in kindergarten to Grade 9, pivoting to a proficiency scale. It was a decision decried by Conservative pundits and met with resistance from plenty of parents.

But I wasn’t paying attention back then. I was scrambling to get my kid ready for school with no morning routine to rely on.

I’m more in control now. Kindergarten, for me, was a rousing success. The whole family unit deserves an A, I thought, as I gazed at my daughter’s last progress report and engaged for the first time with what wasn’t there.

The proficiency scale was originally introduced in the 2016-17 school year as part of a pilot rolled out to select B.C. schools. This fall, however, the new grading system went provincewide. In lieu of the letters I’m used to, academic progress is on a scale of four adjectives: emerging, developing, proficient and extending.

I know what you’re thinking. Why aren’t they all gerunds? Or maybe — and this is the most common gripe — it’s unclear what’s good and what’s bad.

“I prefer the letter grade, honestly,” one parent told Global News. “The letter grade would make more sense to me, [because] when I did read the definitions for each of the words it seems like they are all similar to each other which confused me.”

In the Vancouver Sun, a B.C. high school counsellor called the new categories on the proficiency scale “wishy-washy jargon” that would “cloud kids’ and parents’ understanding of how the kids are doing in their subjects.”

During her time as a former BC United MLA and opposition critic for education in 2023 before defecting to join the BC Conservatives, Elenore Sturko offered her own family as an example, suggesting her daughter was failed by the new system’s failure to fail her the old-fashioned way.

The report cards “had our daughter at ‘emerging’ for three years. It never said she’s failing,” Sturko told the Sun in December.

“For us, it didn’t really signal a problem.”

The imprecision is the point!

It’s hard to take this criticism all that seriously. A run of four random words seems, to me, roughly the same as a run of four letters in sequence. Yale University’s original, Latin-based ranks, as it happens, were optimi, second optimi, inferiores and pejores.

I don’t speak Latin, yet somehow I gather I'd rather my kid gets an optimi than a pejores. A pejores would signal a problem.

So the words don’t really matter, and they’re really not supposed to. In this case, the medium is the message — the imprecision is the point.

“What grades offer,” American education critic Alfie Kohn has written, “is spurious precision — a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.”

Grading looks different for everyone, after all. Learning does too, and that matters.

For example: in grade school, I got As only in PE — not because I ever pushed myself, but because I was good at athletics already. Some classmates were still growing into their bodies. There’s no A for awkward, unfortunately.

Some people are better equipped for particular subjects. The system rewards this without second thought. ESL kids are graded the same as natural English-speakers — in English class. Who's really learning here, and who’s being rewarded for already being white?

It’s funny how often that happens in school, even among educators who read Robin DiAngelo’s 2018 book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism.

Multiple studies have shown racial biases creep into grading, such as this one by University of Southern California education professor David Quinn, which found teachers likely to give better scores to a paper by a student named Connor than one by Deshawn.

What letter grades don’t reflect

Letter grades may highlight deficits relative to one’s peers, but they don't speak to effort, or actual learning.

Moreover, they tend to reward normativity, which can be deeply damaging for racialized or otherwise marginalized students, who can internalize this information and grow up at odds with not only themselves, but the lessons of self-love or pride in their culture that one hopes they’re learning at home.

It doesn’t help the gifted kids much either, to be honest. Letting the smart children coast without overcoming challenges can’t be a productive lesson for bright young people to carry into adulthood. It squanders their giftedness wholesale, I’d argue.

Any model of learning in a progressive, multiracial society must acknowledge diversity in its many forms: racial, economic, social and of course across neurotypes.

To that end, academic competition is best instilled intrinsically, as pupils work to address their problem areas and measure their improvement against where they began.

“The curriculum must be learner-centred and flexible and maintain a focus on literacy and numeracy,” the Education Ministry explained back in the proficiency scale’s pilot phase, “while supporting deeper learning through concept-based and competency-driven approaches."

This hasn’t happened in a vacuum. The shift away from letter grades in B.C. is part of a larger paradigm shift in education — one that is taking place across North America. Smart people are saying the letter-based system is broken, B.C. teachers among them.

The goal of this paradigm shift is to rethink what learning can be, how it’s measured, who measures it and, crucially, when one is finished.

“Proficiency scale assessment regards learning as ongoing, whereas the letter grade and percentages system viewed learning as an event with a definite end,” University of British Columbia education professor Victor Brar explained in The Tyee.

This strikes me as a critical adjustment, as well as a pretty sick burn on that one friend we all have who hasn't learned a damn thing since they graduated.

There’s always more to learn, especially these days. All info is only a Google away. In my day, in lieu of conceptual learning, we memorized facts, because we might never see them again.

Changing how students are both taught and assessed

“We now know good learning is not just memorizing,” the Education Ministry explains on its website. “It’s being able to use what we know in real-world settings. Universities, colleges and employers now care more about how students think than how many facts they can memorize and recall. This is why B.C. has changed what students are taught and is changing how they’re assessed.”

Failing to learn how to learn in alternative ways is a reason that one in six freshmen doesn’t graduate.

Some of us run out of money, of course. Others can’t make the adjustment from rote memorization to interdisciplinary, conceptual learning — or worse, from a coast to a climb.

“High schools have really laxed off in terms of requiring performance of a certain standard and have handed out rather high grades for low effort, so [students] come to university expecting the same to be repeated,” sociology professor James E. Côté told the Toronto Star back in 2009.

This includes some straight-A students. The letter-grade system is easily gamed, after all. I was home-schooled through high school, and I knew where my mom kept the answer keys. I didn’t learn a damn thing. But my report card suggested that I knew it all.

In lieu of cheating outright, cheating oneself is an oft-employed strategy. Gerald Knesek, a professor at the University of Michigan-Flint, has argued that grades can actually be a barrier to learning. For example, students might avoid harder classes for fear that a failing grade might impact their grade point average — or worse, I would argue, their sense of self-worth.

I’m rubbish at math, having made up my mind long ago, like a lot of adults who have never had any incentive to think otherwise. In college, I managed to dodge the math requirement by taking a stats class where numbers might come into play. Of course, I made sure that they didn’t. I needed good grades if I wanted to get into grad school. Good riddance to that whole dynamic.

The old system had students chasing achievements at all costs, but the actual goal is to build lifelong learners. To that end, the emphasis in B.C. schools is now is on three core competencies: communication, thinking, and personal and social competency.

Rather than teaching our kids how to win at life, we’d like them to learn from it. That’s a big difference, and one I’m excited to see play out in my kids’ lives.

Admittedly, I'm sure that parents who thrived on the hunt for gold stars have some big feelings about what we’ve lost. “What does this mean for the stickers of my youth?” they might ask.

It means they were meaningless, both then and now. Take a deep breath about it.

One gets the sense that, for some folks, school instilled a deeply unhelpful rigidity that echoes out now. But if we are to have any shot at both surviving and thriving amidst the challenges before us, we must better equip ourselves for alternative approaches to just about everything, including our children’s education.

That’s why we do things like this. With my daughter’s first year of school behind us, I’m pouring one out for the easy A.

Maybe this next generation of kids can be incentivized to learn for fun or even curiosity’s sake, instead of being motivated to stay in their lane, like their parents.