It’s a classic sitcom plot. The kid with main character energy gets a poor grade on their report card and hatches an increasingly harebrained scheme to avoid sharing the truth with their parents.
The funniest part? Today, that sitcom kid wouldn’t have to do a thing to hide their failure, because report cards do it for them. They are often filled with arbitrary letters disconnected from objective learning standards. 57% of middle and high school grades are inaccurate, giving As and Bs even when students haven’t mastered the material. That 43% accuracy rate means report cards themselves get an F (unless we are reverting to NJ’s district grading system where no one can fail.)
But we parents still value report cards over all else. Why wouldn’t we, when these are our regular familiar source of information?
A new study from the University of Chicago and Oregon State University shows just how much more weight parents give to grades than standardized test scores. 71% of parents say grades are more important for their decision making than test scores. When grades are high but test scores are low, parents don’t invest in interventions. When test scores are high but grades are low, parents do invest.
The missed opportunity caused by overweighting grades has a ripple effect. Grade inflation makes students about 15% less likely to pass subsequent courses, and this leads to a decrease in lifelong earnings. 41% of grades are inflated by 1 or 2 levels.
The other slice of the problem pie is that 16% of grades are deflated. This means that kids who need to be challenged to go further may instead be demotivated by remedial material they’ve already mastered.
Relying on report cards as the only indicator of academic performance is like using a boardwalk funhouse mirror to assess your outfit for a night out at the shore. If parents received within-year and end-of-year standardized test scores on a real-time basis, and if those scores were clearly explained alongside report card grades, parents would gain a more comprehensive understanding of what their child does and doesn’t know.
Seems pretty simple. No harebrained scheme required.
