“It may be that I never go back to the grading system”

5 teachers on struggling to evaluate students during the pandemic

College students marching across campuses in caps and gowns. High schoolers gearing up to take the SATs in packed classrooms. Elementary school children playing tag during recess.

This is what life in American schools usually looks like during the months of May and June. But educational institutions around the nation are wrapping the semester very differently than students and teachers had imagined as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. And on top of the challenges and triumphs of remote school, educators have had to find ways to evaluate their students. The question on many of their minds is, as one teacher put it, ”How do I grade a child during a pandemic?”

Some schools and universities have adopted more generous pass/fail policies to accommodate students during the pandemic, while others have continued to give out letter grades. Meanwhile, teachers across the country are the ones tasked with making sense of these guidelines, and finding ways to grade students who lack access to wifi or have to look after younger siblings at home. The inequities brought to light by the coronavirus pandemic have also sparked a larger conversation about the role grades play in a student’s education, prompting some educators to rethink traditional grading systems.

Along with figuring out fair grading standards, educators have been forced to innovate and find new ways to give students the education that they want and need. Professors have revised syllabi and extended deadlines, and teachers have held virtual lunch periods and homerooms to cultivate relationships with their students through computer screens. Despite all the stresses, some educators have been grateful for the discoveries made as a result of remote learning and plan to bring new technology to the classroom in person.

Patrick Iber, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, said one thing about this semester that rings true among all students and teachers: “People ended it on terms that they hadn’t signed up for in the beginning.”

Vox spoke with five instructors about the challenges of remote learning and the dilemma over how to grade students. Their responses have been edited for clarity and length.

“In our district, we’ve all realized that there have been inequities, but they have never been clearer”

Carlene Baurichter, social studies teacher at Bangor High School, Bangor, Wisconsin

Carlene Baurichter just gave birth to her son in February, and has been juggling caring for her newborn and adjusting to remote learning.

“Trying to reconfigure for an asynchronous, not in-person experience was really difficult for me,” she said.

At Baurichter’s high school, where she teaches all grades, third- and fourth-quarter grades are being averaged, and the fourth quarter is pass/fail. This average also does not count toward students’ GPAs. Baurichter said she is generally satisfied with this more relaxed approach, because administrators and teachers were not sure how engaged students would be going into remote learning.

“In hindsight, you know, it would have been nice to kind of go with a different, more gradeless situation” for the third quarter too, she said. Baurichter has started to integrate more standards-based grading in the classroom, which she thinks is more fair than giving percentage grades. “I do like that we’re not counting it toward their GPA, because that would be really unfair for quite a few kids.”

In rural Wisconsin, where Baurichter’s school is located, high internet prices and data limits mean around 5 percent of her students do not have access to wifi. During in-person classes, Baurichter would ensure that her students had time during school hours to do work that required internet access: “And even that kind of thought process isn’t equitable if you think about it, especially if you’re absent for a day,” she said.

Now the school has a system in place to deliver hard copies of work to students who do not have internet access. School staff drop off packets on Thursdays and pick up the completed work from the week before. This system often leaves students without adequate teacher feedback and a week behind their peers.

“In our district, we’ve all realized that there have been inequities, but they have never been clearer,” Baurichter said, describing a student of hers who is normally very diligent but is falling behind because she has to care for her younger siblings now that all school is virtual and her parents have to work during the day. “That’s kind of a struggle, because you don’t want to fail this student who you know is capable and would do the stuff if she didn’t have these other circumstances,” she said.

Now Baurichter is committed to taking an even more equitable approach to teaching after the pandemic so that students with working parents and from low-income families are not penalized. She wants more work to get done in the classroom and less at home so that students have access to the help and supplies they need.

Through her time teaching remotely, Baurichter has learned not to make assumptions about students’ home situations. Having her son at home all day while teaching courses has also inspired her to be more empathetic. Going forward, she said she wants to be more understanding in order to alleviate students’ anxiety and promote fairness: “It’s definitely solidified what is most important,” she said.

“It’s really difficult for me to just teach by speaking at a child”

Lauren Andersen, fifth-grade special education teacher at Lido Elementary School, Long Beach, New York

“My students learn differently,” said Lauren Andersen, who described the necessity of using physical objects and visuals to stimulate her special needs students in the classroom. Now that she’s had to switch to online learning, she said it’s been difficult to keep her students engaged.

Courtesy of J.C. Penney Portrait Studio

On top of that, many of the online teaching resources she’s using are not user-friendly for either her or her students. But she has committed to learning the ins and outs of different platforms like Google Classroom and Google Slides to create activities that are usable for her students.

Andersen does not give letter grades to students normally, but she is still responsible for giving them written feedback. For these, Andersen has made clear that their health is the first priority, especially because some students at her school have gotten sick, or have family members who have. “I feel like my school is really understanding of the importance of the emotional and social well-being of the child first and foremost, rather than their grades,” she said.

Andersen started a program called “meet and eat,” where her students meet every Friday to eat lunch together and have face-to-face interaction. She said this helps encourage socialization among her students. “Because of the nature of my class, it’s really difficult for me to just teach by speaking at a child,” she said. “Most of my work is differentiating and moderating content to make it accessible for each child based on his or her needs and abilities.”

Meet and eat has become her favorite part of the week, because her students are excited and present, and it makes things “seem normal again.”

While online teaching has been difficult, Andersen wants to continue to integrate the technological discoveries she has made, such as the meet and eats, into the classroom. “I feel like a lot of my colleagues, teaching assistants, and myself have just become more tech-savvy, and as a result, I feel like we’re able to come up with really innovative ideas that may have never even passed through our minds before,” she said.

“It may be that I never go back to the grading systems that I have used up to now”

Patrick Iber, associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin

Patrick Iber was teaching a large lecture class of about 80 students on Latin American history this semester when the pandemic hit and he was forced to move his classes online. Iber said he generally puts a lot of effort into student interaction so that his students feel connected to one another in his courses and encourages them to communicate with one another, meet in small groups, and work out problems together. But Iber said that this kind of collaboration proved difficult with remote learning.

“The biggest challenge, I think, was maintaining a sense of community around the classroom,” he said.

Iber explained that at the University of Wisconsin Madison, after students see their final letter grades, they can elect to switch them to pass/fail. This system is intended to reward students who are in good standing in their courses, while avoiding penalizing those who are not due to personal circumstances.

“I think it’s actually a very good policy on an emergency basis,” Iber said.

But this semester has also prompted him to revisit the grading system he has in place and consider moving to an even more progressive model for the fall. “I have been thinking a lot about what kind of grading system would be even remotely fair under these kinds of conditions or other conditions,” Iber said, adding that he was already skeptical of grading systems before this crisis. “It’s making me think more deeply about what grades are for and why we assign them and why we have the system that we have in place for them.”

Remote learning has made Iber more aware of his students’ situations at home; some of them are dealing with “enormous family crises” like health issues and homelessness. Students have been more communicative and open with him about what they are going through since classes moved online.

“They know what I’m dealing with at home, and now I often know what they’re dealing with at home,” he said.

Going forward, Iber is interested in further reforming grading systems to be more collaborative and focused on self-reflection.

“It may be that I never go back to the grading systems that I have used up to now,” he said.

“Some students have to share like one or two laptops across five or six kids”

Joseph Grabowski, ninth-grade algebra I teacher at Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School, South Hadley, Massachusetts

“Student engagement and access” have been the biggest obstacles for Joseph Grabowski as he has acclimated to remote learning.

Grabowski teaches at a charter school, and his students come from around 40 different districts in Western and Central Massachusetts. As a result, some of his students had long, tiring commutes to school for in-person classes. At home, some do not have access to internet or other technology, have to share one laptop with five or six people, or have to look after younger siblings who are all learning remotely.

Courtesy of Mackenzie Sulliva

Initially, the administration at Grabowski’s school opted to move to pass/fail grading, following the lead of other schools and universities in the area. But after getting intense backlash from families and even teachers, the school returned to its original standards-based grading system, “with the little caveat that work during this remote learning cannot lower students’ grades,” Grabowski explained.

He said he believes there is no “clear answer” about how to grade right now: “Pass/fail for the semester makes a lot of sense but is tough for colleges and GPAs,” he said. “Using the existing grading scheme is inequitable for students who can not participate in remote learning as meaningfully as other students.”

He also stressed the value of written feedback in comparison to grades: “I think feedback during this time is the best thing we can give kids,” he said.

But some of Grabowski’s students are thriving in the new environment. One of his students had a difficult time in school up to the start of remote learning, often skipping classes, hiding in stairwells, and not participating in the classroom.

But since the start of online learning, the student has been doing much better: “Now with the remote learning, they’re constantly engaged, submitting assignments; they’re always logging in to virtual meetings,” he said. He thinks this is because doing work online alleviates some of the anxiety associated with social interaction in large groups, and publicly sharing ideas.

A lot of Grabowski’s students have made comments about how they miss being in the classroom and dislike the online learning experience, so it has been nice for him to see someone benefit from virtual school: “For this student, it’s actually been a really eye-opening experience,” he said.

“The value of a student right now is not on their production”

Dalia Zada, seventh- and eighth-grade visual arts and art history teacher at KIPP Adelante Preparatory, San Diego, California

All of Dalia Zada’s students who needed technology support were provided access to a Chromebook and wifi, so the biggest challenge of remote learning for her has largely been centered on student accountability.

Courtesy of Dalia Zada

It has been hard to monitor students who are not completing work on, checking Google Classroom, or coming to her daily morning meetings, she said. She has also struggled with evaluating her students: “How do I grade a child during a pandemic?” she asked.

Students will not be receiving grades for the final quarter of the school year, although teachers have only communicated this to parents, not students, in order to ensure students complete their work.

“We’re just really focusing on student relationships,” Zada said. She also emphasized the importance of checking in with students about how they are doing at a time when people across the country are struggling with their mental health.

Zada is concerned, however, about the general fairness of grading students for mastery when they all come from different socioeconomic and family backgrounds: “It’s basically penalizing students who are low-income or lack access to a device,” she said. She has made an effort to tell her students that as long as they communicate with her, ask for help, and come to her office hours, they will pass the course.

“Kids and parents are going to look back on this time and they’re going to see which schools and which teachers made the pandemic more stressful for them,” she said.

At 10 am, Tuesday through Friday, one of Zada’s seventh-graders comes to her office hours and presents a compilation of memes to her that he creates himself, titled “Dank Memes for Ms. Zada.” He also teaches her about dinosaurs, a topic he loves.

“It’s the live moments I get where I can laugh with my students and feel some sense of normalcy that I’ve really been grateful for,” Zada said.

Based on surveys that teachers have collected, a lot of Zada’s students are struggling with depression and anxiety as a result of the pandemic. “We don’t know what’s happening, but what makes me happy to know is that we are teaching kids to build a very important skill of self-reliance, but also asking for help and reaching out,” she said.

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