Author: Clay Shumate

Standards-based grading fails in practice more often than its advocates admit, and almost never for the reason its critics give. The objection is rarely that measuring proficiency against standards is a bad idea. It is that schools adopt a system requiring absolute consistency, deliver it inconsistently, and then discover that students, teachers and families all noticed.

This article takes the objections seriously rather than dismissing them as resistance to change. Several of them are correct.

If you want the case for it and what the evidence shows, that is a separate piece: what standards-based grading is and what the research supports. This one is the other half.

Key Takeaways

• Teachers are not marginally opposed to some of this. In a survey of nearly 1,000, 81 percent called no-zero policies harmful.
• Students object on specific, checkable grounds — inconsistency between teachers above all, not a general dislike of change.
• Reassessment can be socially costly. Some students said it made them appear stupid, which no policy document accounts for.
• Piecemeal adoption is the norm and the problem. These practices were designed as a connected system; almost nobody implements them that way.
• The most common failure is sequencing. Changing the report card before agreeing the standards produces a form nobody can complete consistently.
• None of this makes it a bad idea. Most of it makes it a bad idea right now, in a specific building, under specific conditions.

What Teachers Actually Say

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, working with RAND, surveyed nearly a thousand K–12 teachers about grading policies commonly bundled with standards-based and equitable grading reform. The results are not close.

Eighty-one percent rated no-zero policies as harmful, with the consensus holding across demographic groups. Fifty-six percent said the same about removing late penalties. Unlimited retakes were the most accepted of the five policies studied, and even there the split was 41 percent helpful against 37 percent harmful.

A leader looking at those numbers has two options. Conclude that most of the profession is wrong, or take seriously that the people delivering the policy think it damages engagement.

There is a detail in that survey which matters more than the headline. Only 6 percent of teachers worked in districts using four or more of these policies, and just 2 percent had all five. Researchers flagged that piecemeal adoption as a concern, because the practices were designed as an interconnected system rather than standalone interventions.

Which means a large share of the teachers rating these policies harmful were rating them as they experienced them — one piece, bolted onto a system built on different assumptions. A no-zero policy inside a traditional points gradebook really is incoherent. That is not a misunderstanding on the teacher’s part. It is an accurate reading of a half-finished reform.

Writing for Fordham, Meredith Coffey makes a related argument: doing this well depends on school-level adaptation rather than district mandate, on standards rigorous enough that “meeting expectations” means something, and on students having genuine opportunities to demonstrate competency. Her named failure modes are a low bar, a top-down mandate without buy-in, and large schools with high teacher turnover.

What Students Say — and Why They Are Mostly Right

The most useful study here is secondary-specific, which is rare in this field. Peters, Kruse, Buckmiller and Townsley analysed over 500 critical statements from students at one high school during its first year of standards-based grading, published in American Secondary Education.

Inconsistency came first. As one student put it, “some teachers do it sometimes, others all the time, and some don’t do it at all.” Reassessment timelines, eligibility and limits all varied by classroom.

Read that as a finding rather than a complaint. A student is describing, accurately, a system that promises objectivity and delivers a different rule in every room. Their conclusion — that it is unfair — is a reasonable inference from the evidence available to them.

Homework counting for nothing came second. Students had done the work and watched the grade not move. The theory is sound: effort is a work habit, not evidence of proficiency. But if that has not been explained repeatedly, what a fifteen-year-old experiences is the school announcing that their effort was pointless.

Reassessment carried social cost. Some students said it made them “appear stupid.” This one rarely appears in implementation plans at all, and it is the one I find most persuasive, because no amount of policy design removes it. If reassessing is visible, it is a public statement about who did not get it the first time.

Motivation shifted early. Students reported studying less at first, reasoning they could just reassess later. That is rational behaviour in response to the incentives as they understood them.

The limitations, which the authors state: one high school of about 500 students, predominantly white and economically advantaged, during a first year of implementation when inconsistency would be at its peak, with the analysis deliberately focused on critical comments in order to understand resistance. Three of the four authors were university professors who use standards-based grading themselves. So this is not a representative picture of how students feel everywhere — it is a detailed picture of what goes wrong in year one.

The Reassessment Problem, and What I Do About It

When I need to redirect a student, I do it quietly, at close range, rather than announcing it to the room. It takes the same number of seconds and it costs the student nothing in front of thirty people.

The reassessment stigma finding is the same problem wearing different clothes. A student who has to publicly identify as someone who did not meet the standard has been handed a cost the policy never intended and never accounted for.

Most of the fix is logistical rather than philosophical. Reassessment that happens quietly, at a normal time, in a way that does not mark anyone out — scheduled during work everyone is doing, arranged in a two-word conversation at the table rather than announced, with more than one student doing it at once wherever possible. None of that changes the grading system. All of it changes whether a fifteen-year-old will use it.

A reassessment policy nobody will be seen using is not a reassessment policy. It is a line in a handbook.

The Objections That Do Not Hold Up

Not every criticism survives contact with the detail, and it is worth separating those out rather than treating all resistance as equally well founded.

• “It lowers standards.” It can, if “meeting expectations” is set at a trivial bar — Coffey names exactly that as a failure mode. But that is a decision about rigour, not a property of the system. A traditional gradebook with generous partial credit lowers standards just as effectively and less visibly.
• “Students will game the retakes.” Some will, early on, and the student data confirms it. It is also the objection most easily fixed by a written rule about what a student must do to earn a reassessment. “Unlimited” is not a policy.
• “It does not prepare them for the real world.” Most work outside school involves revision, feedback and redoing things until they are right. The single-attempt model is the unusual one.
• “Colleges do not use it.” Students raised this and it is a genuine anxiety, but it is a transcript-conversion question rather than an argument about grading. It has an answer; schools just have to give it before the first report card rather than after.

The pattern across all four: each is a real risk that a school can design against, and each becomes a genuine failure when nobody does.

When Standards-Based Grading Is the Wrong Move Right Now

Five conditions under which the honest recommendation is “not yet.”

The first is the one that sinks most rollouts. If the standards themselves are not written in language a student could read, there is nothing to grade against, and every teacher will invent their own — which produces precisely the inconsistency students identified as the core injustice.

The second is structural and largely outside a teacher’s control. A district mandate with no buy-in is the documented failure mode, and Coffey’s argument is that school-level adaptation is what makes this work. A staff told to implement something they do not understand will implement five different versions of it.

And the last one is the cheapest to fix and the most often skipped. Families will ask about transcripts and college on day one. Not having an answer does not make the question go away; it just means the first person to answer it will be someone on a parents’ group who has guessed.

What to Do Next

If your school is considering this, the most useful meeting you can have is not about the report card. It is about whether every teacher in a department would give the same proficiency level to the same piece of work. Test it — take one student’s work, have four teachers score it independently, and compare.

If the answers diverge, you have found the actual problem, and it is the same problem whether you are grading by standards or by percentages. Standards-based grading did not cause it. It just makes it visible to students, who will then tell you it is unfair, and they will be right.

Fix the agreement first. The free proficiency-level rubrics are a reasonable place to start that conversation, no email required.

The conversion objection deserves its own answer rather than a footnote. Turning proficiency levels back into a percentage is the point where most of these arguments actually stall.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

• Peters, R., Kruse, J., Buckmiller, T., & Townsley, M. (2017). “It’s just not fair!” Making sense of secondary students’ resistance to a standards-based grading. American Secondary Education, 45(3), 9–28. Full text (PDF) — one high school, first year of implementation, predominantly white and economically advantaged; analysis focused deliberately on critical statements.
• Geduld, A. (2025, September 17). A thousand teachers were asked about “equitable” grading. Most didn’t like it. The 74. Read the article — reporting on a Thomas B. Fordham Institute survey conducted with RAND. The survey itself was not read directly; this article is the source for the figures quoted above.
• Coffey, M. (2025, October 2). Standards-based grading can benefit students — in the right context. Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Read the commentary — the source for the conditions for success and the named failure modes.
• Marsh, V. L. (2023, November). Standards-based grading: History, practices, benefits, and challenges. Center for Urban Education Success, University of Rochester. Read the brief (PDF) — context on the implementation dip and stakeholder resistance.

Every link above was checked on September 12, 2026. Two of these sources are advocacy or commentary rather than primary research, and the text says which is which.

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A standards-based grading system reports what a student can do against specific course standards, using a small number of proficiency levels, with academic achievement kept separate from behaviour. It is a better communication system than traditional grading. It is not, on the current evidence, a way to raise achievement — and the people who research it say so plainly.

That gap between what standards-based grading is good at and what schools are often told it will do is where most implementations fail. A staff that adopts it expecting test scores to move will conclude in year two that it did not work, and they will be measuring the wrong thing.

This is what it actually is, what the research shows and does not show, and what goes wrong.

Key Takeaways

• Three criteria define it: report on standards, use three to five levels, and separate achievement from behaviour. Everything else is a local choice.
• The clearest benefit is accuracy of meaning. A standards-based grade tells you what a student can do; an 87 percent does not.
• There is no evidence it raises achievement. That is Guskey’s own conclusion, not a critic’s.
• One comparison found the opposite on test scores. Students at a traditionally graded school scored about 2.2 points higher on the ACT — with serious limits on what that can prove.
• Retakes are the fight, and they are not part of the definition. Guskey argues against writing them in.
• Curriculum alignment comes before the report card. Schools that reverse the order generate confusion and then abandon the whole thing.

What a Standards-Based Grading System Actually Is

Three defining criteria, from Linka and Guskey’s review in Theory Into Practice.

Report performance on key course standards rather than a single blended content-area grade. Use a limited number of performance categories, usually three to five. And report academic achievement separately from noncognitive factors like effort, homework completion and conduct.

That third one does most of the work. In a traditional gradebook an 87 percent might be a student who understands the material and forgets to hand things in, or a student who understands very little and hands in everything on time. Those are different students with different needs, and the single number hides which one you have.

Notice what is not in the definition: unlimited retakes. Guskey is explicit that bolting additional assessment requirements onto the definition adds confusion and can produce unreliable outcomes. Reassessment policy is a separate decision, and treating it as part of the definition is why so many staff conversations about standards-based grading immediately become arguments about retakes.

What the Evidence Actually Shows

Here is the honest summary, and it is more mixed than either side of this argument usually admits.

What is supported. Standards-based grades show a stronger relationship with external measures of achievement than traditional grades do. In plain terms: the grade means more, because it is measuring one thing rather than several mixed together.

What is not shown. Guskey states it directly: no grading system by itself improves student learning, and no evidence indicates that standards-based grading improves student achievement. He also notes the approach remains largely unstudied, with much of the published guidance drawn from general grading research rather than from studies of standards-based systems specifically.

And one result that points the other way. Townsley and Varga compared two demographically similar Midwestern high schools, one traditionally graded and one standards-based, across 327 students in two cohorts. They found no significant differences in GPA — but students at the traditionally graded school scored significantly higher on the ACT, by roughly 2.2 to 2.7 points depending on the subtest.

That finding deserves its caveats stated rather than buried. It is quasi-experimental, not randomised: two schools that differ in grading also differ in a hundred other ways, and nothing here establishes that the grading system caused the gap. The authors say the results are limited to the schools studied and call for replication in more diverse settings. Both schools were small, under 15 percent free or reduced lunch, and had minimal ethnic diversity.

It is one study and it cannot carry a policy. It also should not be left out, which is what usually happens to it.

So Why Do It?

Because “does it raise test scores” is not the only question worth asking about a grading system, and it may not even be the right one.

A grade is a communication. Its job is to tell a student, a family and a future teacher what this person can currently do. Traditional percentage grading does that job badly — it blends understanding, compliance, timeliness and effort into one number and then reports the number to three decimal places of implied precision.

Valerie Marsh’s research brief for the University of Rochester’s Center for Urban Education Success catalogues the reported benefits: reduced test anxiety through reassessment, clearer learning objectives, a classroom culture that talks about learning rather than points, and better communication with families. She also cites a Kentucky Algebra 2 study in which the percentage of students doing well on exams nearly doubled compared with traditionally graded peers.

Hold that Kentucky figure loosely. It is a single course in a single context, reported in a brief rather than read here in the original, and it sits alongside Guskey’s broader conclusion that achievement gains are not established. The defensible claim is about clarity, not scores.

If you want a reason that survives scrutiny: standards-based grading makes it much harder to hide a student who is quietly failing behind a wall of completed homework, and much harder to fail a student who understands the material but is disorganised. Both of those are worth having on their own terms.

Catching It Before It Sets

The most useful thing I do in a lesson has nothing to do with the gradebook. I circulate, and every so often I overhear a group working from a misconception that is about to spread to the table next to them.

Catching it there costs thirty seconds. Catching it on a unit test costs a week and a conversation with four families.

That is the honest case for standards-based grading, stated small. A system organised around specific standards makes you notice which standard a student is actually missing, rather than noticing that their average dropped. It does not make the noticing happen — walking around and listening does that. But a gradebook organised by standard means that when you do notice, there is somewhere obvious to record it and somewhere obvious to look next month to see whether it got fixed.

A percentage column cannot do that. It can only go up and down.

Where It Goes Wrong

Marsh’s brief groups the failures into four categories, and every one of them is an implementation problem rather than an evidence problem.

Inconsistent understanding. Teachers report awareness of the principles but struggle to identify which ones apply. A staff using different principles under the same name produces exactly the confusion you would expect, and confusion is what precedes abandonment.

The reassessment argument. Critics argue unlimited retakes do not reflect situations outside school and may demoralise students who cannot reach proficiency after several attempts. That is a serious objection, not a reactionary one, and a school that has not answered it will have the argument anyway — just later and in public.

Stakeholder resistance. Parents worry about work habits, college admission and scholarships. Teachers cite workload and grade inflation. Students worry about inconsistent implementation and college readiness. Marsh notes that most of the resistance research involved suburban, predominantly white, high-achieving populations — worth knowing before assuming those concerns will show up identically in your building.

The implementation dip. Work completion often falls early, as students feeling less accountable turn in fewer assignments and performance temporarily drops. Schools that did not expect this read it as failure in month three and reverse course.

Guskey’s structural advice cuts through most of this: start with curriculum alignment, not with the report card. Changing the form before agreeing what the standards are produces a new-looking document that nobody can fill in consistently.

The objections deserve more room than a summary. A companion article on why standards-based grading does not work takes them seriously — what nearly a thousand teachers said about no-zero policies and retakes, what secondary students identified as the core unfairness, and the five conditions under which the honest answer is not yet.

Standards-Based Grading vs Traditional Grading

The difference is not strictness. Both systems can be demanding or lax. The difference is what the number refers to.

	Traditional	Standards-based
The grade measures	Points accumulated across assignments	Current proficiency on named standards
Late work	Usually reduces the academic grade	Reported separately as a work habit
Early failure	Averaged in permanently	Superseded if the student demonstrates the standard later
What a parent learns	A number, and a guess at what caused it	Which specific things their child can and cannot do
Main risk	Hides both struggling and disorganised students	Inconsistent application across a department

The third row is the one families ask about, and it is worth answering directly rather than defensively. Yes, a student who could not do it in September and can do it in November is recorded as able to do it. That is the entire argument — a grade is supposed to describe current ability, and averaging in a September failure describes a student who no longer exists. It is the same reasoning behind giving students accountability and another chance everywhere else.

If You Are Starting This in One Classroom

1. List the standards first. Six to ten for the course, in language a student can read. This is the step schools skip and it is the whole foundation.
2. Pick your levels and define them. Three to five, with a written descriptor for each. Vague levels are worse than percentages.
3. Split the gradebook. One section for achievement by standard, one for work habits. Do this before you change anything a family sees.
4. Decide the reassessment rule in advance — and write down what a student must do to earn one. “Unlimited” is not a policy; it is the absence of one.
5. Tell families in writing, early. Transcripts and scholarships are a legitimate concern. Say how your school converts this for those purposes.
6. Expect the dip. Work completion may fall first. Plan for it rather than being surprised by it.

The rubric work is the heaviest lift. If you want a starting point, there are proficiency-level descriptors already written that you can adapt to your own standards, free and with no email required. For speaking and listening specifically, there is a four-criterion discussion rubric on the same terms.

The other heavy lift is the gradebook itself. A traditional gradebook averages everything you put in it, which quietly undoes the thing you are trying to do, and most teachers discover that in week three rather than in August. If you want the setup decisions made before the year starts, here is how the gradebook has to be built for any of this to survive contact with a real grading period.

What to Do Next

Be honest with yourself about what you expect from it. If you are hoping for higher test scores, the evidence does not promise them and one comparison points mildly the other way. If you want a grade that tells the truth about what a student can do, that is a real and defensible reason, and it is the one the research actually supports.

Start with the standards list for one course. Not the report card, not the software, not a department vote. Six to ten statements about what a student should be able to do by June — written where a fifteen-year-old could read them and tell you which ones they have got. Most of the value of this system shows up the moment that list exists, whatever you end up doing with the gradebook.

When you do get to the gradebook, the next thing to settle is the scale itself — and converting a 1–4 level into a report-card grade is where most implementations get stuck.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

• Linka, L. J., & Guskey, T. R. (2022). Is standards-based grading effective? Theory Into Practice, 61(4). Full text (PDF) — the source for the three defining criteria, the conclusion that no evidence indicates SBG improves achievement, and the caution against writing retakes into the definition.
• Townsley, M., & Varga, M. (2017). Getting high school students ready for college: A quantitative study of standards-based grading practices. Journal of Research in Education, 28(1), 93–112. Full text (PDF) — 327 students across two Midwestern high schools; no GPA difference, higher ACT scores at the traditionally graded school. Quasi-experimental; the authors limit the finding to the schools studied.
• Marsh, V. L. (2023, November). Standards-based grading: History, practices, benefits, and challenges. Center for Urban Education Success, University of Rochester Warner School of Education. Read the brief (PDF) — the source for the benefits list, the four categories of challenge, the implementation dip, and the Kentucky Algebra 2 figure, which is reported in the brief rather than read here in the original.

Every link above was checked on September 12, 2026. Where a finding is contested or comes from a single study, the text says so in the body rather than leaving it to a footnote.

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