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The gentleman's "A": new evidence that tough-grading teachers elicit better student performance.

Article Excerpt
WITH REPORTS THAT SOME OF THE NATION'S FINEST UNIVERSITIES have been handing out A's like lollipops at Halloween, the lowering of standards in higher education has become a hot topic. But grading standards in primary and secondary education have received remarkably less attention.

There are two major questions related to grading standards. First, to what degree do the grades distributed by schools and teachers correspond to their students' performance on state and national exams? Second, and more important, how does "tough" or "easy" grading affect students' learning?

The literature on these questions is extremely thin. In fact, to our knowledge, the analysis presented here represents the first study to examine the grading standards of individual teachers and how those standards affect students' performance on independent exams. Our data set enabled us to examine the test-score gains of individual students from grade to grade across three school years. Thus we can see how individual students perform on nationally normed exams as they move from "tough" to "easy" grading teachers and vice versa. Our results suggest that elementary-school students learn more with "tough" teachers, with the effects varying depending on students' initial performance levels and on the overall performance level of their classrooms.

Measuring Grading Standards

For this study, we analyzed confidential data provided by the school board of Alachua County, Florida, which includes the city of Gainesville. The data consist of observations on almost every 3rd, 4th, and 5th grader in the school system between the 1995-96 and 1998-99 school years, allowing us to follow two cohorts with three years of data each. Alachua County Public Schools is a relatively large district (by national standards), averaging about 1,800 test-taking students per grade, per year. The county is racially diverse, with a student population that is 60 percent white, 34 percent African-American, 3 percent Hispanic, and 2 percent Asian. Nearly half of all students are eligible for subsidized lunches, while 19 percent are identified as gifted, 8 percent as learning disabled, and less than 1 percent as English learners.

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Alachua County provides a unique advantage for a study of this nature because it administers both the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS), a nationally normed exam, and the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT). The FCAT was designed to measure the degree to which students are meeting the Sunshine State Standards, which are also supposed to be the basis for students' letter grades. Today, the state uses the FCAT both to rate public schools as part of the "A+" accountability plan and to determine whether students in certain grades are promoted to the next grade. During the period covered by our data, however, these tests were used for informative and diagnostic purposes only (though they were publicly reported each year at the school level).

Students receive scores on the FCAT ranging from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest), with the thresholds for each performance level designed to correspond...