what are grades?
In schools, what is a grade?
Well a grade typically is found either on a scale of F- to A+, F to A, or 0% to 100%, or some other fractional representation such as 33/55(in which would be 33 correct marks on a test with 55 marks).
But what I actually want to write down is how is a grade determined? I'm going to lay it out procedurally.
At least in lower secondary public australian schools. A grade is a teachers interpretation of a rubrick upon work which was presented and informed based of a students interpretation of a task sheet that was (often) created alongside a rubrick from a teacher's(not necessarily the one grading) interpretation of curiculumn subject guidelines. However it also often includes biases that influence grade such as student 'effort' and quality of things that the rubrick alone nay not state.
In upper secondary in south australian public schools. A grade is typically a teachers interpretation of a rubrick or a subject outline upon a peice of work created from the students interpretation of the rubrick and/or subject outline. Often not including or including less biases such as 'effort' as work in upper primary goes towards SACE(south australian certificate of education and if a teacher grades it and then moderators grade it again and get a different result and cannot see a reason why it was different the teacher gets in trouble for bad grading.
So there is a lot of interpretation that goes into grading student work. And importantly it represents student knowledge and capability at a given point in time. But learning is not linear. So I think it would be an excellent thing to try and measure student learning across time?