Opinion: Grading Inequalities in Some Multi-Section Couses

There seems to be a strange kind of luck built into some multi-section courses at Deerfield: some students get the “lenient” teachers, whilst other students get the “harsher” ones. Ending up with the more “favored” teacher seems to bypass the course’s workload and difficulty, highlighting how significant a role teachers play in determining student grades. To combat these ambiguous grading scales, the academy should implement a rubric with explicit guidelines for every graded writing assignment.

Dean of Academic Affairs Anne Bruder acknowledged that “there are courses where that alignment has not yet clicked into place.” That being said, inconsistent grading is yet to be addressed in some multi-section courses. Teachers’ inconsistent grading systems can overshadow students’ efforts, allowing students with more lenient teachers to put in less effort to achieve the same grade, creating an unfair shortcut. On transcripts, the grade received serves as the sole indicator of a student’s performance in the course; teachers’ names do not appear. Since students taking the same course often end up applying to similar-tier colleges, and students strive for higher grades more often than not, this fosters a culture where students “pick teachers” when choosing courses rather than actually signing up for a course they are intellectually curious about. 

In response to grading inconsistency in the same course, Dr. Bruder stated “The very thing you’re talking about is [solved] through an exercise called table grading. Teachers of multi-section courses look at each other's students and norm the way that they're grading.” However, table grading is not transparent to students, and even in the same assignment, inconsistencies sometimes exist among teachers due to subjective interpretations. While this method aims to reduce disparities, teachers can’t collaborate on the same writing piece if they assign different prompts at the same time.

In addition, relying on occasional table discussions is not promising because in humanities courses, teacher-specific formative assessments are weighted the same, and sometimes even more, than summative assessments. Dean of Teaching and Learning Hadley Westman said, “There were five shared graded assessments at the 10th grade level.” The rest of the writing tasks students received throughout the year were still graded based on the teacher’s own standards.

Dr. Bruder also claimed, “There was a time when the academic dean said the school median must be an 89. We no longer mandate a school-wide median. Instead, we remind teachers to use the full range of a hundred-point scale.” Teachers now have more freedom and do not follow a strict grading range. Some may argue that absolute standardization reduces teacher autonomy and that teachers are drawn to Deerfield because they can design their own assessments and learning objectives, especially in the humanities subjects. Especially underclassmen don’t really have the option to choose the courses, so they may not fully understand the direction those teachers are taking. In a mutli-section course, creative liberties can also be reflected through a shared rubric, course learning outcomes and syllabus planning that each teacher can, too, contribute their unique viewpoints.

For example, the ninth-grade English course Voices and Visions of Justice  focuses on different texts and writing assignments, and teachers have different guidelines and standards for the same task. Jay Chen ’29 commented, “It seems like every class has different due dates for our declamation. In the final performance, elements such as including personal experience, which were banned in my class, appeared in some presenters’ declamations.” Students should be informed when such deviations occur, and in some cases, they doubt whether it is consistently applied.

A feasible solution is for teachers to provide a clear rubric for every graded assignment, with rows for criteria and columns for performance levels. This would help students understand their standing and make grading more transparent, since scores can be calculated clearly. It would also be easier for teachers to agree on a shared rubric than to compare subjective writing pieces. Teachers should be responsible for providing these rubrics. Although it requires more work, they can be reused over time.

In the Student Handbook, the academic affairs states that, “Deerfield’s teachers, many of whom have advanced degrees in their field of study, provide both structure and a caring atmosphere for learning.” When teachers start to affect students’ grades more than themselves, the system stops being fully fair. Deerfield has made clear progress toward standardization, but partial alignment is not enough when grades carry such high stakes. If the school commits to academic integrity and students’ academic growth and success, grading consistency is demanded.