The biases we carry can slip into our grading practices without our realizing it. I (Dwayne) am reminded of a conversation with Michael, a Black male student, who shared his frustration with homework and how teachers graded it. His teachers would give grades based on the accuracy of his work and on the effort they perceived he put into it. Michael became anxious about ensuring his work was visually appealing, turning things in on time, and appearing to put in the “right” amount of effort to receive full credit.
Although schools have aimed to move past such grading practices, research shows teachers often mix academic assessment with learning behaviors, making grading more about measuring compliance than reflecting content mastery.
Michael’s case highlights how this type of grading can reinforce inequities, particularly for students from marginalized communities. While all students may be expected to “jump through the same hoops,” those hoops are not equally challenging for everyone. When grading is based on perceived effort and presentation, it can place extra pressure on students from diverse backgrounds to conform to dominant cultural norms of “acceptable” student behavior. This is also where bias too commonly lies—not in the intent of the teachers, but in the unintentional reinforcement of disparities through grading that does not strictly measure learning.
So, how can schools ensure assessments accurately reflect each student’s learning? By intentionally elevating equitable and culturally relevant grading practices.
Removing Bias From Grading
Equitable grading practices address each student’s achievement of intended learning goals and help remove bias from grading. But they go beyond simply offering culturally relevant assessments—equitable grading practices must account for the diverse ways students learn and demonstrate understanding. This means grading should recognize and fairly evaluate different approaches to showcasing knowledge, ensuring they are valued rather than overlooked. Equitable and culturally relevant grading can be summarized in three key principles:
1. Base grades on culturally relevant assessments.
2. View work through a cultural lens.
3. Apply equitable grading practices.
1. Base Students’ Grades on Culturally Relevant Assessments
Grading should accurately assess each student’s understanding and skills. Culturally relevant assessments aim to achieve this by positioning students to fully showcase their learning. For example, as a 5th grade teacher in an urban school, I (Dwayne) saw students struggle with an assessment question about zucchini bread—not due to a lack of content knowledge, but because zucchini bread was unfamiliar in their cultural context, leading to frustration and disconnection from the assessment.
Inaccuracies in outcomes begin when students can’t relate to the assessment. Designing culturally relevant assessments requires thoughtfully considering students’ backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives to ensure content is inclusive and relatable. This approach to intentional assessment design requires following key steps with critical questions to guard against bias.
Align items/tasks, teaching, and student learning.
Ensure the assessment aligns with clear, shared learning goals that are meaningful and accessible to every student. For teachers, this looks like reviewing tasks and testing items with critical questions in mind:
- What is essential for my students to be able to showcase on this assessment?
- How well does the assessment align with the learning experiences my students and I had while engaging with the content?
- How does this assessment support the assets, values, and learning preferences of each student?
Ensure sensitivity to language complexity and technical terms.
When assessments aren’t designed with students’ language backgrounds and learning contexts in mind, they can unintentionally exclude or marginalize learners who cannot relate to the dominant language or narratives used. For example, a math test asking students to “justify” their answers may confuse English learners, even if they can explain their thinking in different wording.
To prevent this, teachers should review assessment language to ensure directions and questions use familiar terms and relatable contexts. Thoughtful wording isn’t about making tests easier—it’s about respecting diverse backgrounds and ensuring all students have a fair chance to succeed. Content-relevant vocabulary is important, but students must have had the opportunity to learn it. Here are some critical questions to guide in this process:
- How do directions and test items account for students’ communication styles and linguistic backgrounds? Are they written in a way all students can understand?
- How are students asked to leverage their cultural capital as a resource through assessment instructions and testing items?
Uplift a wide range of cultural contexts.
Assessments should offer multiple pathways for students to connect learning to their lives. For example, in a history class, instead of assigning an essay on a historical figure, students might write a journal entry from a familial or cultural perspective (relating to the historical figure) or give an oral presentation to connect the material to a current issue in their community or lives. When students see themselves in their learning, they engage more deeply and can better showcase their understanding. Teachers can ask themselves:
- How do test items or performance tasks relate to the lived experiences or cultural contexts of various students?
- How do test items or performance tasks appropriately represent and honor who students are as learners? Do the items or tasks reflect what students bring to the assessment?
Ensure students are stretched but not frustrated.
Finding the right level of challenge helps keep students in the “learning zone,” where they feel stretched but not stressed. When reviewing an assessment, watch for questions that might discourage students or hurt their performance by being an unhealthy match with their abilities. The goal is not to lower expectations, but to ensure each question is both challenging and achievable for each student. Consider:
- How do the test items or performance tasks show an understanding of the “sweet spot” between students’ learning levels and potential frustration?
- How do the test items or performance tasks relate to feedback students have received around targeted learning goals?
When analyzing student work, look for evidence of their thinking, not just what score they received.
2. View Student Work Through a Cultural Lens Before Finalizing Grades
Ensuring an assessment is culturally relevant requires more than intent—it requires careful review. When analyzing student work, look for evidence of their thinking, not just whether they were correct or what score they received.
Consider whether any factor beyond learning influenced their responses. Did the student interpret the task as intended and demonstrate rigorous thinking, or did an unintended barrier or marginalization occur? If so, reassess the learning goal using another method, formal or informal, possibly including a conversation with the student.
I (Sue) still remember being a young substitute teacher many years ago. While this example came from a standardized test, it was my first real experience with the concept of relevance in assessment, and it has stuck with me.
One day, I was called in to substitute in a self-contained 2nd grade class in a local city elementary school. All the classes that day were taking a standardized test that included a primary level vocabulary test with a picture for each item and then a choice of four words. One of the pictures showed a sketch of a detached garage and four word choices including, of course, “garage.”
At lunch in the teachers’ lounge, you could practically see the steam rising off the head of one of the other 2nd grade teachers who had noticed this and was very angry. The area of town around this elementary school consisted mostly of older row houses—houses that shared side walls—that were built in the early 20th century before people commonly had cars. No one in the neighborhood had a garage, detached or otherwise, and cars were parked in the street. Most of the students in that school would never have seen anything that looked like the sketch on that test item. So, if they got the item wrong, you wouldn’t know whether they couldn’t read “garage” (the intended interpretation) or simply didn’t recognize that the picture was, in fact, a garage and not a house or something else.
So it’s important for educators to consider different ways to interpret the students’ work. Key questions to ask include:
- Could there have been any reason other than student learning to explain the work the student did on the assessment?
- Does the student work show that the student interpreted the test item or performance task as you intended?
If you do suspect that the student may have either misinterpreted the item or task or had difficulty responding as intended, assess the same learning goal again, this time addressing what you suspect was the unintended barrier. Ask yourself:
- How can I revise or replace this item or task using different language or a different scenario that might be more familiar to the student, and still assess the same learning goal?
- Can I offer a different response mode? For example, could the student answer orally, or with a graphic or diagram, or a bulleted list, and still assess the same learning goal?
If the reassessment returns the same results as the original assessment, you have not wasted time—rather, you have additional evidence that the original conclusion was accurate, and that culture was not a barrier as you feared. However, if the reassessment produces different results, you now have more equitable and culturally relevant assessment information to use in grading.
3. Apply Equitable Grading Practices
Gathering evidence from culturally relevant assessments (principle #1) and verifying their effectiveness (principle #2) will lead to a set of results. The final step is to combine these results into an equitable report card grade. Ensure grades reflect students’ current achievement in the intended content so that outcomes remain consistent regardless of the teacher grading them. Equitable grading prevents equally knowledgeable students from receiving different grades due to subjective decisions. Five key practices can steer you in the right direction.
Report student performance on important grade-level or course standards.
Typically, districts use state or curriculum standards, or parts of them, as their curricular goals. Ensure all assessments contributing to final grades align with curricular goals and shared success criteria. Sometimes it is obvious that an assessment does not match a standard, as when a teacher gives students “credit” for bringing in pie on Pi Day. Others are subtler, such as including participation grades, which may reward extroversion over true engagement. Ask yourself:
- What learning goal does the standard describe—in terms of both content and cognitive level?
- What questions or tasks will give clear evidence of students’ learning regarding this goal? What scoring method will report this evidence in a sound and accurate manner?
- How can extraneous factors (e.g., artistic ability, reading ability, other unrelated knowledge and skills) be avoided in both test items or performance tasks and their scoring?
Use a limited number of performance categories.
Over a century of research shows that teachers cannot make the fine distinctions implied by the 0–100 scale. Shorter scales (e.g., Advanced, Proficient, Basic, Not Yet) help mitigate issues like inequities from assigning a 0 for missing work.
Consider:
- What grading scale is used in your school/district? If it is a short scale, (e.g., 4-3-2-1 or ABCDEF), how can you be sure you assign performance categories accurately? If it is not a short scale, how can you be part of a movement for change?
Report academic and non-academic performance separately.
Use evidence of student learning for academic grades, while reporting behavior, work habits, and participation separately. These measure different aspects of student performance. Academic evidence answers, “What is the student’s current achievement in key content?”, while non-academic evidence answers, “How does the student demonstrate behaviors that support learning?” Keeping these separate ensures grades accurately reflect learning rather than compliance. Here are key questions to consider:
- How will you ensure that the scoring schemes applied to graded work do not include non-achievement-related points (e.g., for following directions, for being late or absent)?
- How will you separately account for students’ learning skills and behaviors (e.g., promptness, neatness, cooperation, participation, respect)?
Reassessment opportunities recognize that students learn at different rates. The focus isn’t just about giving students a 'second chance' but about calibrating assessment to reflect true readiness.
Provide students with multiple opportunities for demonstrating success.
We use “multiple opportunities” here in two ways. First, using multiple evidence sources—such as a test and a project—provides a balanced view of student achievement, recognizing that students may excel in different formats. For example, a science test can assess broad conceptual understanding, while a project allows students to apply those concepts in depth.
Second, reassessment opportunities recognize that students learn at different rates. The focus isn’t just about giving students a “second chance” but about calibrating assessment to reflect true readiness. Ideally, teachers would assess each student individually when they are ready, but since that’s impractical, assessments happen when they suit most students. Reassessment, with appropriate statements about what the student has done to increase learning before reassessing, is the safety net that catches those students who weren’t ready, for whatever reason, at the time most other students were. These questions can help you think through both “multiples”:
- How do you use formative (practice) assessment information to inform decisions about when to administer a graded assessment?
- How will you set up a policy for redos and retakes, when needed, that honors students’ further learning, as well as teacher’s time, and leads to sound information (grades) about final achievement?
Provide multiple opportunities for formative assessment and feedback before you collect graded evidence.
Maybe we should have started with this one! Grading practice work is not fair, not logical, and, importantly for this discussion of equity in grading practices, privileges students who knew the content in the first place and did not need any instruction. Classroom learning begins with a learning goal, continues with instruction and practice so students move closer to the goal, and finally results in some level of achievement.
We’re not saying to ignore practice work—just not to grade it. Provide feedback and give students opportunities to use it for improvement. This doesn’t mean never assigning a number; an achievement level from a rubric can be useful as feedback, but it shouldn’t factor into the final grade. Consider the following questions:
- How will you build lessons into a sequence that engages students in understanding and pursuing learning goals, allows time for practice and feedback, and readies students to demonstrate their learning for a grade?
- How will you communicate to students the relationship between their formative assessment opportunities, including practice and feedback, and their grades?
The Impact of Equitable Grading
Academic injustice, like the behavior-based grading that Michael experienced, can be prevented when teachers recognize each student’s unique identity, knowledge, and skills. This means building a grading system that goes beyond simply balancing compliance with effort. The goal of all grading is to be equitable and relevant and to provide an avenue for students to demonstrate their learning progress and abilities. We are not saying that every student should automatically pass, but that students’ grades, whatever they are, should genuinely reflect what students have learned when they are given fair chances to show it.
Imagine if Michael had experienced a grading approach that was both equitable and culturally relevant. Our conversation with him today might be very different—he would have had an educational experience that validated his knowledge, showed him his strengths, and communicated that what he brought to the classroom was valuable and respected. We imagine Michael would have felt seen in the classroom and would have trusted his grades to be meaningful reports of his achievement. It’s our responsibility as educators to truly recognize each student’s abilities, starting with intentional assessment and a careful review of results to ensure accuracy and fairness.
