This is the first in a 4-part series on grading in PE. Rather than starting at the beginning of the grading process, we're starting at the end, with the moment a grade gets determined, and then working backwards from there, week by week.

Why start at the end?

Because it's where many of us are right now, or fast approaching, and it's where the questions about grading feel sharpest. So, we begin with the one that sits at the very end of it all: how do we actually determine a grade?

A quick note on scope. This series focuses on the grading process, not the day-to-day classroom assessment that happens long before it. That assessment is what produces the evidence a grade draws on, so it will come up along the way, and we'll look more closely at how it connects by the end of the series.

Determining a Grade in PE

Most jurisdictions tell us what kind of grade to report: a letter, a percentage, a proficiency level, or some mix of these. What they rarely tell us is how to actually arrive at it. So, we do what we know, or what's done around us, and grading can start to feel inauthentic and unfair.

Here's an example from earlier in my career.

My gradebook was organized by units, each with weighted categories that tallied to 100. The computer averaged the scores across units, and when it came time to report, I hit "ENTER" and let the algorithm do the rest.

Unit: Basketball

It felt efficient, fair, and dare I say objective. The numbers were right there to justify the final grade.

But the algorithm wasn't making a judgment about anyone's learning. It was doing arithmetic. And it knew nothing about my students. I did. I knew each of them and where they were in their learning, yet I had reduced all of that to entering scores and pressing a button.

That disconnect was the problem. And it traces back to something common in grading: the way we arrive at a grade often isn't grounded in a clear principle about what a grade is meant to do.

A Principle to Ground Grading

A principle is the reasoning beneath a practice. It's the belief that explains why we do something a certain way, so our choices are intentional rather than just habit or default. In grading, it's the reasoning that grounds and informs our decisions.

To make grades clearer and more meaningful, a key principle is this:

The teacher uses the evidence of learning available to determine a grade that best reflects a student's overall learning achievement.

This puts the teacher back into the decision. Arriving at a grade becomes less about tallying points and finding averages, and more about using evidence of learning to determine where a student is in their learning. That shift, from tallying to deciding, is where this principle starts to shape practice.

Where Principle and Practice Meet

However evidence is recorded, whether as proficiency levels, marks, or something else, the principle holds. You look at the overall body of evidence and decide what it says about a student's learning.

One way to support that decision is with a set of logic rules. A logic rule is a "series of statements that describe how grades for standards will be converted into subject grades" (O'Connor, 2018, p. 191). In plainer terms, they describe how each grade could be arrived at based on what the evidence of learning shows. This gives the grading process structure and transparency, so a grade is never a surprise.

The example below uses proficiency levels 1-4, but the same process applies to whatever scale you work with.

At the end of a reporting period:

• All or almost all 4s, with nothing below a 3, earns an A.
• Mostly 3s and 4s, with no more than one 2 and nothing below a 2, earns a B.
• No more than half 2s, with some 3s or 4s and no 1s, earns a C+.
• Mostly 2s, with no more than one 1, earns a C.
• A mix of mostly 2s and 1s, with nothing below a 1, earns a C-.

To use them, you consider the overall evidence of a student's learning across the four standards.

Each number is a proficiency level showing achievement on a standard, and the bolded number is the overall mark for that standard. (How that overall mark is determined is its own question, and one we'll look at next week.)

Take Karan. Across the four standards, his evidence is predominantly 3s with one 4, which points to a B. The grade comes from reading where his learning landed overall and deciding what it shows.

It's worth being clear about what the logic rules do, and what they don't. They don't make the decision for you. They support it. The judgment is already in the evidence, since each proficiency level reflects a read of student work against the standards. And it's there again when the rules are applied, because evidence rarely fits a pattern perfectly. You weigh it, with more emphasis on what's recent and consistent, and decide what the overall picture shows. The rules give that judgment structure and transparency.

When You Also Need a Percentage

In some jurisdictions, a letter grade or proficiency level is all that's reported. In others, a percentage is required too. This is often where grading starts to feel arbitrary and messy.

It doesn't have to. The same logic rule that points to a proficiency level or letter grade can also point to a percentage.

The chart below uses the British Columbia grading scale. The numbers can be adjusted to fit other systems.

Here, the percentages act as anchor scores, each tied to a described pattern of evidence rather than calculated or guessed. Karan's mostly 3s and one 4 place him at Proficient, which points to a B and anchors to 86.

No logic rule is perfect. There will always be cases that take more thought. But that isn't the point. What a tool like this offers is clarity and transparency for students, parents, and teachers. It gives a consistent way to determine a grade, and a clear way to explain how it was arrived at.

And that is the point.

The Takeaway

Grounding our grading practices in a clear principle is what keeps the process intentional and meaningful. Using professional judgment, based on the most recent and consistent evidence of learning, to determine a grade is one example of a practice that follows from a sound principle.

There are many practices that can bring a principle to life, and the logic rule is just one. What it offers is structure and transparency for how grades are arrived at, and that helps make them clearer for everyone.

Coming up Next Week

This article focused on the end of the grading process, where a grade gets determined. But a grade determined through judgment is only as strong as the evidence behind it. Which raises some fair questions. How much evidence do you need? And how do you organize and make sense of it, so that when it's time to determine a grade, you have the information you need?

Next week we step back a stage, to the evidence that feeds the grade, and how it can be summarized to set up a sound decision at the end.

See you then!

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Reference

O’Connor, K. (2018). How to grade for learning: Linking grades to standards. Corwin.