An Education Week article examines the pressure on teachers to change grades, how some schools prevent demands by students or parents to change marks, and how traditional grading systems have become open to debate.
Students requesting a grade change is very common, according to a 2023 survey by Intelligent.com of 288 high school teachers and college professors. Among respondents, 44 percent said students “often” ask for a grade boost — and 82 percent reported they acquiesce. Perhaps it’s the path of least resistance: 38 percent of educators surveyed reported harassment from students and 33 percent from parents over grades. Only 6 percent of respondents noted that students “never” ask them to improve their grades.
Changing grades is not as common in K-12 schools. A 2024 national EdWeek Research Center survey found 44 percent of teachers said they never changed a grade after a student has seen it. Among those who did, 8 and 6 percent said it was because a student or parent requested the grade change, respectively. High school teachers reported that students were more likely than parents to make requests to change grades. Parent requests or administrative pressure coming from parent complaints drove grade change requests at the elementary level, according to the survey.
An EdWeek poll sampling of teacher comments about handling grade change pressure:
Never, unless I made a mistake grading it. We do enough to prepare them. The retakes, redos, etc., are out of hand … it isn’t really showing what they learned.
—Mimi H.
At the high school level—always!!!! Digging in against a parent is NOT worth my time! I have told many a parent: ‘You have to live with this, I don’t.’
—Lysa N.
Only if they correct their mistakes or complete some alternative. I can’t fault them for having an off day. I give my students multiple chances to get it right.
—Kimberly P.
There is no one strategy for teachers to respond to grade-request changes. But administrators are taking steps to minimize them altogether.
Some schools stymie requests to change grades by implementing formal policies that may make students or parents think twice before asking for a redo or new grade. At one school this involves a multistep checks and balances process of documenting all grade-change requests, including the reason for the request; formally reviewing the request; and, when deemed warranted, officially changing the grade.
Other schools are moving to a completely different grading system that reduces the likelihood of these requests by students or parents. In Vermont, recent legislation that adopts proficiency-based learning states that schools “must provide students with flexible and personalized pathways for progressing through grade levels and to graduation.” Proficiency-based learning replaces a traditional grading system, thus reducing student or parent demand for grade changes.
“We don’t have letter grades or a 100-point scale any longer, and that is entirely based on the idea that we are not summatively assessing and averaging grades for an end-of-the-year total,” says Chris Young, the principal of North Country Union High School in Newport, Vt. “We are approaching learning as more of a progressive approach.”
Students have opportunities throughout the year to demonstrate how they’ve met specific learning goals, he explains. This lends itself to more retakes and redos of assignments – but it’s often teachers who encourage students to retake or resubmit assignments to show progress—not the other way around, Young says. A teacher can say, “Why don’t you just redo this piece of it and show me that, after some help, you got it, and then we can go back and make an adjustment.”
Education Week
