Making the grade: a history of the A–F marking scheme

Abstract

This article provides a historical interpretation of one of the defining features of modern schooling: grades. As a central element of schools, grades—their origins, uses and evolution—provide a window into the tensions at the heart of building a national public school system in the United States. We argue that grades began as an intimate communication tool among teachers, parents, and students used largely to inform and instruct. But as reformers worked to develop a national school system in the late nineteenth century, they saw grades as useful tools in an organizational rather than pedagogical enterprise—tools that would facilitate movement, communication and coordination. Reformers placed a premium on readily interpretable and necessarily abstract grading systems. This shift in the importance of grades as an external rather than internal communication device required a concurrent shift in the meaning of grades—the meaning and nuance of the local context was traded for the uniformity and fungibility of more portable forms.

Keywords:

• grades
• report cards
• student evaluation
• grading

Notes

1. Here, we follow James Scott’s use of the term ‘legibility’ by which he means the ability for information to have a universal meaning and understood not just in the local context but by distant observers as well.

2. A similar process occurred in non-natural products in other fields as well. On the rise of Moody’s Credit Agency, see: Carruthers (2011, May). The Economy of Promises: The Origins of Credit Rating in nineteenth-century America. Presentation to the Department of Sociology, Stanford University.

3. In 1912, Starch and Elliott published ‘Reliability of the Grading of High School Work in English’ in which they reported that grading was highly inconsistent across subjects and instructors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jack Schneider

Jack Schneider is an assistant professor of Education at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, USA;

Ethan Hutt

Ethan Hutt is an assistant professor of Education at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. He is currently completing a book on the history of minimum educational standards.