> . The authors of _Grading For Equity_ spoke at my school and the reasoning they gave for eliminating 0-grading (i.e., not using 0 as the lowest possible grade) was because it's basically impossible to recover from.

It’s easy to recover from if you don’t use a stupid method if aggregation, but that takes actually thinking about what it is you are trying to measure; for instance, if you grade by % in each of several competency areas throughout the year, and have a final grade catehory standards (cumulative, so you get the highest grade where you’ve met all the standards):

D: median of competency area medians meets minimum proficiency standard

C: median score within every competency area meets minimum passing standard

B: median of competency area medians meets high proficiency standard or median in at least one competency area meets excellence standard

A: median of competency area medians exceeds excellence standard

(standards might be something like passing 70%, high proficiency 80%, excellence 90%, but the exact numbers aren’t the point.)

That will give you a measure of overall competence that isn't particularly sensitive to outlier scores on a single assignment, even if the assignment has components across many competency areas.

I support this. My kids have had a single zero on occasion for a missed assignment and it demolished their grade. No way to recover. This is not a good measurement of whether you grasp the concepts. It’s a good measurement of whether you made no mistakes in the process.

If 50% is a passing grade, and a student neither mastered the topic at the beginning or the end, they would still pass. A better solution is to weight the assignments and exams at the end much higher, to give a students a chance to prove their knowledge, while still failing those who learned nothing.

You weigh the grading such that you could still pass the course by doing well in the end assessments. Something like hand out 30% of the grade during the course and the rest at the end.

Grades traditionally measure mastery of material on an externally imposed timeline under some amount of externally imposed pressure. I support moving to simply measuring master of material in most cases, but it's important to recognize that you lose some signal from those other areas. In real life, sometimes it's better to maximize for mastery regardless of timeline (within reason) while other times it's better to maximize for the best job you can do within a certain fixed amount of time.

> a student who masters the material by the end of class should get the same grade as one who masters it at the beginning

The same lesson is not being given over and over again.

There are X tests/assignments/projects for X areas covered.

Each is assessed in its turn.

Of course, there is usually some overall assessment on the content as a whole, at the end of a quarter/semester/year. I think that aligns perfectly with your desire.

One of my classes in high school used "competency quizzes":

* Several easy math problems

* Unlimited re-tests

* You had to get 100% to pass