EdLevity: Uncle Curmudgeon Grumps about “Exceeds the Standard”

Mike Anderson wrote this letter in 2016, in the voice of a retired teacher called Uncle Curmudgeon, to argue for a 3-point instead of a 4-point competency-based grading scale. A new section below asks what research says about standards-based grading and how a committee can choose.

Every now and then, I come across a letter from Uncle Curmudgeon, an old retired teacher, to his niece, Kennari, an aspiring new one. I’m happy to pass another along!

Dear Kennari-

So! You’ve signed up for your first committee! And you aren’t messing around with something like the staff breakfast planning team…you jumped in feet first. The report card revision committee! I like your style.

I’m excited to hear that your district is ditching traditional grades. It’s about blessed time! I never really understood what it meant to get a B. Did that mean a kid was pretty good? Did it mean they were smart but lazy? Confused but hard working? Compliant but not exceptionally so? And what did you call these newfangled grades—competency-based? If I understand what that means from the explanation in your letter, they sound promising. Marks might actually reflect academic competency instead of hoop-jumping! Sounds like there may be less guess work for teachers too—instead of everyone making up their own crazy system for grades, teachers can finally get on the same page.

You said that the big question your team is wrestling with is whether to go with a 3-point or 4-point scale.

For Pete’s sake—go with the 3! It seems to me that a 4-point system will be problematic on several fronts.

Exceeds the Standard?

Many standards simply can’t be exceeded. If the standard is 2-digit multiplication, how do you exceed that except by moving on to 3-digit multiplication (a different standard)? What about “knows all 26 letters of the alphabet”? Do you exceed that by making up new letters?

I suppose some could argue that “exceeding the standard” might indicate a different depth of knowledge…the ability to explain your thinking with great clarity. This is absurd, of course, since that’s an entirely different skill set and has nothing to do with multiplying, knowing the alphabet, or most other standards.

More Gray Areas for Teachers

Another problem is that it creates a wishy-washy gray area for teachers. Adding in this “exceeds the standards” malarkey puts you right back where you were with the whole A vs. B thing (or even the even more ridiculous A- vs. A+ thing). Teachers will now have to invent criteria for what it takes to exceed each standard, and I’ll bet your britches no one’s getting enough collaborative time to figure that out together. Everyone will do the best they can, create something different from their colleagues, and you’ll all find yourselves in a whole passel of trouble.

Confusing for Parents

What are parents supposed to think about the difference between a 3 and a 4? Is “meets the standard” truly the goal, or is that for the common folk, and future Ivy Leaguers should all be exceeding everything? Or, perhaps the 4 is throwing a bone to those parents who need to know that their little dumpling is exceptional? It seems to me that a potential benefit of a 3-point competency-based scale is that you could simply show where students stand in relation the standards as opposed to how they stack up against each other. I’m sure some of your colleagues may still believe that schooling is all about separating the wheat from the chaff, but most of them must be about ready to join me here at Sweet Meadow Acres for Retired Teachers. (And just wait ‘til they get here…I’ll give ‘em what for!)

Replacement Skill Sets

Are you and your staff actually getting good professional development to support you through some of the challenges caused by this potential shift? Probably not. In fact, I bet people haven’t even thought about some of the ramifications of changing the grading system. It seems to me that there are two key shifts that teachers may need to make for this to work, and though they may not be verbalizing it, some are probably nervous as heck about them.

First, for a teacher who has relied on dangling the A-carrot (or wielding an F-stick), they may worry that kids won’t be motivated to work without an “exceeds the standard” type of grade. Of course, this is only the case when kids have been trained to work for grades and when the work itself doesn’t have inherent merit.

Second, many teachers use grades as a management tool. They may wonder how they’ll get kids to participate, bring in homework, or follow class rules without traditional grades. Of course, there are many proactive and reactive management strategies that are highly effective with these sorts of things, but if teachers have relied on grades to bribe or bully, they may not yet have those skills. I’ll bet my bottom dollar that schools aren’t helping teachers with the replacement skill sets they need, and teachers are going to feel like the rug’s being pulled out from under them.

(By the way, if you need a consultant who can help your school with those replacement skill sets, let me know. I know a fella who can help.)

All right…I’m off my soap box. Speaking of soap, next time you visit me here at the home, could you bring me an extra bar? Don Sweetser (a former chemistry teacher) and I are going to paint it with nail polish and leave it in the men’s room for fun. You gotta make your own entertainment at this place…

Love to your mother…

Uncle Curmudgeon

Mike Anderson is an education consultant who leads great learning throughout the United States and beyond. He is an award winning teacher and the author of many books. You can follow him on Twitter:@balancedteacher. To explore more resources about assessment and grading, explore Mike’s Pinterest board, Rethinking Assessment and Grading.

The 4 point grading scale versus a 3 point scale: what research says about standards-based grading

A 4 point grading scale is the usual choice when a school moves to standards-based grading, in which teachers report how well a student meets each standard instead of giving one overall letter. Mike Anderson’s 2016 letter above, written as Uncle Curmudgeon, argues for three levels instead, because a top level of “exceeds the standard” cannot be defined for many standards. This section asks what research says about that choice, what it does not say, and how a report card committee can decide for its own district.

What research says about grades in general

The letter begins with a question many parents and students have asked: what does a B mean? A large research review answers that the meaning is often unclear. Susan Brookhart, Thomas Guskey and six colleagues synthesized about a century of studies in “A Century of Grading Research”, published in Review of Educational Research. They found that teachers often give different grades to the same work because they weigh different things, that some use grades to reward or punish behavior such as late work, and that many educators now divide a subject into subskills and report each separately. The authors concluded that the gap between research and practice in grading may be wider than in any other area of education.

That finding supports the aim of Anderson’s letter, which is for grades to reflect academic competence and for teachers to share a common system. It does not by itself say how many levels the system should have.

What the newer trials test, and what they do not

A recent, rigorous study of standards-based grading is a cluster randomized trial by Steven Kramer and colleagues, published in 2025 in the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness. Thirty-five schools were randomly assigned to either a standards-based system called PARLO or to traditional grading in algebra and geometry courses, and outcome data from 29 of them (14 using PARLO and 15 comparison schools) and 2,736 students were analyzed. In PARLO, teachers organized each semester around roughly 10 to 15 learning outcomes, gave feedback, let students reassess for full credit, and based final grades on how many outcomes a student showed proficiency in. The What Works Clearinghouse reports a statistically significant positive effect on a researcher-developed end-of-course test, an improvement index of 13 percentile points, and a rating of “meets standards with reservations.”

Two points keep that result in proportion. First, the trial tested a whole system, including reassessment and seven to eight days of professional development for the teachers using PARLO (against two to three days for comparison teachers), and not the number of performance levels. Second, the sources opened for this section do not describe the number of levels PARLO used. Brookhart’s 2026 essay on grading research since 2016 was published in August 2026 and covers research on traditional grading, the pandemic, standards-based grading and rubrics; only its abstract was read for this section, so no finding on scale length is reported from it here. The search for this section found no study that compares a three-point scale directly with a four-point scale, so the choice rests on design arguments, and those arguments are worth examining on their own terms.

Weighing Anderson’s three objections

• Some standards cannot be exceeded. Anderson’s example is two-digit multiplication, where going further means starting a different standard. A committee can test this by writing, for a sample of its own standards, what exceeding would look like. If it cannot do that for most of them in a sentence, a fourth level will invite improvised criteria.
• Teachers will invent their own criteria. This echoes the century review’s finding that teachers differ in what they count. A district keeping four levels needs time for teachers to agree on examples of each, and Anderson doubts that collaborative time exists.
• Parents may read a 3 and a 4 as a ranking. Anderson suggests a three-level scale shows where students stand against the standards and not against each other. A district can address this in the report card wording and in a family guide, whatever the number of levels.

Supporters of four levels may argue that a top level recognizes students who go deeper. The research reviewed here does not settle that, and a committee could pilot one scale in a few classrooms and compare how clearly parents and teachers describe the results.

The teacher skills behind the scale

Anderson’s closing point is also practical: teachers who have used grades to motivate or manage behavior will need other strategies when grades only report academic standing. The PARLO trial included training for teachers, and a district changing its report card would do well to plan for the same. For wider coverage of grading and assessment, see edCircuit’s assessment guide, and for the companion letter in this series, read Uncle Curmudgeon Gives Aspiring Teachers the Lowdown on Homework.

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