The old song about sheet music

The assessment of our pupils' performance through grades is probably as old as school itself and has not only been controversial since today. As early as the beginning of the last century, studies systematically analysed examination and assessment practices at public schools. Even then, these studies fundamentally questioned the legitimacy of assessments. By the 1950s at the latest, the scientific concerns were also being discussed in practice.

The fact that the issue of grades continues to boil over to this day certainly has to do with the existence of dozens of unrefuted studies. These show that conventional performance judgements are very susceptible to a number of distortions and therefore fail to reflect the actual performance of our children. This is because grades convey a false sense of accuracy. The learning progress of individual pupils is neither recorded nor visualised, and grades alone cannot adequately reflect performance.

Unequal conditions

To illustrate: Imagine you had to give your children grades while they were learning to ride a bike. How and what would you judge? The speed at which they do it? Would the fact that your child falls and how often this happens also influence your grade? A child who has the opportunity to use a balance bike before switching to a real bike certainly has the advantage of already being able to balance on a two-wheeler. They will therefore be able to get on a bike and start pedalling much more quickly than a child who has never sat on a two-wheeled vehicle and has not been able to acquire this balancing skill beforehand.

Learning progress is neither recorded nor visualised in grades, and performance cannot be adequately reflected in grades alone.

How should these children be assessed? The child with the balance bike logically learns to ride a bike faster and with fewer accidents than the one who is travelling on a two-wheeler for the first time. As a result, the second child should receive the lower grade, even if it did not have the same prerequisites and opportunities as our first child. Can the number ultimately show how and what the child has learnt and where they still need to practise?

What reads like a farce here is a daily balancing act for teachers and a life of contradictions. In the first years of school in particular, classes are full of children with different levels of ability, unequal prerequisites and at very different stages of development. For this reason, teachers have the legitimate task of differentiating teaching within the class wherever possible. This means picking up, challenging and supporting pupils at their current level of performance.

However, this differentiation of the child's level of development has to stop when it comes to grading. At the end of a learning unit, everyone is measured with the same yardstick again, and tests are usually used to record in a snapshot how many tasks have been solved correctly or how many questions have been answered correctly. Using an impressively simple system (numbers from 1 to 6), which has characterised pupils and parents in our country for generations, the learning progress of our children is recorded.

Think back to the example of learning to ride a bike. Grades have the deceptive advantage that they seem to simply show how the child has performed in a particular subject. They are a tried and tested means of labelling pupils' achievements and perhaps also their efforts. However, grades are not a suitable means of demonstrating a learning process or learning development. For this reason, schools have been mandated for several years now to carry out not only summative assessments (taking stock by means of grades), but also formative (promotion-oriented) and prognostic assessments.

The latter are based on close communication between teachers and their pupils and should also have an influence on the pupil's report card grade. They give teachers the opportunity to respond to children's learning processes beyond a rigid number system. So far, so good. In practice, things become difficult when report card grades are seen as mere averages of written school examinations. In many places, teachers come under pressure if the report card grades do not correspond to the calculated average.

Learning for life instead of for grades

Even if it is not easy to say goodbye to the old and familiar, the school's long-term goal must be to find and try out new ways of monitoring and assessing performance. In such a way that ability, lateral thinking, creativity, imagination, but also skills such as perseverance, co-operation with others, team spirit, willingness to make an effort and tolerance of frustration can be better taken into account. After all, if schools only strive to achieve grades and lessons mutate into «teaching to the test» or «learning for the test», we all miss out on what will become increasingly important in the future: Creativity, social learning and the ability to solve problems with imagination.

Treating grades like a holy grail is no longer in keeping with the times and slows down the school's development.

To get straight to the point: With the changes in our society - advancing digitalisation, skills assessment in connection with Curriculum 21, school integration and the recognition of the diversity of our children - the assessment system in our schools must also undergo a transformation. This can only be successful with a transparent assessment system and a clear, intercantonal concept that allows teachers to use their professional judgement in addition to or instead of grades. Parents, on the other hand, need to have confidence in the professionalism of teachers so that they can guide pupils into the future. Ultimately, both parents and teachers should only be concerned with one thing: a fair, timely and child-centred assessment that meets the child where they are at.

In today's school, where pupils with different performance levels sit in the same class, where the focus is on skills, where we are entering the digital age, it is also high time to modernise the assessment system. Treating grades like a holy grail is no longer in keeping with the times and is slowing down the school's development.