Is it better to grade students against one another or against themselves?

Is there a departmental policy on grading? If not, there should be. You shouldn’t have to second-guess a student’s possible work. I would stick with mentioning this in your comments, even the compliments on an excellent effort.

One of my son’s English teachers (granted, it was in ninth grade) gave two grades for each paper. Content and form. I’m not sure this is helpful.

As someone who is still in school myself, I would say that the fairest way to grade would be to grade against the other students. The student who always does A work and hands in a paper that would earn any other student an A still deserves that grade even if it is below that student’s level of work ordinarily. Similarly, if a student who ordinarily does D work and hands in a paper that would get any other student a B, that student deserves a B and not an A.

Personally, I would have been furious if my teacher had told me that my paper was better than another student’s but worse than they expected of me. I most definitely would not have demanded a grade change but I think I would have committed several subversive acts during the rest of the year.

Edit to add: I think these policies can change from class to class however. A paper that earns an A in a low-level class would probably not earn an A in an AP class.

Grade against a set standard, don’t change the standard. I had a teacher that gave the top 20% an A. Next 20 B etc. If you were in the bottom 20% you were SOL. even if you did otherwise passing work. Teach long enough, and you will find you have a group of students where nearly everyone is ahead of the curve. Next year they will all be behind the curve.

You may have to tweak the standard a bit as emphasis changes, but it should be close to the same from year to year.

Agree that consistency is vital. Without it, grades are pretty meaningless.
There is also the fact that two profs can teach the same course a different way and grade differently, so in a way grades are already pretty meaningless anyway…

Grading w/ respect to the individual favors students that progressively do better over the course of the term.

Knocking a “star” down a few points for “OK” work will probably have little effect on a person’s final grade. Similarly bumping a slacker’s grade up on an assignment also has little effect on the overall grade. The assumption is that in both cases the grade adjustment you make to an assignment that differs from their personal level of achievement is an infrequent occurrence and therefore is negligible to the final term grade, which is all that really matters. If you’re consistent in grading, it probably all averages out in the end to a grade that accurately reflects your opinion of the student’s ability in the course.

Give the grade that the work is worth relative to “all students”. I don’t think it’s fair to judge different students by different yardsticks.

However, your commentary (aside from the grade itself) can carry a lot more weight than you realize.

I had an English teacher in high school who assigned us to write a sonnet when we were studying Shakespeare. He threatened us with -10 points per day for every day of lateness. For some reason I blew off the assignment and turned it in 4 days late, but very well written… and he carried through on his threat. He gave me a big red D on the paper, but I recall his commentary doggerel next to the grade, more than 40 years later:

You did try hard; a noble attempt,
But from a poor grade you are not exempt.

We had a great relationship for the rest of the year after that, and I aced his class.

Never, never do what your teacher did. A grade is a measure of how well you did an assignment. Students need honest feedback on the quality of their work.

Agreed with @CyanoticWasp about the commentary. Thats where you can let a student know that they are slacking off or that you appreciate their hard work.

It’s better to grade against a standard, in my opinion. When you grade students against each other, and you are in a selective, competitive environment the possibility for success diminishes. I do not subscribe to the notion that there must be failure among a class. If everyone gets 95% of the required work done, then the whole class makes a 95. I have run into this before and feel quite strongly about it.

In your high school example, I would have been at the school had I been your mother. Such subjective grading should certainly not be allowed in K-12.

In the real world, we are rarely graded/judged against ourselves so why do it in the classroom? Example: An employer is evaluating 2 employees. John can always produce 1000 satisfactory widgets every week and on occasional weeks, he has produced 1100 and once produced 1500. Bob can always produce 600 satisfactory widgets every week but for the last few weeks, he has produced 900 widgets; a marked improvement. You have to decide which one gets a raise and the standard is based on productivity. Obviously, John would get the raise based on the standard. What you are grading is highly subjective, there are still standards and I think that is what should be graded. (structure, punctuation, etc.)

The constructivist will tell you that each student should be measured by her own accomplishments. We all construct our own knowledge differently and at different rates. But that doesn’t fly with the administrators, who need to quantify the performance of the school as a whole.

I believe in grading a student by their own growth. But the establishment forces me to grade according to a standard. Luckily I teach art and design, so i can afford to be a little more subjective.

I understand that you’re trying to get each student to perform his or her best, but using relative standards goes contrary to the real world fixed standards, as @myopicvisionary described. As a student, I would get very irritated at teachers who did this. I was trying to manage my study time, doing just enough in each subject to get an A. I learned to hide my abilities from teachers who did not grade to a fixed, objective standard. Other students preferred teachers to grade on a bell-curve; I wanted to know exactly what was expected (other students hated me for being a “curve buster”) so I could do exactly that much work and no more.

That’s the reason I had to take typing class. My English teacher said that my work was excellent but she never met a person whose printing was worse than their cursive.

She promised me an A if I typed my papers. I won on both counts. I was the only guy in the typing class and got an A in both classes. A couple of the very few A’s that I got in high school.