Better Grades is the product of my pandemic passion project. Some people got weirdly into sour bread. I got weirdly into measurement, assessment, and equity.

Here in Arlington, we have ambitious goals for our grading system: accuracy, fairness, bias-resistance, motivation, sound math, and ease of understanding. The basic problem is that our current system will never meet these goals, not even most of them. And the harm from these flaws falls most on lower-performing students, especially marginalized students. We have to do better.

In Better Grades I explain these problems at length, along with a proposed solution that actually does everything we want grades to do. It's not just theory, because I've been testing it in classrooms for a few years now. It works! It is a simple change, but a big change.

Originally, this was meant to be a slide deck to share my ideas, but after slide 200 or so I decided to put it into less gruelling format - so now it is a delightful
e-booklet! Full of color charts and graphs! Free to download! Just click on the cover below: