After years of As, Bs, and Cs, some teachers have begun using 4s, 3s, and 2s to give feedback on individual assignments. Letter grades, however, still appear on final transcripts and are separate from this feedback process.

This “proficiency scale,” as it is referred to by school district officials, is a chart that is broken into four levels of achievement. A four means that the student’s work is advanced, a

three means proficient, a two means emerging, and a one means basic, according to Kim Stiffler, the Senior Director of Curriculum and Instruction for the Tamalpais Union High School District (TUHSD).

As part of a district effort to gear curriculum toward district-specified learning outcomes––known as standards-based grading––the four-point proficiency scale was developed to assess students’ mastery of the skills deemed necessary for graduation, according to Stiffler.

Yet what distinguishes the four-point scale from letter grades is not merely the numbers themselves, but the way some teachers use them.

In an effort to inform students of their level of mastery and to praise growth, some teachers omit earlier scale placements, likes twos and threes, when calculating a student’s final grade if the student has since improved and demonstrated mastery of the skills.

“I used to hold students’ lowest scores against them, but now I have students pushing themselves to achieve their best,” said English teacher Jon Weller, an enthusiast of the scale who takes only the highest placement of each skill into account when calculating final grades.

In other words, if a student turned in a poorly-written essay at the beginning of the semester, but turned in a well-organized one at the end, that first essay wouldn’t impact the grade as it would have in a class with a traditional grading system.

The district is encouraging––but not requiring––teachers to use the scale, according to Principal David Sondheim. The district cannot legally dictate how teachers grade due to California Ed Code 49066.

Each number on the proficiency scale is further tied to written statements that provide the student more information about where they’re at. Since the scale is in its infancy and is still being revised, some teachers have chosen to use it only on certain assignments or not at all.

In the current versions of many scales, the attributes of a level one are not as fleshed out, according to English teacher Stephanie Haver-Castex, who attended revision meetings about the scales.

Some teachers dislike this aspect of the scales.

“We don’t know what [a level one] is,” said science teacher Todd Samet. “The district scales that are written really don’t address the one level. Exactly what that translates to in terms of a score is a little bit of a wild card.”

Advocates of the four-point grading scale tout it for its emphasis on student growth and understanding, as opposed to letter grades and percentages, which critics say do not provide as much feedback.

Weller said he has seen his students shift  their attitudes toward learning since he implemented the new grading scale.

“This is my 16th year of teaching,” Weller said. “This is the first year that I’ve seen most of my students be more concerned about specific aspects of their writing.”

U.S. history teacher Lisa Kemp, who has taught for 10 years and currently heads the history department, implemented the scale after getting frustrated with the traditional grading approach.

“I was looking for an alternative to the hundred-point scale and averaging because I thought that was a total distracter––the same with points,” Kemp said. “Kids were coming in saying, ‘What can I do to get more points?’”

Kemp cited studies that show that as soon as students see a grade, they stop caring about academic improvement.

“If I’m an A student, I’m an A student; I don’t need to figure out how to do better,” Kemp said.

Currently, the district does not have a uniform system of translating each number to a letter on final transcripts, so it is at the discretion of the teacher to determine how the numbers match up. The lack of a uniform translation system has been an issue for some teachers, who wish the district would create one.

In Weller’s English class, a 3.5 and up is an A, and a 2.5 to 3.5 is a B. Kemp, however, translates grades somewhat differently: A 4 becomes a 95 percent and a 3.5 becomes a 90 percent. Students cannot achieve a 100 percent, or A+, on their final transcript.

Weller said that letter grades have a certain connotation to them––the four-point scale, on the other hand, provides a clean slate.

“That ‘A’ has become a communication tool,” Weller said. “Whereas if I say instead it’s just a number, perhaps that translates differently––it’s a translation tool.”

Some students, however, do not believe that the proficiency scale is any more helpful than traditional letter grades.

Junior Kenzie Johnson, a student in Kemp’s U.S. history class, said she finds the scale more distracting than informative.

“I don’t like it,” Johnson said. “I like traditional grading better because I just obsess over how the four-point scale translates into regular grading. I don’t focus on what level I am at––where a four is or where a three is. I focus on the fact of what that means for my grade. I focus on how it translates for my grade instead of what’s the feedback and what I need to do to get it higher.”

Science teacher Todd Samet also acknowledged that students tend to focus on how the four-point numbers translate into letter grades.

“We are in a grade driven economy here––it is all about the points,” Samet said, adding that the scale does not necessarily provide better feedback than a traditional grading system.

“There is nothing magic about it, but it certainly can be a useful device.”

A further issue with the scale is that eSchool, the website where teachers post grades, cannot accommodate 4s, 3s, 2s, and 1s, and can only average grades––not take the highest score––so it can be difficult for teachers to post grades online if they want to stay consistent with the growth-based nature of the scale.

To troubleshoot this, Weller has created his own grading system on a Google spreadsheet that finds the highest value for each unit in the curriculum, and then puts those highest scores into the grade book for a cumulative grade.

Sophomore Zane Feldman, who is in Weller’s English 3-4 class, praised the four-point scale for its ability to reward his growth and show him areas of improvement.

While the system can be helpful in rewarding overall growth, Feldman acknowledged that, at first, some students in his English class were put off by the shift from traditional grading to the new system.