reDesign

After watching the overview video above, explore the cards that follow. Each card unpacks one grading principle in more depth and includes real-world examples that show what it can look like when that principle becomes a design focus in practice.

These six principles are meant to be considered together. Strong competency-based grading systems attend to all of them over time in some way or form. That said, context matters. Based on your role, constraints, and current grading practices, you may find that one principle feels especially pressing right now—perhaps because it’s creating friction, confusion, or inequitable outcomes for learners.

Use these principles as lenses, not a checklist. You’re not aiming to “fix” grading all at once or achieve full alignment across every dimension. The goal is intentionality: making clearer, more deliberate choices about how grading works in your context, and understanding the tradeoffs those choices create.

As you move through this section, consider:

• Which principle most needs attention in your current system?
• How does that principle show up—or fail to show up—in grading, advancement, and reporting?
• What might shift if that principle became a more explicit design priority?

You can explore the principles in any order. Start where the tension feels most real.

Transparency: No mystery here! I understand criteria, know what to expect, and have access to my data. It’s clear what is being graded and reported and I know the grading policies and practices.

Transparency in grading is about making sure students know how they’re going to be graded and have access to that information. When grading systems are transparent, learners understand what is being assessed, how evidence is interpreted, and how grades are determined. There are no surprises—no hidden rules or unspoken expectations.

Because learners process information differently, transparency isn’t a one-time event. Grading policies may live on a syllabus or course overview, but they also need to show up on assignments, in feedback conversations, and in ongoing references to criteria. Transparency is not just about making information available; it’s about making it understandable and usable.

When grading lacks transparency, students often fill in the gaps themselves—sometimes accurately, often not. This can lead to anxiety, disengagement, or a focus on point-chasing instead of learning.

REMEMBER
Clear grading systems build trust. When expectations are explicit, learners can focus on growth—not guessing.

Transparency in Action At Urban Assembly Maker Academy, schoolwide grading practices are publicly posted so students, families, and staff all share a common understanding of expectations.

Reflection

Review the "I Do/ I Avoid" guidance (view above or download below) to examine how clearly grading criteria are defined, communicated, and revisited—and where assumptions may be filling in the gaps. Then reflect on your current practices:

• In what ways does your grading currently communicate expectations to students?

• Where might students be inferring rules that you haven’t explicitly stated?

• How might different students interpret the clarity—or lack of clarity—of your grading system?

Learning and Growth: I’m not penalized for early mistakes. I have the opportunity to use feedback. Growth is valued and recognized as the vehicle for reaching high levels of performance. Feedback and grades are aligned to shared learning goals (competencies, standards), not other behaviors.

If the goal in our classrooms is learning, then grading students based solely on where they start—before they have time to practice, receive feedback, and improve—can be problematic. A learning-and-growth-oriented grading approach prioritizes what students know and can do after instruction, feedback, and revision opportunities.

This principle does not require that no early work is ever graded, nor does it require unlimited retakes or revisions. Instead, it asks educators to examine when grades are assigned and what those grades are intended to represent. Are grades communicating what students have learned in this course, or are they capturing a snapshot of early attempts?

This principle also invites attention to systemic constraints. If policies limit flexibility, the work becomes identifying where advocacy, piloting, or incremental change might be possible. Grading for learning and growth is both a classroom practice and a systems conversation.

Note: Some behaviors may legitimately be tied to learning goals, but it is critical to distinguish when that is the case. For example, verbal participation may be central to learning goals in a world language course, while in other contexts participation grades may unintentionally measure compliance, confidence, or extroversion rather than learning.

REMEMBER
Learning is progress, not just performance. Early mistakes aren’t the end—they’re part of the journey. Consider how your grading might reflect this.

Learning and Growth in Action These prototypes of South Carolina competency-based progress report shows how student learning might be documented and communicated across time rather than averaged into a single snapshot.

Reflection

Review the "I Do/ I Avoid" guidance (view above or download below) to identify where your grading practices emphasize growth—and where early performance may be carrying disproportionate weight. Then reflect on your current practices:

• How do your grading practices capture and communicate learning over time?

• What assumptions about learning are embedded in how you assess progress?

• When students struggle early, how does your grading system respond?

Agency: I am an active participant in understanding and engaging in the assessment of my own learning. I am supported in self-monitoring and decision-making to support my learning.

Agency in grading means students are active participants in understanding, monitoring, and reflecting on their learning. Rather than grades being something that happens to students, grading becomes a process students can engage with, make sense of, and use to guide their next steps.

Agency is supported when learners have opportunities to synthesize what they’ve learned, reflect on how they learned it, and consider what strategies helped or hindered their progress. Synthesis prompts help students connect ideas, identify patterns, and articulate new understandings. Reflection prompts help students examine their learning process, build self-regulation, and develop metacognitive awareness.

When grading systems exclude student voice entirely, learners may disengage or focus solely on external outcomes. When agency is present, grading information becomes a tool for learning rather than a verdict.

REMEMBER
Grades are more meaningful when learners understand themselves—not just their scores.

Reflection

Review the "I Do/ I Avoid" guidance (view above or download below) to examine how often students are invited to interpret evidence of learning—and how often meaning-making is handled entirely by adults. Then reflect:

• How do you currently learn from students about their progress, challenges, and growth?

• In what ways do students have opportunities to reflect on how they are learning, not just what they learned?

• How might your grading system change if student interpretation and reflection were treated as meaningful evidence?

Fairness: One size does not fit all. My individual strengths, needs, and circumstances are taken into account to ensure I have a fair shot at success. Criteria for success are stable.

Fairness in grading recognizes that equal treatment is not always equitable treatment. And this can be tough, because isn’t fair grading about the way you consistently apply evaluation across students as they work to meet certain stable objectives? Well, yes. Aaaand …while the success criteria need to remain stable and consistent for the class, the ways in which students demonstrate that knowledge or skill might vary. So the big question here is, how can I create learning and assessment opportunities that consider student strengths, needs, and circumstances to ensure all students have a fair shot at success? Might you create performance assessments with various end-product choices? Might you have revision policies that don’t punish those who took a little longer to grasp a concept? Might you allow the specific topic of study be student-determined? In all of these cases, the content and/or skill standards you’re holding students accountable for remain static, but by being flexible with the how and the when, you’ve taken a step into the fairness circle. 

And to be clear, fairness doesn’t mean unlimited extensions, modifications galore, or only choice-based options. There are times when being fair means holding students to deadlines, time-based assessments, static criteria. But we’re not always measuring what we think we are. And if the outcome isn’t dependent on what the final product is, then fair can look different. If you're assessing certain expository writing skills, then you are likely not going to give an option to turn in a collage or a video. But if you're assessing the ability to explore symbolism in a piece of literature, then a paper, collage, or video could all be vehicles to show that understanding. 

Unexamined grading practices can unintentionally advantage students who already know how to “do school” well. Fairness requires ongoing reflection on whose success is being supported—and whose may be unintentionally constrained.

REMEMBER
Fair doesn’t mean the same. It means giving every learner a real opportunity to succeed.

Fairness in Action At Building 21, an open admission high school, students can earn credit based on accelerated growth (not just reaching a grade-based performance level). Students can also replace low scores with higher scores in their portfolio, which represents their best work. Content knowledge is more flexible (except for Math), while competency development is not. Growth is calculated for each set of competencies in a content area. Growth can only be calculated if students have 2 or more ratings for a skill. Growth can be used to award students credit: If a student’s Performance Level is too low to receive credit and they have shown a year or more of growth, then the Growth-to-Grade Conversion Chart can be used to give students a grade and earn them credit!

Reflection

Review the "I Do/ I Avoid" guidance (view above or download below) to examine how assessment design and grading routines account for learner variability and growth. Then reflect:

• Whose strengths are most visible in your current grading practices?
• Whose challenges might be hidden or amplified by the way grades are calculated?
• How do your grading practices balance stable expectations with flexible pathways?

Validity: The tools and practices used to measure and report my growth and performance—and to calculate my grades (if applicable)—are sound, reasonable, and credible.

Validity asks a simple but critical question: Are we measuring what we think we’re measuring? In grading, validity refers to whether the tools, criteria, and practices used to evaluate learning actually reflect the intended learning goals.

Grades lose meaning when they are influenced by factors unrelated to the target outcomes—such as compliance, timing, or unrelated behaviors. Valid grading practices are grounded in clear learning targets, aligned assessment tools, and thoughtful interpretation of evidence.

Whether a quick observation and debrief, grading an essay, sitting in a conference with a student, writing summative comments, or something else, we are constantly evaluating and giving feedback. A lot of times that is based on experience, gut, or mentorship we’ve received. Most of our classrooms aren’t research labs, and it would be hard to quantify all our practices and tools as either valid or not valid. We can, however, carve out purposeful and regular times to take stock: are our practices and tools—our rubrics, checklists, journal prompts, etc.—reasonable? Sound? Credible? Are there any tools we want to update? Try? Get rid of?

The good news is that we can help you with a few … the Future9 Competency Framework is filled with researched, tested, leveled skill indicators, ripe for sound, credible, and reasonable rubrics. And the tool below can help with leveling scoring/grading between teachers, adding credibility to grading and opening up great discussions and leveling about everything from partial-points on solutions on math assessments to whether or not to penalize for spelling errors to more. 

Learning to rate student work in a fair, accurate, and consistent manner across a school team requires lots of practice, discussion, reflection, and ongoing collaboration with colleagues. There is no other way to ensure consistency across a school than to engage in calibration exercises that help norm rating practices among teachers. To calibrate themselves, teams will need a calibration protocol and dedicated time for reviewing, scoring, and discussing student work. This might sound simple, but it leads to profound and important discussions about learning.

REMEMBER
If the evidence isn’t aligned to the goal, the grade can’t be trusted.

Validity in Action Review (and use!) a sample calibration protocol from reDesign. The linked image will bring you directly to the full protocol.

Reflection

Review the "I Do/ I Avoid" guidance (view above or download below) to identify where grading evidence may be misaligned—or where tools need refinement. Then reflect:

• What evidence most strongly influences grades in your context?
• Where might grades be reflecting factors other than the intended learning goals?
• How often do you revisit the soundness of your grading tools and criteria?

Consistency: I know what to expect because there is consistency in how and when feedback is provided, how grades or performance/growth are calculated, and when and how data is shared.

Imagine preparing for a classroom observation, anticipating constructive feedback focused on growth, only to never hear from the observer about the visit—or to find out it was being used as a performance evaluation tool, not a growth one, after the fact. And what if you found out your observation didn’t have a debrief but someone else’s did. Or your observation was used as a performance evaluation, but someone else’s was used as a growth conversation? Yeah. That wouldn’t feel good at all. And for many of you, those scenarios hit close to home, which is the point. Because consistency in the what, the how, and the when is important for all of us, and this applies to grading as well: consistency in following the grading guidelines you’ve given, consistency in when and how feedback is provided, consistency in how grades or growth are calculated, and consistency in when and how feedback and grades are shared. 

This does not mean rigidity or uniformity in all circumstances. Instead, it means that criteria for success, timelines for feedback, and methods for interpreting evidence are applied in ways that are clear and dependable. Inconsistency—intentional or not—can undermine trust and disproportionately affect students who rely on structure and clarity to navigate school systems.

Ideally, consistency is experienced throughout an entire school, so students aren’t juggling multiple guidelines and grading schemes as well as the workload itself. If that can’t happen, consistency in a department, division, or other grouping of teachers is the next best thing. And if that can’t happen? You can create consistency within your own class(es). While it doesn’t always feel like it, you have power, and the consistency you create for students is a gift. 

REMEMBER
Consistency isn’t about being inflexible—it’s about being reliable.

Consistency in Action At Sanborn High School, all teachers follow a shared grading policy, providing students with consistent expectations across courses.

Reflection

Review the "I Do/ I Avoid" guidance (view above or download below) to surface where inconsistency may be unintentionally undermining trust or clarity. Then reflect on your current practices:

• Where do students experience your grading as predictable and steady?
• Where might inconsistency show up unintentionally?
• How does consistency (or inconsistency) affect students’ confidence in your grading system?