Grading vs. Feedback: A Personal Reflection on Learning
Recently, I felt a deep sense of gratitude, pride, and happiness as I read my child’s report card. It was filled with wonderful progress toward critical milestones and encouraging comments about growth, serving more as a competency check-in than a traditional report card. As I reflected on it, I couldn’t help but put on my educator hat and think about the role grades play in learning and the distinction between grading and feedback.
As I shifted from proud parent to reflective educator I began thinking about how often we conflate grading and feedback in education. Grades are designed to assess competency at a moment in time to provide a snapshot of where a student stands. Feedback, on the other hand, is dynamic and evolves with the learner and helps them grow. Feedback is what empowers students to see not just what they got wrong but why it was wrong and how to get it right moving forward.
As educators, we have a responsibility to disentangle grading from feedback. Assessment is important to give students and teachers a benchmark for progress. However, feedback is where real learning happens. Effective feedback is targeted, actionable, and adaptable to the individual learner. It’s what turns a mistake into a growth opportunity and transforms confusion into understanding.
Reflecting on my own teaching, I remember spending countless hours grading math homework, quizzes, and tests. Looking back, I realize how often grades fell short of telling the full story. Grades frequently assume that students inherently know how to improve based on a score, which isn’t always the case.
Take a common example from a math class: A student receives a 2 out of 5 on a problem because they improperly used the quadratic formula. That grade indicates a gap in understanding, but it doesn’t explain the gap or help the student bridge it. Was it a miscalculation? A misunderstanding of the formula itself? A misstep in applying it to the problem? Without further guidance beyond a circle around the mistake, the grade itself is static and doesn’t offer the student a way forward.
This is where feedback comes into play. Feedback goes beyond assigning a score; it provides the student with a roadmap for improvement. Maybe it’s an annotated solution set that walks the student through the correct process, highlighting where their error occurred and how to avoid it next time. Maybe it’s a verbal conversation where the student reflects on their mistake and gains clarity on the concept. Or could it be a written response where a student annotates the proper solution and explains their mistake. Feedback- especially paired with a loop asking students to implement that feedback- offers a level of nuance that grading alone cannot.
Reading my child’s report card reminded me of the delicate balance between these two concepts. Progress markers are valuable, but they are only as effective as the feedback that accompanies them. If we want students to truly grow, we need to ensure that feedback is an integral part of the learning process that evolves, encourages reflection, and meets students where they are in their learning journey.
Grading will always have its place, but it should never overshadow the power of feedback.
