In a move that has left students more perplexed than ever, schools across the nation have unveiled a slew of innovative grading methods. The aim is to dismantle America’s long and sordid history of inequitable grading. And educators, especially those fresh out of ed schools, are showing how imaginative they can be in assessing student work.
Leading the charge is Moe Geldman, author of Grading for Niceness, who’s birthed a brave new world. Traditional approaches like A–F grading are, of course, out. But so are recent alternatives, like 0–4 grading. In their place is Geldman’s magnum opus: the Emoji Scale.
One of the early adopters, Kindly Middle School in Fargo, North Dakota, has replaced letter grades with emojis that include 😄 for excellent, 😐 for satisfactory, and 😢 for needs improvement. They’ve also eliminated in-line textual comments on assignments in favor of, for example, 🤯 for deep insights, 🤫 for run-on sentences, 🥸 for suspected plagiarism, and 🤓 for perfect answers.
So far, students are 😢 over the change. “I used to love sending 👀 to my friends,” says one seventh-grader, “but now they think I’m jealous of their grades. This has ruined what used to be so much 🤪.”
Despite the pushback, educators remain committed to their new grading methods. “It’s all about keeping students engaged and thinking outside the box,” Principal Noma Faleyers says. “And if that means grading their work based on 💃, 🤹🏻, and 🏄🏻, then so be it.”
