Imagine you’re a freshman who opens up Home Access Center only to find that you got a 75% on your first biology test. The lab you did? A three out of five, dropping your grade into the low 70s. Last year in science you met expectations without ever needing to study. But as the quarter draws to a close and tests stack up, staying on top of all your classes becomes harder and harder – especially without the option to retake assessments. You question whether or not middle school truly prepared you for high school.

Freshmen coming from Wayland Middle School (WMS) some aren’t fully ready for WHS. WMS uses a standards-based grading system, while WHS uses letter grades combined with a grade point average (GPA) structure. Specifically, WMS grades on a one-to-four scale where four is “exceeding expectations,” three is “meeting expectations,” two is “not yet” and one is “unsatisfactory.” If a student gets below a three, they get a chance to revise until they meet expectations. Accompanying this change in grading is also the no-retake policy at the high school, which can make it especially difficult for students who relied on multiple attempts to improve their grades.

“You’re gonna move forward, but now you have to change gears, and for some students, [this] can be a little bit shocking,” WMS social studies teacher Daniel Fernandez-Davila said. “The transition can be harder for others, [while] others will adapt.”

In WMS, standards-based grading is designed to let students make mistakes without being discouraged. When students enter high school without the safety net of retaking tests, they are set up for failure.

In middle school, students aren’t always exposed to percent grades or letter grades. As a result, coming into high school without WMS’s tools can be startling for students.

“What is difficult to calibrate, and that’s for us as teachers, [is] ‘What are the standards that you want?’ That’s the difficult part,” Fernandez-Davila said. “That’s why we should always review the standards to contrast what we are doing with the students, and then tune them up.”

Because teachers ultimately infer a student’s grade in each class, grading methods can differ widely among subjects.

“Let’s say, a kid that gets what would have been a 62% if we were doing regular grading, and another kid gets a 76%, they’re [both] gonna get the same standards-based grade, but obviously that kid that got the 76% did a lot better than the kid that got a 62%,” middle school science teacher Nora Martyny said.

In high school, grading depends heavily on the average percentages from different assignments and tests. By contrast, a key feature of standards-based grading is the “proficiency error” – common in math – where you understand how to solve the problem, but make a numerical mistake. For instance, you might walk into math class, see your test score is all 3’s despite a few proficiency errors, and not have to retake it because you didn’t get a 2. That kind of flexibility disappears in high school, where even minor errors can drag down your entire assessment grade. In middle school, what would be a simple “P” could become a C, D or even an F in high school.

Even a small shift in the grading system for eighth graders could smooth their transition into high school. If WMS incorporated percent grades into its system, students would be better prepared for the change in expectations. There can still be flexibility, such as re-assessments, but seeing their grades as percentages would help them adapt to high school’s grading demands.