Chapter 7: The Relative Nature of Grades and Their Definitions

Chapter 7 address a concern that every teacher will have constantly throughout their career. This concern is grading. The fact that summative grades have little actual use is brought up in the chapter as well. Another major thing that I took from this chapter is that without differentiation many students will simply fail. Although all of that was important the part of the chapter that really shocked me was when the text explained that many high schools do not use any grades whatsoever. This does not make sense to me at all. If there are no grades what ambition is there for the student to get their work done, how can we monitor for parent, students, and ourselves what is actually being learned without some sort of scale? I don't know that I believe in this, and I wouldn't do this in my classroom given the option.