Transcribed by otter.ai
Today is January 29, 2025, and this is William Michael, Headmaster of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. Today, I’d like to take some time to talk about grading and assessment in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, because I believe that this is where the Classical Liberal Arts Academy really differs the most from any other program, from any modern school, any other homeschool program. It really is with assessment and grading that we separate ourselves in ways that I believe are really important for the development of Christian learning.
The Problem with Modern Assessment
If we think about modern schools and what they do with respect to assessment, we see that it’s all limited by the artificial school calendar. Most of the time, students are given assignments or tests. They’re given the opportunity to submit an assignment or take a test. They receive a grade, and that’s it. They move on. They move on to the next lesson, they move on to the next assessment, they move on to the next grade. They move on to the next school. The students are graded and they move on, but they don’t have the opportunity to improve. There’s no time or opportunity for improvement. The schools will spend time talking about grammar lessons and writing rules, and they’ll talk about critical thinking skills and all sorts of concepts and criteria for quality student work, but the students don’t get the opportunity to submit an assignment, receive feedback and improve, and receive more feedback and improve until they’ve completed an assignment where there really is not much negative feedback left to give. That opportunity to submit, receive feedback and improve is absent in modern schools.
We can think about this with respect to written assignments, and also with respect to quizzes and tests. Students are given a quiz on a certain day, and that’s it. They get a grade and the class moves on. What if the student did poorly? Well, the student is warned that he better get his act together, because there’s going to be another quiz and a test, and since he got an F on the last quiz, his grade is now lower, and he needs to work hard to pick up that grade. But what about that failed quiz? The student doesn’t have the opportunity to go back, study the material and prove that he’s mastered that content. The class just moves on. And this continues from the earliest years in our children’s schooling, all the way through to the end, and there’s a lot of craziness when we consider this, because what schools do is really incredible.
College Admissions and the Focus on Comparison
When I talk to college admissions representatives about student transcripts and student work that’s been done, they ask me strange questions. They’re always concerned, for example, with the dates when students studied certain courses. They want to know when the student studied this Latin reading course, or when the student studied this theology course. They don’t ask about the quality of the student work. They don’t ask about how the student has improved in the subject over time. They want to know when the student did this work, because they have only one thing in mind. They want to compare students. They want to rank and classify and label and compare the students because they’re concerned about their own admission policies. They’re concerned about their own students that they receive into the school. They’re really not concerned with the students. They’re really not concerned with whether or not the students are learning. They’re simply comparing students and trying to pick the best students that they can find based on their scores, and this is really a backwards way to look at education.
Personal Experience and the Pizza Maker Analogy
When I was teaching, I used to get frustrated by this stuff. When I was a classroom teacher in a private school, I remember saying to my students, if we go to the pizzeria, and there’s a man in the pizzeria, and he is the pizza maker, if he doesn’t make a pizza, we would judge him to be unsuccessful, and he would probably get fired. No one would go to the pizzeria where the pizza makers don’t make pizza. The pizza maker has to make pizza. That’s what it means to be a pizza maker. But when we come to schools, we have people who are called teachers, and yet the students don’t learn the material that they’re supposed to learn in the course. The parents pay tuition, the schools pay the teachers, and the teachers don’t teach. They’re like pizza makers who don’t make pizza.
What I told my students was I take personal responsibility for each one of you learning the content that I’m responsible to teach. And so when I think about what I need to do as a teacher, there are many things that the so-called teachers do which don’t lead to learning, and I’m not interested in doing any of those things. I’m not interested in imitating the teachers who fail to teach. I want to know what I have to do to cause my students to learn the content that I am hired and paid to teach them, and the practices and the methods that I need to use to effectively do this are very different from what other teachers are doing, and frankly, I don’t care what other teachers are doing.
A Better Approach to Grading and Assessment
In my classes, I had very different policies than any other teachers had. I told my students, we have marking periods here in the school where grades are due at certain times. You may always retake a quiz or resubmit an assignment until the end of the marking period when I have to submit my grades. So you have until the very last moment when I’m submitting my grades for the end of the term to retake or resubmit anything that you’ve done poorly on, because I don’t want you to receive a low score and then say, “Oh well, I got a 60 on that quiz.” If you do that, then I have failed to lead you to learn the content that I’m being paid to teach you. I don’t want you to do that.
There are many reasons why you might not be able to study and complete an assignment at a certain time. There’s just other stuff going on. We get sick, we have other activities. These schools have these kids involved in all kinds of extracurricular activities, and then those active kids are penalized when it’s difficult to get all the schoolwork done. And so I told my students, you may retake any quizzes or tests, resubmit any assignments at any time until the last minute my grades are due, because I want you to learn this material. I want you to prove that you have learned this material.
My students thought I was crazy. They laughed as if it was some kind of a joke, or as if they would be allowed to cheat. And so I would have students showing up at the end of the school day or during a study hall, asking if they could retake this quiz or retake that test, and we would schedule time for them to do it. I’d have students coming in to me who didn’t turn in an assignment earlier in the term, and they’d turn in that assignment. And so my students had a different attitude in my class, because they knew there was never an excuse to get a low grade.
Removing Excuses and Raising Standards
I remember one day the mother of a football player in our school came in to talk to me after school because she received a midterm report that told her that her son had a D average in my class, and she came in as the friendly, happy, supportive parent who wanted to know what she needed to do to help her son raise his grade, and so I told her my grading policy. I said these students in my class are allowed to retake any quizzes or tests they want. They’re allowed to resubmit any assignments that they want. They have until the very last minute that my grades are due to raise their grades. So in all fairness, ma’am, the reason why your son has a D is because he’s chosen to have a D. There’s no excuse for why he has a D.
This friendly, supportive mom—I could see in her eyes a fire building when she realized that her son was not struggling in class, her son was simply not working—and she thanked me and shook my hand and promised me that her son would be raising his grade, and that boy was in my class the next day asking to schedule time to retake quizzes and tests. All excuses were taken away from the students. There was nothing but work necessary to earn the highest grades and the perfect scores. And at the end of the terms, I had students who mostly had A’s and B’s, and if there was a student who had a low grade in one of my classes, he was mocked and ridiculed by his classmates. How could you be so stupid to get a low grade in this class when you’re allowed to retake quizzes and tests and resubmit assignments?
After a few terms with me, students started to realize that everything was in their control, and I would have students getting A’s and B’s, retaking quizzes and tests, resubmitting assignments all the time. It was effective for teaching. The assessment method had a direct effect on my ability to teach the students. My students wanted to learn because they knew that they could get high grades in my classes.
Lessons Learned and Pushback from Other Teachers
Now, of course, some of the students thought that they’d take advantage of that, so they wouldn’t take the initial quiz or test seriously. They thought that that was a cute approach, that they would make use of my lenience and my patience and just make up for it later. But they learned the hard way that time runs out, and so they realized that, no, you really do need to study because this is your first chance and your best chance, and you might not actually be able to take advantage of the policy, even if you do have time, because other stuff comes up and there’s more to study, and there are more quizzes and more tests, more assignments, and so on. But the key was the assessment method was directly responsible for the success that my students had.
Now, the other teachers disliked what I was doing because word got around. And when students would get bad grades in other courses and they would have to keep those grades, you can imagine the students would complain and say, “Why can’t you be like Mr. Michael? He lets us retake quizzes and tests and resubmit assignments.” And the answer is, there’s no reason why teachers can’t be like me with respect to assessment and grading. There’s no explanation why a teacher would rather give a student a D for the year rather than see that student retake quizzes, go back and review material, retake tests, resubmit assignments, and raise that grade to an A. There’s no explanation for why a teacher wouldn’t do that, except that the teacher didn’t want to. The teacher didn’t take responsibility for the student’s learning the material or completing the assigned tasks, and the school allowed the teacher to get away with that. That’s the problem in modern school. Teachers are not responsible for the learning of individual students. They just grade the students and treat the kids as if they’re just parts of a class and the class moves on. The education is not organized to serve the interest of the individual students, and as a teacher in a school, I always hated that about the schools. I took the learning of my individual students as my responsibility, and to tell you the truth, if I had a student who wasn’t doing what I said and wasn’t getting his tasks done, I took it as a personal challenge, and I was upset by it, because it was my job to make the pizza, to use the illustration.
The Founding of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy
So that was one of the reasons I eventually left school teaching and started the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. It was because I said to myself, I want to build an entire school program that employs my policies and procedures with respect to assessment and grading. I want students to know that they can earn a perfect score on every quiz, every test, every exam, every assignment, and know that at the end of the day, there’s no one to blame for them not having straight A’s and perfect scores but themselves. And that’s the goal of my policies on assessment and grading in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. Students may retake every quiz, every test, every exam, may resubmit every assignment, as many times as they need to, until they earn perfect scores. And if they don’t have perfect scores, there’s only one reason why: they have stopped working.
Now, to do that, of course, takes a lot of work and sacrifice, and there’s obvious reasons why teachers are not willing to do that, but as I said, technology, database technology, online quizzes and tests, the use of artificial intelligence to assist us with certain parts of assessment that are very wearisome for a human teacher to handle, but are not at all wearisome to a machine—by making use of the resources and tools available and developing carefully conceived plans and procedures for assessment, we’re able to provide students in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy with the opportunity to improve on every activity that they participate in. So our students can take a quiz and receive a score. They get instant feedback on their quiz. They can see which questions they had wrong. They can go back to the lesson, review the lesson, come back to the quiz, retake it, and raise their scores. And they can continue to do that until they’ve mastered all of the content in the quiz or the test or the exam, and you see how it challenges them not to get a grade and say, “Oh, I got an 80. Oh, well, move on to the next lesson.” No, you got an 80 on your first try. That means you got 20% of the questions wrong. You need to go back to the lesson, review, come back to the quiz, resubmit it and get everything right. There’s no excuse for why you don’t have every question right on this assessment. And students are challenged to do that, and most of them do.
Assessment and Feedback in Practice
With respect to assessments, written assignments, students are given an assignment. They work on that assignment, and they’re encouraged to try and earn a perfect score on their first try. That’s obviously the best way to do it. And so the students get to work, they submit an assignment, and it’s reviewed. I review it. I read over it. As I said, I use AI tools to help analyze the student work from a certain perspective, really from a grammatical perspective, and I ask an AI tool to provide the student with criticism based on the quality of their written work with respect to organization, completeness, grammar and so on. And I provide the students with feedback, detailed feedback on their assignments. The students then have the opportunity to read that feedback, see what their strengths and weaknesses are, and revise and resubmit the assignment to improve on their weaknesses, to eliminate those weaknesses, to learn to become conscious of those faults in the work that they submit and get rid of them, and so they can resubmit and get new feedback that says, “You did well this time with grammar, your organization was much better. Here’s your new grade, a higher grade, well done,” until they finally reach 100% scores where it says there is no more need for revision.
Every single assignment in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy offers the students that opportunity to revise their work and actually improve their study skills. And I don’t believe that that’s available anywhere else. Every assignment in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy offers students that opportunity to improve and improve and improve. Now it’s challenging. It’s tiring for the students, but if our goal is to actually improve in our studies, this is how it’s done. This is how it’s done.
The Modern School System’s Lack of Interest in Individual Growth
Now, the problem with this is that the modern school system, the modern school industry, I would say, has no interest in this individual development of students. It has no interest in it. It has no respect for it. It’s not looking for this kind of information, it doesn’t show any appreciation for actual improvement. Colleges will literally say to me, we want to see the students’ grades, the student’s GPA, the class rank and the dates when the courses were taken. In other words, every part of their evaluation of students is subjective. There is no objective evaluation when they look at the academic records of the students, and that’s a real rip-off. The students are not assessed objectively. Their grades are looked at, which are given subjectively by teachers who grade, as I explained before. Their grade point average is just a summary of the grades that they’ve been given by teachers, teachers who determine their own standards, their own rubrics, their own grading scales and so on—a grade point average that just allows a college to compare one number with another student’s number, class rank, which, again, is entirely subjective. These are the things that colleges look for on student transcripts.
And what happens is, when schools know that this is all that the colleges look for, they just pad these numbers. They just puff up these statistics for their students to help them appear to be learning. We see this especially, shockingly, in math and science classes, where an entire class of students will be struggling, an entire class of students will be failing the course, and at the end of the term, or at the end of the year, the teacher will, quote, unquote, curve the grades. And we talk about grading curves as if it’s just some sort of normal educational technique for learning, where what we’re really doing is saying we began the year with a syllabus and with goals for this course, content, goals and so on, and this group of students did not achieve the goals that we set for this course. Most or all of the students have low grades. None of the students have demonstrated mastery of the content, the concepts and skills that we intended for this course to provide. So we don’t want to have 25 students get D’s and F’s for this course. So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re just going to change the grading scale. So rather than 93 to 100 being an A, we’re just going to drop that down to, oh, I don’t know, 78. So 78 and above will now be an A for this course, and a B, rather than going down to, let’s say, 85 or so, will go all the way down to maybe 70. And we’ll just rewrite the grading scale and assign grades based on this curved scale. But what’s really happening is an entire class of students is being promoted to the next class after not learning the content of the previous class. And this is common all through high schools and colleges today. There’s no commitment to actually learning the subjects. It’s just this game of dressing kids up and giving them awards that they have not earned and agreeing to pretend that they’ve actually earned these degrees and diplomas and awards, which they haven’t, in fact, earned.
I experienced it myself in a college calculus class. I had no idea what this class was about. My sophomore year in college, I was in a calculus course. Horrible professor, hardly even looked at the class during our classes. I had no clue what we were doing. I was barely passing, and even when I passed a quiz or a test, it was just by luck. I just happened to come close enough to get partial credit, to not completely fail, and I ended up with a B for the course, even though I learned no calculus whatever, because the grade curve pushed me up to a B. That is not education. That’s a total corruption of schooling, and it’s common all through modern schools, because all that matters are the grades and the numbers and not individual learning.
The Challenge and Standards of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy
So when parents enroll children in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, these children are going to face a challenge that other children are not facing. They’re going to be challenged to actually learn, develop, demonstrate mastery and improve their work. When they first start in our courses, when students get started in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, they’re really in for a shock and awe experience when they see the standards of our quizzes and assignments. Our quizzes are very difficult. Our quizzes are not some little goofy 10-question quiz, it’s a 30, 40, 50-question quiz that’s very challenging, that’s thorough in its assessment of a lesson as far as the content goes. And then when they come to their assignments, it doesn’t matter if they say, “Well, you know, were my answers right? Did I answer the questions correctly?” That’s only part of the assessment, because we take writing and communication seriously. You’re not allowed to write like you’re four years old in a high school course. And so every single assignment is going to be evaluated, not only by the content of the work, but also on the quality of the work. We take grammar classes in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy because we want to communicate with good grammar, and so when you submit an assignment, every single assignment submitted is a grammar quiz. Every single assignment is going to be a writing quiz, and we’re going to constantly be working to not only learn the content of courses, which is important, but also to practice all of the concepts and skills that we learn in our grammar and composition courses. That’s the whole purpose of studying grammar and composition.
So a student may fail a history assignment not because he didn’t study the history lesson or can’t answer the history questions, but because he wrote terribly and he needs to learn to write according to the rules of grammar and composition. Now some parents will say, “Well, I want my child to learn history, but he is not good at writing. He doesn’t have good grammar,” and my response to that parent is true learning is more concerned with grammar and composition skills than with the knowledge of the trivia of a history class. So we can’t pretend that a child who can answer the history questions correctly and win the trivia game is a good student receiving a good education, when he can’t write clearly. The writing is actually the greater skill. The writing is a higher skill than the history lesson. And so this is enforced in all of our assessments. We provide detailed feedback for students.
The Value of Writing and Communication
When students get started in our courses, parents and the students should expect the first lessons to go slowly. It’s very likely, especially when they come in from other programs, all these Charlotte Mason programs, where there’s all of this talk about reading and content knowledge, and these kids can’t write, these kids can’t communicate. And what I don’t understand, the challenge that I would raise to all of these great books programs, and Charlotte Mason programs, all of these reading-heavy programs is, what would there be to read unless there were first good writers? The value of reading underscores the value of writing. Without great writers, there’s nothing to read. Reading comes after writing. The real work is the writing, not the reading. It’s like watching a sporting event and imagining that watching the sporting event is virtuous, rather than actually competing on the field is virtuous. It’s like watching a play and thinking that being a spectator who watches plays is real learning, rather than actually studying and performing the plays as an actor or actress. We have this backwards, especially in fake classical education. All of this talk about great books and reading, because the composition is the actual study skill. The composition, the ability to actually produce what’s necessary to be written.
You know, as a Dominican, I learn in the Dominican Order that our mission is to contemplate. It’s to study. Yes, that’s true, but the end goal of that contemplation is to be able, in charity, to share the fruits of that contemplation. I’m not just a black hole of study and contemplation and information gathering. There’s an end to my study. The end to my study is to fulfill the work of mercy, to instruct the ignorant, to counsel the doubtful, to preach the gospel. Those are the ends of my studies. And so to imagine that learning the information, gathering all of the trivia, all of the knowledge, imagining that that’s important, but the ability to communicate it clearly and effectively is not important is a fatal flaw in education, or what’s called education.
Expectations and Growth for Students and Parents
So when students come into our program, they often get frustrated because they are not made to do this work. Normally, they don’t necessarily like it, and they’re not allowed to submit lazy work. We require them to write clearly, communicate clearly, organize their work effectively, and present us with quality submissions. Now there’s no danger in these standards, because we give them critical feedback and invite them to resubmit. And we’ll do that as many times as is needed, until they learn and attain to the standards in our program. The first lessons will be slow because they’ve got to get used to that, but after they start to get the hang of it, after they start to realize what’s required, after they start to get used to what it feels like to actually complete our assignments, it becomes normal, and what parents and students should expect is that the rate of progress in their studies will be exponential. That means that it will increase more and more as time goes on. The beginning will be very slow, because they’ve got to learn to work up to the standards. But as they do so, they will actually be improving in their studies. They will be improving, and as they improve, their ability to study will increase, and the rate at which they will be able to progress will increase, and the difficulty of the content that they will be able to study will increase, and this will all be independently. That’s the real goal of education, and there’s no way to fake it. There’s no way for lazy teachers to do it. If homeschooling parents themselves are lazy, there’s no way that they’ll do it. They’ll go right back to those lazy reading programs where there’s no objective standards for the quality of student work. And that’s fine, because the Classical Liberal Arts Academy is for real students, students who actually desire to get better, to master the lessons and skills of a classical Catholic education, to actually improve, to get better and to work towards perfection. That’s the goal of our program.
It’s very costly for parents and teachers to provide real education. It’s very time consuming, it’s very labor intensive. It requires great patience, but that’s why instructing the ignorant is a work of mercy. It’s a work of mercy. It’s very difficult. It requires a right disposition in the parent and in the teacher. It requires the grace of God to actually enable a parent and/or a teacher to persevere in the work and actually help the student. It’s very difficult work, and parents and students and teachers need to learn to respect that teaching is very difficult work.
The Principle of Improvement in Assessment and Grading
And so in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, when it comes to assessment and grading, the most important principle is our assessment and grading policies allow students to improve, to work towards perfection in their studies, in their writing, in their communication. When our students learn a lesson, they’re required to practice it. They’re required to grow in their communication skills, not just gather trivia. And that’s a major difference between the Classical Liberal Arts Academy and just about any other program or school available today.
So the most important reason why I want to talk about this and share it is because I know that that initial shock and awe of our program and the number of assessment tasks that are available can be overwhelming. And when students who are usually flattered because they’re smart or they’re trivia whizzes receive low scores because they’re not effective in writing and communication, that can be really upsetting to those students and upsetting to parents who are proud and who hate to see their children receive any negative feedback. You should expect negative feedback because we’ve got lots of faults to correct. We’ve got lots of weaknesses to fix, and our assignments and our assessment give the students the opportunity to actually grow and improve, and so you should learn to receive that feedback critically but positively, because as I said, it’s not a grade. We’re not judging the student, we’re not grading the student, we’re not labeling or ranking the students. We’re giving the student a response regarding the quality of his work at the present time based on the work that he submitted, and we’re inviting him to revise it, read over the feedback, and resubmit it. And so it’s always positive. It’s always with a view to improving, to getting better, to raising scores and moving towards perfection. That’s what real education should look like, and we can provide that in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy.
I would even say that was one of my principal goals in founding the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. It was to allow students to study and work and receive grades and feedback that were always open to improvement. That, I believe, is the key for education.
Diplomas, Documentation, and True Mastery
Now, when we get into the business of applying to college or putting together diplomas, we’ve got some confusing issues to deal with, because the way that our studies work is not how modern schools work. They can put together a nice, clean and neat diploma, because their whole entire school is organized for the sake of the diploma and not for the instruction and development of the individual students, so they have this advantage, this appearance of an advantage, when it comes to pumping out all kinds of documentation and certificates, most of which is just empty fluff. What we should be able to produce, what we should be able to give evidence of in the end, is a student body that actually possesses the skills that schools are supposed to provide their students with. That is, that we, claiming to be the pizza makers, should actually be able to present a pizza to those who come to our shop, and in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, that’s our goal. Our goal is to actually lead the students to mastery of the classical Catholic curriculum and of modern K to 12 school requirements. But that requires lots of academic tasks, lots of assessment, lots of feedback, lots of revision, lots of resubmission. That’s the means by which we pursue perfection as Christian students.
Conclusion and Invitation
So I hope that that helps to explain how assessment differs in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, and I hope that it helps parents and students to approach these assessments with the right attitude, with the right disposition, so they can make good use of them, look at them positively, keep working and not be discouraged or offended by a low score or some critical feedback. It’s all intended to be positive and to assist the students in improving their study skills. If you’ve got any questions about specific assessments or anything that relates to grading or assessment, I encourage you to write to me directly. I’m happy to talk about it.
Also, for parents, if you’d like to join us on Wednesday evenings, we have a weekly homeschool parent meeting. It’s a Zoom meeting my wife and I host, and it’s open to all CLAA parents. You can come and ask any sorts of questions that relate to education or homeschooling, and we’ll talk through those questions. My rule for these meetings is we get started at nine o’clock and I’ll stay on in the meeting room for discussion as long as that discussion continues. So if you’ve got questions and would like to really dig into things, feel free to join us on Wednesday evenings and bring your questions and we’ll talk through them. To register for those meetings—the meetings are free, but you need to register—go on the CLAA Study Center. You’ll see in the announcements the announcement for registration for the weekly parent meetings. Go to that link, register yourself, and you’ll be in. So that’s one good place to continue this discussion.
But if you’ve got private questions about assessment or grading or your student’s progress and work, feel free to contact me directly with those, either by live chat on the website, by email or by phone anytime. All the contact information is available on the Academy website.
I hope that’s helpful. God bless you.
Mr. William C. Michael, O.P.
Headmaster
Classical Liberal Arts Academy
