Moscow school switched to a new grading system: from zero to two

Moscow gymnasium 1514 introduced a new system for assessing knowledge – from 0 to 2 points. Now in elementary grades a two is equal to a five, and instead of a “fail” they put a zero. Parents are perplexed – how to convert this innovative “zero scale” into a regular five-point scale? When moving to another school, for example, or to the secondary level in the same gymnasium, “zeroing” has not yet happened there. And most importantly, who and why needed to give up the usual fives in favor of twos?

As MK learned, the initiative to introduce a new knowledge assessment system, the so-called criteria-based one, came from the school administration and personally from the director Anna Belova. Moreover, 1514 is one of the best schools in the South-Western Administrative District in terms of average Unified State Examination results.

Parents of students in grades 1-4 were, to put it mildly, taken aback by the news that from this September children will be bringing home ones and twos. After a noisy meeting at the school and a collective complaint to the Department, the director prepared an explanation: “This (criteria-based assessment) is one of the modern teaching methods, which is absolutely transparent and excludes the human factor when assessing a student’s knowledge.”

The director believes that such a system helps to assess the student’s level of preparation at each stage of training. And don’t worry, they say: for a trimester, half a year, a year they will give normal grades on the usual five-point scale. But “the training within the topic is gradeless”…

“MK” called the school to get an explanation first-hand, but director Belova did not talk to us.

Scores from 0 to 2 are vaguely familiar to some people with higher education. This is how universities assessed the so-called “control weeks”: 0 means “cannot cope”, 1 point means “not fully mastered”, 2 points “fully mastered”. In 1990-2000, some universities introduced intermediate points of 0.5 and 1.5.

“A test week is an internal university story, when one week in a semester teachers find out how the material is going,” says education expert Anastasia Gordeeva. — A kind of express diagnosis of the current performance of the student and the group. I don’t know why such a three-point system should be introduced at school. In fact, now there is a four-point system in schools; no one is given “stakes.” World practice is to increase the points – 10, 12 and 100 point systems. Or, conversely, do not give grades at all, as in Norway from 6 to 13 years old.

You can often hear practicing teachers complain that the grading system “from two to five” is not flexible enough. Sometimes you want to give it a 6, but you can’t. And different students’ grades are not equivalent… However, all attempts to introduce a 10-point grading system in our schools have not been successful. There are too many difficulties, especially legal ones, when issuing certificates and transitional documents. Pilots with increased-intensity systems were covered in Russia back in the 2000s.

But in Belarus, Latvia and Lithuania, Moldova, Georgia and Armenia, a 10-point scale has been adopted. In Finland, too, officially from 1 to 10, but they do not give grades below 4. In Ukraine, 12-point, in the USA and Kazakhstan, letter 12-point (from A to F with “plus” and “minus” options for each). In France, it’s as much as 20 points: “excellent” is 17-20 points, “very bad” is below 7. In India, there is a percentage system where a five corresponds to 70% above, and below 30-40% it is a “two”…

Interestingly, in Russia the five-point grading system appeared in 1841. And it was, in fact, a six-point scale, from 5 to 0. Failure, that is, a two, was then called “mediocre”, a one “poor”. And there was also a “zero”, which Pushkin, as we remember, often received in mathematics.

“In our schools, criterion-based assessment usually means different emoticons, or color differentiation, or some other analogues of grades at the beginning,” clarifies Anastasia Gordeeva. — In fact, the term means correlating the learning outcome with its goals, with standards. Therefore, the current weighted average five-point grading system in schools is closer to the criterion system than the three-point system.

“Any manipulations with the assessment system in schools and the reaction to them reveal some gap in the legislation,” says lawyer Stanislav Popov. — On the one hand, schools have quite broad autonomy. According to Article 28 of the Federal Law “On Education”, the administration is competent to monitor current progress in the ways it wants. True, “taking into account the opinion of the parents.” However, exactly how this opinion should be taken into account is not spelled out; there is no mechanism. But according to Article 44 of the same Federal Law, parents and legal representatives “have the right to take part in the management” of the school and protect the legitimate interests of children. So, a suddenly introduced assessment system that diverges from the generally accepted one in our schools can be challenged in court.