Types of Grading Systems: A-F, Pass/Fail and Standards-Based

A grading system is the set of rules a school uses to turn student work into a reported result, and most US schools use one of five: A-F letter grades, pass/fail, credit/no credit, satisfactory/unsatisfactory, or standards-based grading.

Many districts are now revisiting how they grade, as more move their report cards toward standards-based reporting and explain the change to parents.

Below, the page compares the five systems side by side, then covers four alternative approaches and how to choose between them.

What is a grading system?

A grading system is the set of rules a school uses to turn student work into a reported result. It decides what is included in that result, how each part is scored, and how the final result is presented.

The grade on each essay or quiz is a single data point. The reported result on the report card or transcript is a result that comes out of all those data points after weighting, averaging, and other policies regarding late or re-taken work are considered.

Almost every grading system falls into one of two families. Norm-referenced grading scores students against each other, and grading on a curve is the familiar example.

Criterion-referenced grading scores students against a fixed standard, so everyone who meets it gets the result, regardless of what their classmates score.

The most common type, which is A-F, falls somewhere in between. A letter grade is meant to measure work against a fixed standard, but curves, bonuses, and grading habits pull it back toward a comparison between students. That in-between position is the source of most complaints about A-F.

The five grading systems US schools use

Five grading systems cover almost every US school, and they differ in how much information the final result carries.

The pass/fail system reveals just one piece of information: did the student pass the threshold? A standards-based report card could reveal a grade on each specific skill being taught during that particular semester.

Usually, the majority of schools adopt a combination of these grading systems. The high school may issue letter grades in core classes, pass/fail in a few elective classes, and satisfactory/unsatisfactory in conduct classes.

Here is how the five grading systems compare.

A-F letter grades

The A-F system converts a percentage score into a single letter, and it is still the default in most US schools. The teacher assigns points or grades throughout the term, and the school's scale converts this percentage into the letter grade.

Most scales skip E. Early scales used E for failing, and schools switched to F so it would not be read as "excellent." Plus and minus modifiers add finer gradations within each letter band, so a B+ and a B- are not scored the same.

The problem is that a single letter grade can bundle very different things together. One A-F grade may average performance with behavior, effort, attendance, participation points, homework completion, and extra credit. Students may receive the same letter grade for two vastly different achievements.

The first aces every test but does not complete any homework assignments. The second completes all the homework assignments but performs poorly on the tests. Both can end up with the same letter grade despite very different skills.

Two variants are common: some elementary schools use E/G/S/N/U (excellent, good, satisfactory, needs improvement, unsatisfactory), and some graduate and medical programs use High Pass, Pass, Low Pass, Fail.

Pass/Fail

Pass/fail replaces the letter with a single threshold judgment: the student either met the standard or did not. It appears mainly in elective classes, courses outside a student's major, some graduate programs, and internships and fieldwork. In most schools, passing doesn't affect GPA.

The schools use pass/fail because it takes pressure away. If a class will not affect the student's GPA, then they are likely to take a risk on it.

American University argues, in its overview of alternative grading systems, that pass/fail removes the grade pressure that gets in the way of learning.

What you lose is the information. A pass tells you that the student met the requirement, but it doesn’t tell you how well.

Both outstanding work and barely passing work receive the same evaluation. In an elective class where there is not much at stake, this might be an acceptable trade-off. But not in a class whose results someone will have to evaluate later.

Credit/No Credit

Credit/no credit records whether a student earned course credit, without recording a performance level. It closely resembles pass/fail, and the two terms are often used interchangeably.

In practice, the difference shows on the transcript. In most cases, failing a class affects one's GPA, whereas no credit usually means the course simply does not count, with no penalty attached.

You will see it used in electives in colleges, community and developmental classes, as well as in summer and transfer classes.

The problem arises when a student transfers to another university. A receiving institution often cannot tell what "CR" stands for, because the grade behind it is not recorded. It can also refuse to count the course as a prerequisite and ask for a letter grade that was never given.

Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory

Satisfactory/unsatisfactory reports performance in two or three broad bands and is most common in elementary grades and non-academic subjects. A report card might show S and U, with N for "needs improvement" as a middle option.

It fits areas where a detailed score would be false precision, like a first grader's work habits, conduct, or specials such as art, music, and PE.

Families of young children mostly want to know whether things are on track, not where their child sits on a 100-point scale.

It falls apart in academic subjects, though. If a fourth grader's reading goes from shaky to solid over a term, both report cards might still say S. The teacher saw the progress, but the report can't show it, and a parent has no way of knowing which skills still need work.

Standards-based grading

Standards-based grading scores each learning standard separately, so a grade shows which specific skills a student has mastered rather than an average of everything they did.

This means that a report card will show individual grades for citing evidence, organizing an argument, and conventions, not an averaged English grade, with separate scores on a 1-4 scale.

According to KnowledgeWorks, a nonprofit organization providing competency-based learning initiatives in districts, there are five distinctions between standards-based grading and traditional grading systems (2023):

• A failing result shows which standard should be re-taught, thus allowing working only on the standard rather than repeating the course.
  
  
• Students get several chances to prove their mastery. Thus, a low September mark will not affect the overall grade.
  
  
• The department defines criteria consistently, reducing discrepancies between an easy grader and a hard one.
  
  
• Expectations are published, so students and families can see what's being measured.
  
  
• The only thing to be measured is the standard itself, not behavior, extra-credit tasks, or late penalties. They are reported separately.

Re-assessment is the key to all standards-based grading. Without the possibility to reassess, standards-based report cards provide more detailed information about the same one-shot evaluation.

The real drawback shows up on the transcript. Colleges and scholarship programs still expect a GPA, and turning a set of standard scores into one number is awkward.

Therefore, most school districts using standards-based grading adopt the hybrid approach, reporting standard scores to families and a converted letter grade in a transcript.

Proficiency-based and competency-based grading refer to nearly the same approach. People use the three terms almost interchangeably, and proficiency-based turns up more often in state policy language.

If you're writing standard-by-standard criteria from scratch, it can save time to browse the rubric library first.

Four alternative approaches

Four alternative approaches change how the grade is decided, not just how it is reported.

These approaches are more commonly implemented in individual classrooms and college courses than in district-level policy, and all four are usually compatible with those listed above.

1. Mastery-based grading: Students progress after proving their mastery of the skill, not by the date on the unit schedule. For one student, it takes three attempts. For another, it may take only one. It is suitable for sequential subjects such as math or early reading. However, it poses problems regarding the pace of studying, as teaching a class of 28 diverse students is difficult.
   
   
2. Contract grading: In contract grading, teachers and students make agreements at the beginning of the course on how much work and how good it should be for a particular grade. Columbia University's Center for Teaching and Learning describes contracts that get discussed again in the middle of the term, when assignments are usually assessed as either completed or not. Although students feel less anxious, a loose contract can reward volume over depth.
   
   
3. Specifications grading: Every assignment is marked as satisfactory or not yet according to the set of published specifications in specifications grading. Also, the final grade is based on the number of met specifications, or groups of assignments. Columbia's CTL points out that revisions and resubmissions are possible until the specifications are met. Writing clear specifications requires a lot of time, though.
   
   
4. Ungrading: In ungrading, grading is removed from almost all of the assignments, and feedback is provided in narratives. Columbia's CTL is clear that ungrading means de-emphasizing grades, not dropping them altogether. In fact, most educational institutions require assigning course grades, and in ungraded courses, teachers and students usually agree on it together at the end.

How to choose a grading system

The right grading system depends on what the grade needs to communicate, and to whom. You can ask these four questions to decide what grading system to go with.

• Who reads the grade? Students and their families usually need detail they can act on, like which skill a student is weak in or what they should practice next. Also, transcripts and admissions offices need one comparable result. If both audiences matter to you, which they usually do, your grading system needs to produce both.
  
  
• Does it need to convert to a GPA? If the answer is yes, a pure standards-based system will need a hybrid, so settle the conversion rules before rollout.
  
  
• Can students re-assess? Standards-based and mastery-based grading give more than one chance to students so they can get another go. If your schedule, class sizes, or policy won't allow retakes, you won’t see many benefits going with these two grading systems.
  
  
• Is grading decided per teacher or per department? Standards-based grading only works when all teachers agree on what proficiency looks like. If each teacher sets their own bar, a 3 in one classroom will mean something different than a 3 in another, and the families will notice this.

Also look at what feeds the grading system. A grading system can only report what your assessments measure, so review the types of assessment tools you rely on before you change how results get reported.

Most schools moving away from A-F end up with a hybrid rather than a clean switch.

Grading consistently, whatever system you use

Every system on this page depends on the same thing: that the same piece of work gets the same result regardless of when it is marked or who marks it.

However, that consistency is hard to hold in practice. The teacher who goes through 100 papers within four days will not be the same person on the last day as on the first one. The teacher will start experiencing grading fatigue, and the last paper will be read differently from the first one.

Standards-based grading makes it harder, because instead of forming one overall impression, you score each essay against several standards.

EssayGrader, a rubric-based AI essay grading platform for K-12 and higher-education teachers, was built for exactly this.

It grades each essay against the rubric criteria you define and reports mastery against writing standards separately from the assignment grade.

You will receive the required grade for your school and the score for all standards in one attempt. If you do not have a rubric at hand, you can build a custom rubric and apply it to the whole class set.