Authors: Teacher Candidate, Pre-service elementary school teacher in the Denver Metro Area, and Elizabeth Cordova, Crescendo Education Group Coach
This article is written in partnership between a professor and a pre-service elementary school teacher currently earning her master’s degree and teaching license. We intentionally bring together two vantage points: one as a longtime practitioner and professor who has implemented equitable grading practices across secondary and concurrent enrollment contexts, and the other as a student navigating the realities of higher education, student teaching, licensure requirements, and graded coursework.
Our collaboration reflects a belief at the heart of equitable grading itself: that systems are best examined when those most affected by them are part of the conversation. Throughout this piece, we draw Elizabeth’s instructional practice and survey data from preservice teacher candidates, while also integrating this teacher candidate’s personal experiences to illuminate how grading practices are lived and interpreted by students preparing to enter the profession.
Adopting Equitable Grading in a Preservice Teacher Program
As a veteran of implementing equitable grading tenets in secondary classrooms, I (Elizabeth) adopted equitable grading practices in a college course for preservice teachers with some discomfort.
My students are not only students; they are interns, student teachers, employees, and future educators. They balance coursework alongside licensure benchmarks, unpaid placements, and employment. If equitable grading is meant to resist bias and more accurately reflect learning, then it must contend honestly with that reality while preparing students to become teachers.
The principles of grading for equity are grounded in three pillars: accuracy, bias-resistance, and motivation. While some practices transfer more easily than others from K–12 settings, focusing on this broader framework has helped me work toward a more equitable grading system in higher education. In some ways, higher education sharpens these questions even further – particularly around attendance and participation.
A student might reasonably ask, “If I’m paying for this course and passing the assessments, why do I need to come to class?” That question forces us, as professors, to reflect on what we are truly valuing, not only in our grading systems, but in our instructional design. It can be intimidating work. Staying grounded in accuracy, bias resistance, and motivation has helped me navigate it, and transparency has emerged as especially critical when teaching preservice teachers.
Grades and Learning: What Do They Tell Us?
When I asked students how accurately their grades reflected their learning, most responses clustered in the middle range. Many acknowledged that grades often reflect what they are able to demonstrate in a given moment, rather than what they actually understand.
Several students noted that learning in a preservice program is deeply experiential and difficult to quantify. Others described grades as accurate only insofar as they reflected what students had time and capacity to show, not their intellectual engagement or curiosity.
One response captured this tension particularly well: learning was happening; readings and discussions were meaningful, but life circumstances often prevented that learning from consistently showing up in graded artifacts.
This distinction matters. Equitable grading asks us to interrogate whether grades reflect learning, performance under constraint, or compliance with academic norms (and whose norms those are).
Student Perspective: When Disagreement Becomes “Incorrect”
Teacher candidate
After a lesson focusing on how to handle classroom management, we were asked to think about the different ways we would implement classroom management tools into our future classrooms using the resources we just learned about. I chose to write about the “carrots and sticks” method, noting that while the research we analyzed in class pointed to this method being ineffective in traditional classroom environments, I believed it could work to develop good habits in a kindergarten classroom.
I received a grade I felt was biased simply because I didn’t agree with what we had learned in class, even though I offered strong reasoning to support my argument. In the feedback for this assignment it was noted that we learned the “carrots and sticks” method was ineffective and therefore should not be used in a classroom. I felt this was unfair because I had followed the assignment guidelines and backed up my argument with other resources from the class. I felt that my opinion differing from the professor and the resources we learned about had impacted my grade unfairly.
Grading can unintentionally reward alignment with instructor beliefs rather than depth of thinking. For preservice teachers, this is especially concerning: we are encouraged to be reflective and responsive practitioners, yet sometimes assessed as though there is a single “correct” pedagogical stance.
Motivation: Relevance Matters, but Grades Still Signal Priority
Students were candid about motivation. While many named relevance, future teaching, and licensure as intrinsic motivators, grades still functioned as a powerful organizing force.
When time is scarce (and it often is during student teaching), work rises to the top. This is not a failure of motivation; it is a rational response to structural pressure.
This created a real tension in my equitable grading approach. When formative work is ungraded, students may deprioritize it—not because they don’t value learning, but because grades remain the dominant currency of higher education.
Students were clear about what helped: they engaged in ungraded work when it was clearly taken up in class, when it fed directly into future assignments, and when instructors explicitly followed up and referenced it. Equity here requires instructional follow-through, not point values.
Student Perspective: Grades as Survival, Not Apathy
Teacher Candidate
The number one motivator to complete assignments is point value and weight in the grade book. While I willingly enrolled in a higher education program and I am excited about the content I’m learning, between work, student teaching, and other courses, something has to determine what gets done first. For me and many of my peers, that’s the grade book.This does not mean we don’t care about learning. It means we are navigating competing demands within systems that still communicate priority through points.
Bias is Not Obvious, but Power Can Be
When asked about bias in grading, student responses varied widely. Some reported no experiences of bias. Others described favoritism, inconsistent expectations, or grading tied to tone, communication style, or perceived compliance rather than academic work.
One student described grading as a “power play” rather than an evaluation of learning.
Importantly, even students who did not identify bias in this course named it as a persistent feature of higher education more broadly. This reinforced something critical for me: bias resistance cannot rely on individual goodwill. It must be built into systems: rubrics, policies, transparency, and consistency.
Student Perspective: When Rubrics Aren’t Real
Teacher Candidate
I’ve had a professor tell students, in a very straightforward manner, that she “doesn’t really use the rubric,” and that it’s more of a guide. She then continued to explain that grades are based on how she feels about the work we produce at that moment. This professor is also somewhat well known for having inequitable grading practices as a result. By grading like this, the professor is putting immense pressure on students with no real solution. We continue to be anxious and wary each time we submit an assignment and receive a grade. Personally, it does keep me up at night thinking about if I will receive a passing grade. Essentially, my entire focus has come off the project or assignment and has shifted to being on the grade and my own self-esteem instead of reflecting on how to become a better educator.
In another class, a rubric stated that projects should follow example layouts exactly. A few friends and I followed the rubric and examples to a tee, only to be given drastically different grades. We each got entirely different letter grades for the assignment, despite following the example and rubrics in the same fashion.
Despite identical adherence to expectations, outcomes varied widely. Experiences like these make grading feel arbitrary and personal – conditions under which bias can easily thrive (and are highly demotivating!).
Clarity and Transparency
One of the clearest throughlines in the survey data was the importance of clarity. Students overwhelmingly reported consulting rubrics before beginning assignments. When expectations were clear, they felt more confident, less anxious, and better able to manage competing demands.
Students requested clear success criteria, explicit connections between assignments and course goals, and word counts or concrete scope indicators.
These are not minor preferences; they are equity supports. Ambiguity advantages students fluent in academic norms and disadvantages those balancing heavy workloads, new professional identities, or unfamiliar expectations. Transparency made grading feel less personal, less arbitrary, and therefore less biased.
Formative Work, Attendance, and Worth
I chose not to grade discussion posts or attendance, while still emphasizing their importance to learning and community. Students largely agreed with this approach in principle.
Their attendance decisions were driven not by points, but by whether class felt worth their time. That worth came from face-to-face interaction, instruction that extended prior learning, applied experiences, and clear links between class activities and future teaching.
Equitable grading, then, is inseparable from equitable instruction. If grades are not the incentive, learning time must be meaningful enough to stand on its own.
Concluding Reflection
Writing this article together has reinforced a central lesson of equitable grading: systems feel very different depending on where one stands within them. By combining practitioner experience, student survey data, and lived student perspectives, we see more clearly how grading practices communicate value, power, and belonging.
For those of us preparing future teachers, equitable grading is not only about fairness in our own classrooms. It is also a model for the systems our students will one day create themselves.
Elizabeth taught secondary social studies for fifteen years in Denver, Colorado. She is an adjunct professor of social studies at the University of Colorado Denver and works for TEACH Colorado. Elizabeth holds a Master of Arts from the Teachers’ College at Columbia University, where she also completed her work as a James Madison fellow for the state of Colorado, and a Bachelor’s Degree from Lake Forest College in Illinois. She loves to run, do yoga, and spend time with her four-year-old and baby.
