Ever since Peg Syverson first introduced me to the Learning Record, I have anxiously awaited the semester when I'd get to use it to evaluate my students. I probably have the same criticisms of traditional grading systems that most of you do--even those who continue using them despite their limitations--and hoped the LRO would be a productive way out. Actually, I think I saw it as a potentially perfect grading system.... And then the disillusionment set in...:

Now that my maiden voyage with the LR is drawing to a close, I'm having serious second thoughts about using it, or at least some first thoughts about modifying the way I use it.

Basically, I'm frustrated by how often and how drastically my students' estimations of their grades differ from the grades I think their LR warrants. To be precise, at the midterm, all but one of my students claimed they had earned As or Bs, when I saw mostly C range and D range development. (The one student who claimed a C+ didn't seem to me to have demonstrated anything above the D level, and the few students whose LRs convinced me they earned Bs all estimated As.)

What's going on here? Are my students totally blowing off my class and lying to me? Or did I miss something? Or am I just a meanie or a tough-guy or something worse?

Among the reasons I wanted to use the Learning Record were that I found myself to be a "hard grader," wanted to avoid awkward "grade-grubbing" conversations with my students, and honestly thought that maybe I had "unrealistic expectations." My students were always very frustrated and I didn't see anything but terrible papers. Because a LR grade is supported by out-in-the-open, evidence-based, and shared-vocabulary-based arguments, I thought I would see that, regardless of how their papers turned out and how frustrated we all felt, my students were doing a lot of useful work and learning lots of stuff in my class.

Well, it hasn't turned out this way so far and I'm sort of dreading the finals I'm going to get in two weeks.

To make things worse, I've looked at the "exemplars" that Peg's LR site provides and I have to say that I don't think most of the samples support very high grades. I do think that, overall, the samples seem better than what I've gotten, but to me, the ones that claim As don't really cut it. Where's the evidence? Where is the significant development along all dimensions of learning?

I realize that it's probably significant that 1) this is the first time I'm grading with the LR, and 2) my students are all first-semester freshman, still in high-school mode, only free of its authoritarian control... Not only are the type of writing and argument that the LR requires new to them, but so are the serious self-reflection and taking-ownership that it is based on.

I guess I'm wondering what other people's experience with the LRO has been like. Do students actually show actual evidence of development in all the specified ways? Do they ever say anything about "confidence and independence" other than "I have become vastly more confident"? How do you and they negotiate between "marked development" and "significant development"? What about claims about "high quality work" when you don't give grades and your students' experience with evaluations of quality has almost always been in terms of (most likely 0-100% scale) grades?

I've been thinking that next semester I might give regular letter grades even though I use the LRO to determine the final grade... but I go on and on...

For more on my frustrations, etc. see my new personal blog.