What often results from standards-based grading is a student who never did any of the work or learned any of the material, but still passes.
For instance, in a sophomore English class, students may have to master the standard of recognizing the relevance of historical background in a given text (TEKS 110.37.6D). Students “practice” this standard by doing various exercises that pick out pieces of text and short biographies of various writers then require students to answer questions about historical background.
In a final project (always a project, never an actual test, which offers fewer loopholes), the students might show “mastery” of this standard by drawing a picture of a story’s setting and writing a three-sentence description of that setting. If the student completes this task in any conceivable capacity (a stick figure and a few words), the teacher can then justifiably declare that he mastered the skill and have that grade on this final project replace all the zeroes the student received on the practices.
Everything about this is wrong. The first problem is with the theory of standards-based learning itself. Most subjects, even math, cannot be broken up in to isolated standards. Understanding context, making inferences, determining purpose, evaluating an argument, and all the rest are not really “skills” in any meaningful sense; they are all part of the reading process. Readers do all of these things at the same time, and if they can do it well, they haven’t mastered any particular skill, but are simply strong readers.
