How Do You Grade Your Leadership Class

One of the most frequent questions I hear at conferences and conventions is, “How do you grade your students in your leadership class.” This is a questions that does not have one right answer, but there are a few things you need to consider when grading your leadership students.

By nature, ASB Programs attract your high end honors students. As a result, these students are motivated to get good grades, but they need to clearly understand the teacher’s grading rubric. Therefore, it is imperative to provide students with a clear outline of what they need to do to earn a grade of “X” in your class. This sounds simple, but we all know it is easier said than done.

Good leadership programs have ongoing activities throughout the school year, and like anything in life 20% of the people do 80% of the work. This 20% is easy to grade. They are the ones to show up and the last ones to leave. They are the ones who take the leadership role in planning activities, and they try their best to get everyone else involved. These are your “A” students. However, does that mean because someone does not approach activities with the same enthusiasm or lack of leadership skills that they are automatically thrown in the “B”- “C” category? There are some students who possess more innate leadership qualities than others. I strongly believe that this is where teacher observation needs to play a significant role in grading. For example, little 9th grade Suzy is a sweet shy girl who is great at doing tasks assigned to her. Suzy is an absolute perfectionist who will make the best rally poster in the whole class, but will not be able to complete all of the ten because of the stress it causes her. Your top-notch students complain that Suzy does not do anything, but in truth she does about all she can handle and what she does do is top quality. Furthermore, Suzy always gets assigned to the less appealing committees and tasks because she has not yet developed self advocacy skills to tell the “leaders” in the class that she would like to do something else. Now grades come out and little Suzy gets a “B”. Suzy’s mom freaks out because Suzy goes to all of the activities and she tries her very best at all the tasks she has been assigned. What do you do? Maybe in fact Suzy deserves a “B”, or maybe she deserves an “A” because she is truly giving her best effort. I don’t know which grade is correct, but I do know that teacher judgment is going to play a role in assigning the grade, and it is not going to be as black and white as I initially hoped it would be.

One of the best measures to use when grading students in ASB is to allow them to do self evaluations. At the end of the quarter or semester, you simply hand them a list of all of the activities, committees, meetings, etc… that they have had the opportunity to participate. Ask them to rate their performance on a scale from 1 to 10 with 10 being best. Then individually talk to each student and ask them to tell you the grade they think they deserve. Most of the time, the students will be much more critical of their performance than the actual teacher, but most of the time the students are spot-on with their grade via their self-evaluation. Moreover, after each ASB sponsored activity you can conduct peer-evaluations. Peer evaluations is another way both to grade and motivate students in your program.

Once again, grading students in your leadership program is not always black and white. If you grade to leniently then the students who do all the work will become resentful, or if you grade to stringently then other students may become too discouraged. The bottom-line is you need to find a grading system in which you are comfortable with, and a grading system in which the students find fair.

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