A couple of days ago, I was sitting in an optometrist’s office waiting for my annual eye exam when a woman rushed through the front door, clearly flustered. She approached the front desk and blurted out, “I am so sorry for being late! Here is my insurance card.” Just beneath the counter was a sign spelling out the consequences for tardiness.
Despite arriving late, she was still seen—just as I was after arriving a few minutes early. Her eyes were examined, her prescription assessed, and her vision evaluated. The optometrist’s judgment of her eyesight was not adjusted downward because she arrived late.
A connection to grading reform immediately became evident. If we agree that the primary purpose of grades is to communicate learning, then applying penalties for late work—such as a “10% deduction per day late”—misses the point.
Nearly everyone I know agrees that frequent tardiness should be addressed and that completing tasks on time is important. As the sign communicates, if I were more than 15 minutes late, the office might reschedule my appointment, and if I consistently failed to show up on time, they could even dismiss me as a patient.
But Don’t Deadlines in Education Still Matter?
Absolutely. Meeting deadlines is an important life skill, and schools have a responsibility to teach students responsibility, time management, and follow-through. Ignoring late work entirely does students no favors.
However, the question is not whether deadlines matter—it’s where they should matter. When late penalties are baked into academic grades, the result is a distorted message about student learning. A lower grade may signal missed deadlines rather than misunderstandings of learning goals, leaving students, families, and educators unclear about what actually needs improvement.
Just as the optometrist addressed timeliness through office policies rather than altering a vision prescription, schools can—and should—address late work through behavioral feedback, reteaching expectations, and separate reporting of work habits.
What To Do Instead
The optometrist’s communicated assessment is not dependent upon a patient’s punctuality. In the same way, academic achievement should be communicated separately from behaviors in a gradebook or report card. This distinction is at the core of grading reform philosophies such as standards-based grading and reporting.
Many elementary schools already use standards-based report cards to communicate academic achievement separately from learning behaviors.
Secondary schools implementing standards-based grading may also choose to communicate employability skills separately from academic achievement. For example, Wautoma Area School District in Wautoma, Wisconsin, reports “work and people skills” independently from academic proficiency.
If we truly believe academic grades should communicate learning, then we must be willing to stop using them as tools to enforce compliance. Reducing academic grades for late work may feel efficient, but it obscures the very information grades are meant to provide. Grading reform challenges educators to ask harder questions:
- What do I want this grade to say?
- Does it accurately reflect what the student knows and can do?
When we separate achievement from behavior, we gain clearer data, more honest conversations, and better instructional decisions.
An eye doctor would never blur a prescription to teach punctuality. Our grading practices shouldn’t blur learning either.
—-
Disclosure: The ideas, examples, and draft originate from the author. Generative AI was used to proofread this blog post for clarity.
Of all the things I taught when working with pre-service teachers, this was one of the hardest for them to wrap their minds around. People who want to be teachers are often good rule followers–that is how they succeeded in school–and this felt like breaking a big rule or big “tradition” to them. I once asked a student teacher why she was giving her students a study guide. She said, “Because they have a test.” And what, I asked, was the purpose of the study guide? “Because that’s how you study for a test.” And what then does the test do, I asked? She looked at me blankly and burst into tears: “You give a study guide and then give a test. That’s just how it is,” she explained. Some habits (or “traditions”) are hard to break…