The Origin of Grades in American Schools

Ezra Stiles, a former president of Yale University, died nearly 230 years ago, but his ghost continues to haunt schools and colleges across the country. In addition to his time leading one of the most well-known educational institutions in the world, Stiles was also a minister, a founder of Brown University, someone who bought enslaved people, and a pen-pal of both Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, yet he is largely remembered for something he himself never would have anticipated: introducing grades as a means for evaluating academic work.

Not only was Stiles the president of Yale from 1778-1795, but he was also a faculty member, which required him to examine students on topics ranging from Greek and Latin to rhetoric and mathematics. At this point in Yale’s history, students answered exam questions orally, and they were evaluated publicly in front of their peers other members of the university community.

Stiles kept a meticulous diary, and in a series of entries for the year 1785, he details a rather frenetic week full of student examinations. From April 4-8 of that year, he did everything from writing questions to personally examining students. April 5 is of special significance for our story, though. On this day, Stiles examined 58 seniors. In his diary and other notes, he describes the way he categorized student performance on the examinations. Twenty out of the 58 were classified as Optimi, 16 as Second Optimi, 12 as Inferiores (Boni), and a worrisome 10 as Pejores.

Three of these terms are fairly easy to translate. Optimi means “Best,” while Second Optimi unsurprisingly means “Second Best.” Pejores, the lowest performing group, can most accurately be rendered as “Worse” (not “Worst,” which indicates at least some empathy on the part of Stiles). Inferiores (Boni), on the other hand, is a bit trickier. In the past, some have translated this phrase as “Less Good,” but “the Lower of the Good Group” is probably closer to the original meaning.

Although we may dither a bit about the exact meaning of these terms in English, there are a few points that are incontestable about Stiles’s four categories of achievement. First, they together comprise what is almost certainly the first documented grading system in the history of American education. Before you cheer or jeer him for this, it is important to know that Stiles did not invent this approach. Across the pond, examiners at Cambridge had been evaluating student performance on oral exams using similar kinds of Latin-labeled groupings for much of the eighteenth century. Stiles was simply an enthusiastic importer of this British system, but he can be credited with putting an American stamp on it. As a vocal supporter of independence and the Revolutionary War, which took place during his Yale presidency, I think this might have pleased him.

Second, the clear purpose of this mode of evaluation was to publicly rank and sort students according to their achievement, not to give them feedback on their learning or to suggest how they might improve before the next exam. This kind of class ranking was a mechanism for conveying status and privilege (or withholding them), oftentimes mirroring the social structures of the world beyond the ivy-covered university walls. In the end, Ezra Stiles bears a healthy dose of responsibility for popularizing a system in which public recognition and classification of performance mattered more than individual learning, student development, or the cultivation of curiosity and inquiry — all of which are ostensibly the primary goals of education.

This is grading’s original sin, and — despite centuries of change in American schools and colleges — we have never been able to move past it. From the very beginning, grading was more about sorting, signaling, and certification than it was a system for supporting or enhancing students and their learning. Class valedictorians, Latin honors (like summa cum laude), and GPAs are all legacies of Ezra Stiles in this regard, but even more familiar grading models suffer the same fate.

Percentage grades and A-F letter grades, which arrived on the scene in the late 1800s, give slightly more information about a student’s performance in a class, but they still serve the purpose of ranking and sorting, and we also have good evidence to suggest that they are not accurate measurements of learning in the first place. That’s a problem, and students shoulder the burden.

We have now arrived at a pivotal moment for education in America. Armed with an understanding of the problems with traditional grading, teachers and administrators across the country are experimenting with new approaches like standards-based grading, contract grading, collaborative grading, and more. Their goal is to evaluate students in ways that better reflect learning, allow room for mistakes, and account for personal growth.

Those elements of education might not have mattered much to Ezra Stiles in the America of the 1780s, but they are absolutely essential for the future of our nation’s students.