Teachers warn new grading scale may mislead parents

The education minister’s new grading scale for primary schools could confuse parents because it uses numbers to represent competency levels rather than percentages, teachers told Morgunblaðið.

Grades from 1 to 3 will not be reported to students. A grade of 7 means a student has met the competence criteria, while grades of 8, 9 or 10 require them to demonstrate skills beyond those criteria. An 8 indicates this to some extent, a 9 to a great extent and a 10 to the greatest extent.

Primary school teacher Þorsteinn Mar Gunnlaugsson said parents accustomed to a conventional 1-to-10 scale might misunderstand the results. A student could meet every expectation and submit a flawless answer but receive a 7, he said, whereas the same performance would earn a 10 on a traditional percentage scale.

Gunnlaugsson and fellow teacher Ragnheiður Stephensen criticized the lack of clear, consistent assessment criteria, warning that similar student performance could be judged differently between schools. They also criticized how authorities had introduced the change.

The teachers said expectations for what students should know, and how their abilities should be assessed, need to be clarified and applied more consistently across schools before a decision is made on which grading scale to use.