Update on the Mastery Transcript Concept: A New Way of Assessing and Grading
For this week’s blog I am writing from College Park, Maryland, where I am attending a Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC) Symposium with more than a hundred educational leaders from around the nation. Attending with me are Sonia Arora, Director or College Counseling; Tom Thorpe, English Department chair and Director of REDI Lab; and Martha Smith, science teacher and associate teacher in the REDI Lab. We are here for two days of planning, listening, learning, and developing ideas to bring back to Colorado Academy.
In general the MTC (https://mastery.org/) is a coalition of public and private schools looking to replace or amend the grade-based system in education with something that better reflects and promotes student learning and encourages students’ individuality, all while reducing the unhealthy “arms race” that has emerged within competitive school environments.
If you pay attention to education news, you have probably already heard of the Mastery Transcript Consortium; the budding movement has gained attention in the popular press three years since going public. One of the leading educational thinkers in the country, Dr. Tony Wagner, whose work has been influential to CA’s progressive work in the past, is one of many who has vocalized strong support for the MTC. Wagner argues that “After 124 years [of this educational model], it’s time to reimagine the high school curriculum for the 21st century and to encourage teaching and assessment of the skills and dispositions that matter most. Our students deserve a more accurate measure, and they shouldn’t have to wait another century for their transcripts to better reflect their accomplishments.” Many leading educators in the independent school world feel similarly. The rallying cry has been strong.
Proponents argue that students cannot effectively tell their high school stories nor distinguish themselves meaningfully through their transcript. To supplement the transcript, up to now we have relied on school and teacher recommendations, along with supplemental information about the student’s involvement in clubs or other activities, to convey the journey of a young person’s growth over four years. Still, the transcript and test scores have dominated the admissions process because they provide easily quantitative measures by which colleges can choose to admit or deny students. The MTC looks to help students tell a more complete story and to help high schools re-calibrate what they measure. Rather than simply provide a list of students’ courses with the grades they received, the mastery transcript would be more akin to a portfolio of student work with clear evidence, curated in conjunction with the students themselves, about what they have learned and how they have demonstrated what they know and what they can do.
It’s a bold endeavor, and one that would take years to come to fruition, if indeed it ever does. Because it radically transforms the way we report on student learning and achievement, there are currently more questions than answers about how it would all look and work. An often-asked question in regard to the MTC’s ultimate goal of a new high school transcript relates to college admissions: How will colleges deal with something different, something presumably more complex, to analyze than a list of courses and grades? What numbers will they rely on if GPAs cannot be considered? MTC Founder Scott Looney has pledged that one of the consortium’s deliverables will be that the alternative transcript may be read in under two minutes, which is roughly the amount of time a college admissions reader can spend on that portion of an application. (One might hope an intriguing or in-depth transcript might tempt the reader to spend longer.)
MTC has been lining up support from institutions of higher education to ensure that students who present alternative transcripts will not be disadvantaged in any way in the college process. Many liberal arts colleges around the nation have indicated that they would be willing, even eager, to consider this new method of evaluating students. But the practicality of this has not yet been tested and skepticism remains. Will a college admission rep really take the time to learn the nuances of a whole new kind of transcript? Can the application reader readily identify ways in which a student distinguishes herself from the many other applicants from around the country? (I should note that CA’s college office believes our students would be well represented regardless of transcript, because of our school’s reputation and the personalized approach we already offer in the college search process.)
Still, regardless of how far the MTC can move towards overhauling the current high school transcript, the coalition is helping steer educational discussions towards one important aspect of pedagogical practice: how we assess students. Currently, most of the traditional assessment methods—tests, papers, even oral presentations—tend to support the grade-based system that we have all grown accustomed to. But research has shown that these are not the best ways for students to demonstrate what they know, nor does it have much lasting impact, or transference, to other situations. Students learn what they need to learn for the test’s sake, not necessarily for learning’s sake, which means more often than not their level of understanding is not particularly deep. If any of us considers something we know very well, we know we have been exposed to this body of knowledge or skill multiple times over a longer period of time. If we truly aspire to mastery of a topic, we don’t cram information into our heads, test ourselves on it, and move on to the next thing. In a mastery-based approach, tests and papers would continue to have their place. Knowing certain content still matters; clear written communication of ideas still matters. But these ought to be just two components of a much larger body of work. Students’ performance on certain authentic tasks, hands-on learning opportunities, and multi-dimensional projects would also fill their portfolios. So would frequent self-reflection on their learning; mastery requires us to ask ourselves regularly “What did I learn from this experience, and how can I apply that learning to the next similar situation?” This is also something our current system does not do very well, as individual assignments within particular disciplines tend to remain as self-contained units.
Colorado Academy is pleased to be in on these important conversations and, as always, is looking to create the best possible learning environment for our students. As one of the first thirty members of the MTC, CA has been able to participate in impactful conferences and workshops already.
In the meantime, many public and independent schools are already exploring alternate methods of assessment, evaluation, and compiling of student work. At CA, for example, we have used a Pass/Fail system during the first trimester of the Freshman year. Without the usual constraints of an A-F grading system, teachers can do more to emphasize the learning process, offering students multiple attempts at the same assignment (thereby promoting mastery) and encouraging students to take risks and offer more creative solutions to problems. We are also exploring alternate ways of assessing and grading in our REDI Lab trimester for Juniors.
Underpinning this whole shift in the way transcripts look is the new and exciting brain research that has emerged in the last decade. We now know much more about how people learn, what motivates them, what is effective in terms of long-term retention, and how the concepts of grit and having a growth mindset factor into our ability to learn and grow. Future years will bring even more advances in the fields of social science, and that will have important and positive effects on student learning and on the ways school is conducted.
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