The grades students earn in school serve as critical measures of student learning. Grades are used both internally (course placement, intervention, program access, graduation) and externally (scholarship, college entrance, employment qualification) to evaluate student academic ability. Schools do not currently have a systematic method to evaluate instructional effectiveness using course grades.

Measures of instructional effectiveness primarily focus on the evaluation of an instructor’s pedagogical skills and content knowledge during periods of observation. Course grades entered into grade records (transcripts) are widely accepted as accurate measures of a student’s understanding of course content. However, the scoring and recording practices of student learning vary greatly in classrooms across school campuses. As a result, teachers and administrators cannot comprehensively evaluate the efficacy of instructional effectiveness and the resulting levels of student learning of essential curriculum standards as reported by student course grades.