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Loudoun County Public Schools is launching a review of its grading procedures, with a tentative plan to implement an updated policy during the 2025-26 school year.
During a recent Curriculum and Instruction Committee meeting, Chief Academic Officer Ashley Ellis said while many educators agree with the philosophy of the grading procedures, “they struggle with the implementation in their classrooms.”
Loudoun Now first reported that the policy will be reviewed this school year.
The decision comes as several Northern Virginia school districts are considering possible changes to their grading policies. In Arlington, school leaders used the “Grading for Equity” approach, hoping to remove subjectivity and make sure a grade truly represents a student’s knowledge. The school board in Fairfax County is scheduled to discuss grading as part of a work session later this month.
“The policy was implemented right at the start of COVID, and so the training that we had planned, while robust, was not really implemented the way we had hoped,” Ellis said. “And I do think some of the challenges come with that and inconsistencies across schools.”
The choice to revisit the policy for possible updates came after “overwhelming feedback that there were some areas within this policy that needed to be looked at,” school board member Lauren Shernoff said.
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As the school division collected informal feedback, Ellis said similar themes resurfaced. The most common topics included formative assessments, retakes and what’s called the “50 floor,” which means a 50% is the lowest grade a student can get for turning in certain assignments late.
Formative assessments include things such as homework and quizzes, and summative assessments are items such as final projects or tests a teacher creates at the end of a unit.
While it considers what parts of the policy need to be updated, the school division clarified that the current rules let teachers decide to give a score of lower than a 50% on a summative assessment if a student “did not make a concerted effort, or reasonable attempt, to complete the assessment.”
A student who “demonstrates a pattern of repeated retakes, late work, or missing work” may also have retake opportunities limited, and the original score, possibly lower than a 50%, may be counted.
“There are certainly opportunities or times when students have clearly taken advantage of the process and should not be offered a retake,” Ellis said.
Shernoff said the division’s current policy doesn’t need to be overhauled, but “what I do think we need to do is look at where we have those situations where, certainly, we always want to have the student in mind first. If it’s a vulnerable situation, we never want to write a kid off where they cannot get back in the game and prove themselves.”
The revisions, Shernoff said, are needed to expand definitions, boundaries and parameters.
The school division will continue collecting feedback and holding focus groups, and a tentative draft of the updated policy could be shared in March of next year, with a possible school board vote in April.
“We need to really press into the process, and press into listening to our educators who have been living with this policy and executing the policy as is,” Shernoff said. “And start to really see where do we need some parameters around protecting teachers so they’re not in the eleventh hour always grading retakes or late submitted work? Where do we make sure that kids are prepared for the real world where there isn’t a 50% grading floor necessarily, or where you have to be on time or get your work done?”
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