It's the end of the year and it's time to enter final grades. Teachers enter all the student scores and the grade book program generates a final % and grade for each student. Teachers immediately press "submit", right? Wrong. They start using "Grade Hacks".

The guilty secret is that most teachers use Grade Hacks when the grade that the software calculates for a student isn't the grade the teacher believes the student deserves. Damian got a 79% (C+) according to the software, but he deserves a B-. We aren't able to overwrite our software's grade so we "hack" the software: We omit a student's lowest test score, or we boost the student for "effort", or we change a classwork or homework assignment--we're trying to adjust the points just enough so that the software's calculation spits out a grade that we agree with. We're educational professionals, and we've been reduced to outfoxing a fancy excel spreadsheet.

It's exactly what we should do--make sure our professional judgment prevails over software--but it's absurd as well. It reveals how inadequate our grading software is and it's a symptom of how our traditional grading practices get in the way of, and even undermine, teachers' expertise.

Hacking the software is the right thing to when our grading doesn't support us. But we can improve our grading to be more equitable and we can reconceptualize our grade books to match the grades that we believe students have earned. There’s no better way to find out how than to get started.