What are Grades?

What do grades mean?  This is a question that has been in the forefront of my brain for a few weeks now and something I've thought about regularly for years.  What do they actually mean?  If a student has a 95 for a quarter grade, does that mean that they understand 95% of the material covered in that quarter?  Or are they just a means of comparing students to each other?  As a teacher, I was taught to grade every effort given by my students.  Throughout my years of teaching I've been pushed to make every assignment "count" by assigning a grade.  You may ask who is forcing me.  It's the community.  

 "consistently show students the correlation between the work we give them to do, and their increased understanding of a topic"

I love the school district that I work for.  We have a high success rate, the faculty is happy and the faculty and administration work very well together.  However, because of our success we have become grade obsessed!  You see, some people have been lead to believe that if there is no grade attached to the assignment, it doesn't mean anything but I believe that they couldn't be more wrong.  If grades are supposed to recognize the amount of information understood by students, then the only thing that should be graded are assessments that prove that the student understands the material (summative assessments) not the in between assignments that help students to get there or else your results can be skewed.  What about the student who  hands in all of the assignments but they had their friend or tutor do it so they don't really understand the material?  Or the student who pays attention in class, learns and fully understands the material without doing their homework?  Assigning a homework grade would skew both of those results.

So how do we get students to start doing homework, even if it is not graded?  We need to consistently show students the correlation between the work we give them to do, and their increased understanding of a topic.  Got half of the questions wrong on a test? Well let's look at how much of the work the student did to prepare.  As students do more of the work, and understand the material more, their assessments should be in line with that, if they are not, the teacher needs to prepare more differentiated material for their students.