Comportment Grades Have No Meaningful Impact for German Students

Grading the behavior of students in Germany has no meaningful impact on their educational success or school-to-work transition, finds a new ifo Institute study. “We found no discernible differences in academic performance, character traits, or career profiles between schoolchildren who received comportment grades and those who did not. These non-academic grades therefore seem to have neither a positive nor a negative impact on the students’ development,” says ifo researcher Florian Schoner. “In other words, the heated debates around them have been much ado about nothing.”

The study is an excellent example of how some education reforms are fiercely debated in public, but do not produce a measurable difference for the students to whom they actually apply. “From a policy perspective, this is very illuminating,” says ifo researcher Larissa Zierow. “Science needs quantitative evidence to clarify whether much-discussed reforms even have any impact in the first place. Our findings on the comportment grades reform suggest that policy efforts should focus on other areas to improve the quality of Germany’s education system.”

The authors used three extensive datasets for the study: assessment studies given in the ninth grade, measurements of character traits such as conscientiousness from surveys, and data on the school-to-work transition from the Microcensus, the official annual household survey in Germany. If proponents and opponents of comportment grades are correct, all of this should be affected by those grades. However, these theoretical considerations cannot be confirmed in measurable terms. Schoner explains this by saying that comportment grades provide little in the way of additional information, as academic grades already partially include student behavior and participation.

In the study, ifo researchers Florian Schoner, Lukas Mergele, and Larissa Zierow compare educational reforms of German states that have introduced comportment grades in their school systems. “Due to opposing views on the benefits and drawbacks, there were multiple ministers of education in the 2000s who either abolished or reintroduced comportment grades. We exploited the staggered introduction of it among the federal states to examine the consequences this form of grading has for the students,” Mergele says.