Grading Music: The Music Department’s Path to Stricter Grading

In each of Stuyvesant’s music ensembles, student musicians showcase different talents: chorus students sing in harmony, orchestra students rehearse classical pieces, and band students perform modern compositions. However, since these ensembles are also classes, students must receive a grade. Recently, Principal Seung Yu and the music department have called for stricter grading. As the music department adjusts its grading policies, complexities and questions about the objective way to grade a subjective skill arise.

Stuyvesant Band Director Dr. Gregor Winkel brings a unique perspective, having started as a physics teacher. “I spent my first years in Stuyvesant as a physics teacher, but then I found the music department,” he recalled. He noted that the latter is often very individualistic, with a single student able to thrive without collaboration. “In physics, you can sit down and study. You can go [to class] if you want, but you have a textbook that you can study outside of class,” Winkel described. However, being a musician in an ensemble is very different. “[In a band], you need to communicate with your conductor and with the rest of the musicians. It helps you refine details together [...] and ask for help and guidance,” Dr. Winkel added. As a musician, improvement as an individual is of little worth if the entire ensemble does not improve as well, and group rehearsal is crucial for this improvement.

Stuyvesant Orchestra Director Joseph Tamosaitis addressed difficulties he has seen with assessing individuals. “When we grade, it’s not like music school, where you’re just graded purely on the basis of how good it is. I’m more interested to see someone who is showing steady improvements,” he explained. In order to do this and to grade students fairly, he must keep track of each student and use different scales in assessing each individual. “Someone could come in as a complete beginner. But if I see the intonation is improving, vibrato is occurring, then that impresses me a lot more than someone coming into the school who has had a lot of training and is already at an advanced level.” However, this system of grading is difficult, as there are around 40 students for what is considered a small orchestra. “You can't tell by looking,” Tamosaitis finished.

This unique aspect of music classes makes them difficult to grade, and far more subjective. Individual success and effort cannot be measured through traditional assessments such as pen-and-paper tests or projects. “It’s not so easy to understand music, as [it is with] physics—doing well is more than playing well,” said Dr. Winkel. “It is a group performance, a performance class.” For this reason, grades in the music department have traditionally been based primarily on class participation and attendance. “The classwork grade is based on what we see, if the student is engaged and does their best,” Dr. Winkel described. The Winter and Spring Concerts count as the students’ summative assessments. “You must be at the performance, or it is missing a part,” Dr. Winkel said. “There is no makeup test.” Attendance in concerts typically accounts for 40 percent of students’ grades.

Last year, the music department announced that ensemble grades would be pass or fail. Both students and teachers were unhappy with this idea. “We brought it to the students, and the students were overwhelmingly against it. I didn't like it because playing an instrument takes so much skill and concentration in ways that may not be obvious. It's definitely as skill-intensive as, say, trigonometry,” Tamosaitis said. “I would not be happy with it.” Condensing a student’s performance into a simple pass or fail diminishes their effort and fails to take into account the nuances and importance of music.

Ultimately, the change was reversed due to a student-organized petition, but there has been a renewed push from the administration for stricter grading. Liliya Shamazov, Stuyvesant’s Chorus Director and Music Department Director, explained the department’s new policies in an email interview. “The motivation for the recent changes comes from the school trying to create a more uniform way to assign grades across all disciplines,” said Shamazov. To achieve this, teachers are introducing additional forms of assessment, such as sight-reading tests and video assignments. 

These are individual assessments that are more easily quantifiable. “It’s an attempt to make the grading formalized,” Dr. Winkel said. “The emphasis is being shifted—everything is in one moment, [in the way that] tests or homework are.” Ultimately, it is too early to see the long-term effects of the policy change. “We’ll see how it goes,” he concluded.

However, students have already noticed significant differences in the handling of coursework and assessments in comparison to previous years. Band student and junior Shirley Liu explained, “Grading was very simple last year. Every month or so [Dr. Winkel] would give a homework assignment based on completion, and you could do it whenever you wanted to to get full credit.” However, this school year, Dr. Winkel is adding more formal assignments to the coursework. “He said he is giving us playing tests throughout the year so that we can submit more summative assessments. That disadvantages [our grades] a little bit because we have to be consistent with our effort the whole school year,” she said. However, despite this foreseen impact on students’ grades, Liu believes that the change will have a positive effect on band students’ effort. “I think these changes are fair. [...] Band grading has always been a little too lenient on students who didn’t put any effort into the class, and the new grading system changes that.”

Junior Phon Myat Mo agreed, sharing his experience as a Chorus student. “It was very [relaxed] for classwork. You just had to show up to class and do your assignments and [not] goof around too much. You also had to show up for [afterschool] rehearsals,” he recalled from the previous year. “The homework grade was free; just do the homework and don’t mess up too much. You record yourself singing your part while listening to the track for your part—so again, very free,” he said. The summative assessments were also not very comprehensive. “Assessment-wise, you just had to show up and do your part for the concert, and you’d get full cred[it], so you would essentially be guaranteed a 98 as long as you did what you needed to.” As in Band, more has already been added to Chorus’s coursework. “We have to do this really big packet of music theory stuff, which honestly isn't that hard but [is] super tedious,” he said. “[Ms. Shamazov is] preparing us a lot for final exams she's going to give this year, [...] on sight reading and music theory at the very least. I know there's at least one, which is way more than last year,” he remarked. Mo recalled last year’s departmental call for a change in grading systems. “I know they wanted to make music a letter grade, so to keep it numerical, they made it more academic,” he concluded. “So although I am a little annoyed, it ultimately is a fair change.”

Tamosaitis had a positive outlook on the change. He is especially hopeful for the potential of video homework assignments. “I get to see, in there, how each member of the orchestra is doing,” he said. “That takes a lot of time. But it's worth the time, because I get to hear them and know what they're doing.” He also added that grading helps students keep themselves accountable for the work they put out. “When students realize that they're accountable for the work they do every week, every day in class, and the work they do at home, practicing, then the standards are going to go up. For me, I want people who will come to the concert, everyone really knowing their part, playing to the best of their ability.”

Shamazov was also optimistic about the policy, having already noticed improvements in both the efficiency of learning and in the ability of her students. “Having homework assignments has been helpful in my chorus classes, because now students work on music theory and sight reading at home, which generally makes them better musicians and singers. It also makes learning music faster and easier for the students,” she noted. She also shared her broader perspective on the policies as head of the music department. “Grading ensembles is difficult, since there is never a perfect way to play or sing, or a perfect performance. We have to grade projects that are ‘gradeable’ in ensembles, such as mastering parts, musical knowledge, overall improvement, music theory, etc.,” she said. These different assessments can be adapted for each diverse ensemble. “The music department came up with a number of various homework assessments that work, and different classes use the ones that are most useful to them,” she said. She sees the potential of the new grading system and notes that she has already seen points to be hopeful about. “While the newer grading system presents some challenges, both teachers and students have been adjusting well,” she finished.

Across all three music ensembles, the ultimate motivation of the class and its participants is the same: to create music as a whole. While this goal may seem simple, the challenges lie in attempting to quantify art and in fairly evaluating individual contributions within a group performance, making grading both difficult and nuanced. Hopeful teachers and students believe that the newer, stricter policies are fair, but only time will tell whether the changes will benefit the department and its musicians in the long run. Our student musicians can produce their best art when grades, motivation, and success exist in a positive feedback loop. Until then, we can view the recent changes as a step towards the final, ultimate iteration, where grading and music exist in harmony.