I had a similar K experience. They graded my son's work as "adequate" for counting up to 30 in math. This kid was independently working on grade 5 level math using EPGY at that time and was working on grade 2 singapore math after school. I asked for a teacher meeting for the report card and she said that she was only allowed to assess kids for counting up to 30 in K and he counted correctly when asked and she marked his performance as "adequate" based on that. She said that it was impossible for any kid to "exceed expectation" for counting up to 30 in her class We moved schools after that. The system is set up to generate nonsense report cards and since it is K, nobody is supposed to care!
Ignore it.

Thanks so much everybody! Yes, I will attempt to ignore. I just hope that it won't prevent him from getting into a good private school in a competitive market (think NYC) if and when we move...Interestingly, this school is an expensive private school as well).

Yes they test whether they can do x then put learning to do y in the next steps but. They don't test if they can do y already.

We did end up moving to a competitive private school. I made a portfolio of recommendation letters from his coaches/mentors (people unaffiliated with his school), his work samples, scores from Standardized testing, Talent Search exam results, progress reports from online classes he was taking and sent them in to the competitive private school along with a letter mentioning why we needed to get into their school and why I needed to document his abilities rather than rely on previous report cards. so, if you are attempting to get into a seriously competitive school, consider a well documented portfolio in addition to everything else.

I thought of this thread because we recently got another K report card. All 3s out of 4 for DS's grades.

DS really wants to know why he isn't getting 4s when everything is "SO EASY."

I told him to ask his teacher if she could help him understand what he might need to do to get a 4. Bad idea? I'm not sure he'll really do it, but he has the question and I think it's a fair one. She should be able to answer it.

Many topics tend to repeat on the gifted forums, and this type of unfortunate grading has been discussed on earlier threads, including this thread from 2013. Basically, grading may be subjective and relative to a teacher's expectations for a specific student, rather than being an objective score or measure of the amount of assigned material which the child knows.

Many parents are not aware that even early elementary report cards may now furnish data into the U.S. Department of Education's "Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems", a summary of whose characteristics can be read on this factsheet, dated July 2009, and available online at http://www2.ed.gov/programs/slds/factsheet.html.* More on data collection here.

US public schools are seeking to close "the achievement gap" and "the excellence gap" among various demographic groups. A variety of grading strategies and techniques can be the tools to generate the same grades for students of various demonstrated abilities... thereby creating a longitudinal database from which reports can be extracted to indicate progress toward the goals of closing gaps. A public school teacher whose class shows gaps may receive a negative evaluation and lose his/her job to a teacher who will help close gaps, and achieve equal outcomes.

Here is a roundup of other threads which discuss various strategies/techniques which have unfortunately been used to generate the same grades for students of various demonstrated abilities:
- requiring 100% on pretests
- selective access to redo opportunities
- announcing "pop quiz" dates to selected students while withholding information from others
- spreading the credentials among a broader bunch of students (at high school level)
- differentiated task demands
- standards-based grading

This is not to discourage your son from asking his teacher what he can do to raise his grade from a 3 to a 4. This is just to provide you with information which may help you understand how grades may be used, and provide insight for evaluating any response which your son may report after speaking with his teacher.

Your son speaking with his teacher is the beginning of his self-advocacy efforts. Before your son speaks with his teacher, you may wish to coach him to remember what his teacher says so you may begin to keep dated documentation at home in case it should be necessary to refer to in preparing for any future advocacy efforts.

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* The U. S. Department of Education "Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems" (July 2009) is archived on the WayBack Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210809095250/https://www2.ed.gov/programs/slds/factsheet.html

Yikes! Interesting reading there.

And like others have mentioned, I do worry that it's causing us to be indifferent to the grades/report card. I feel that it doesn't matter, but I've stopped short of telling DS "the grades don't matter." If I do that I wonder how I turn on the motivation to get good grades later.

It was also interesting that on our AIG nomination form his grades were used to say "No services needed" in one of the boxes. Fortunately for him he already had qualifying independent test scores, but if he didn't he might not have been nominated for further testing because of his grades. I wonder if it's also a way of hold off eager parents that think their kids need more. But maybe I'm paranoid.