The aim of this essay is to create an understanding, of how teachers comprehend knowledge, grades and tests in a school context. It is important to get a grip of the different parts of the teacher’s reality. The test, the grades and knowledge are deeply connected as a part of a whole. The teachers view on knowledge can not be understood without asking about the practical parts of their work and understand how the different parts are dependent on each other.

The main material consists of interviews with four teachers that work in a public mandatory school in the south suburbs of Stockholm. Two of the teachers work with social science and the other two works with natural science.

The result shows that the teachers have a complex and contradictory view of the different parts of their praxis. They all have different perspectives of what the grade system is, what knowledge is and what a test is. All these parts even if they appear as contradictory but can be understood as a whole, when comparing the teachers goals and the practical reality they work in.

What the result shows is that the social science teachers are deeply critical to a "grade school" while the natural science teachers are not. The first group is critical because their goal with social science cannot be fully expressed in a school with large numbers of individuals in each classroom and with a priority on tests and grades. The second group is not critical to the school in the same way as the first one. This is because their subject works better with a school with big classes and tests. The natural science teacher’s goals can coexist in a grade system much better than the social science teachers.

The essays result also shows that even if the individual teachers are critical and cannot express their goals in a practical way in the grade system, they can have small "rebellions" against it. The teacher’s way of interpreting the grade system can also be seen as an adjustment to their subject’s nature, and a conflict between how they want to teach and how they have to teach.