In presenting the basic data of the article the authors note that the topic itself, the sociology of the school grade, is determined by the overall context of timely and relevant issues that have to do with rating the success of the educational process. In the past few years the array of problems relating to educational evaluation has been studied and discussed primarily according to the logic of the assessment of its end result, the unified state examination, or the logic of international comparative surveys of academic progress in school that make it possible to characterize the educational achievements of Russia's school students relative to those in other countries. The article is based on materials obtained in a questionnaire survey of 3,056 students in the fifth through ninth grades of twenty-two general education schools in different districts of Moscow. The survey was conducted by the Institute of the Sociology of Education, Russian Academy of Education, in the second semester of the 2009-10 school year. Data from sociological research in Russian schools show that grades are a function of a complex interaction of social and personality factors in addition to academic performance.