This doesn't really address the problem; the "life skills" grade isn't standardized and will be meaningless for just about anything beyond the report card. Its value is as a signal to parents.
So why not have a comments section? Is it too much to ask that a subjective assessment be spelled out in a written sentence or two?
Um, back in the day when the "life skills" grade was incorporated into the actual grade, it was also non-standardized and meaningless for just about anything. Splitting apart the knowledge assessment from the life skills assessment seems to be a big win.
I don't see any indication that there is not a comments section.
Had an ex-gf who was a teacher and had to do just that - comments on every single student in addition to their grades. It was incredibly time consuming, but, I'm guessing incredibly useful for parents and students.
The problem is that, in our increasingly data driven world, comments are very hard to deal with on the large scale. I'm actually working on trying to define goodness around teaching interactions, and one of the big wildcards is how we structure feedback such that we get the depth of comments, and the processability of numbers. It's tough.
So why not have a comments section? Is it too much to ask that a subjective assessment be spelled out in a written sentence or two?