a new grading system - fair and accountable

As teachers we tend to lock ourselves into doing things in a certain way and find it very hard to change. We might be quick to try a new lesson but the structure and procedures our classes tend to be sacrosanct – and how we grade assignments would definitely fall into this “holy” category.

Well in the spirit of having no "sacred cows", before the last school year started, my team sat down to seriously look at our grading system to make sure we were doing all that we could in the best interest of our students. The starting premise is that we passionately felt that as middle school teachers we should not accept late work because it did not hold the students accountable [see my previous post on my rationale of grading the "total" student]. But at the same time, kids are kids and so we did not want a student’s overall grade to essentially be destroyed for simply forgetting a paper at home. We also saw that there was a ripple effect in that many time when a grade got so low, a student simply gave up trying to improve it because they did not think it was achievable.

So now we had to objectively look at what we wanted to do and what kind of effect it was having. Even though we all felt very strong about not accepting late work - basically entering a "0" for anything not on time - we also realized the down side to it based on the traditional grading scale. The percentage difference between the grades are:

Between B and A – 10%
Between C and B – 10%
Between D and C – 10%
Between a “0” for a late assignment and D – 50%

So we came up with a new, simplistic grading policy that emphasized accountability and fairness. On the actual assignments we would only write down the letter grade they received (no + or -, just the letter) but for the computer grade book we had to come up with an actual value for every grade. The following was our new “grading scale”:

All A’s = 95%
All B’s = 85%
All C’s = 75%
All D’s = 65%
All F’s = 55%
All Late/Missing Work = 45%

Okay, here is where I initially had problems because I could not get over giving a 45% to somebody who did absolutely nothing. What it took was having to really change my way of thinking because in order for this to make sense you cannot think of their grades as percents. This new system is simply letter grades - the student either gets an A, or a B, or a C, or a D, or an F or, in essence, an F- for late work.

Originally we wanted to put this on a 0-5 point scale and forget the percentages all together but our electronic grading system would not allow that - everything had to be a point system. So how we handled this was that we entered every assignment with a worth of 100 points and then simply gave 95 points for all A's, 85 points for all B's, etc. But of course the only way this would work is if we weighted all of our assignments because an “A” on a worksheet does not have the same importance as an “A” on a test. For my Science class I had the following breakdown:

Test/Quizzes = 40%
Labs/Projects = 35%
Classwork = 25%

We saw many benefits to this new system:

1. If a student does not turn in their work on time, they still fail the assignment but their overall grade does not drop them so low that they cannot recover
2. There is still enough incentive to turn something in and get a 55% instead of just blowing it off even if they were totally lost [remember that all F's count the same so if on point value a student got a 32%, we would still enter it as a 55% in the grade book].
   
3. Then there was the unintended benefit - there was no longer the nit-picking of the difference between an 82% and an 86% - a B is simply a B. This made grading such things as essays and projects sooooo much easier as it fits really well into a rubric and you do not get buried into the minutia of trivial details.

Being a very “left-brain” kind of guy, I wanted to know how this would really turn out before I subjected my student’s grades to a mere experiment. Well I sat down with my grade book from the year before and picked out several students of mixed academic successes and differing amounts of missed work. I then applied this new grading system to their work and compared it to what they had already earned under the traditional scale. What I found was that for those students who had missed some key assignments, their grades ended up going up by a full letter grade BUT it actually put their grade in exact alignment with their average test grade. And for those students who did not have any missing work, their averages were almost exactly the same.

The conclusion that we reached is that this new grading system allowed for the occasional mess up – which let’s face it, even the best of students will have – while still holding the students accountable. And more importantly we found the emphasis was put on what the student actually learned and not just on a certain grade.

Nobody likes change and so we really thought we would have found a lot more push back from students and parents. But everybody really got behind the new system. What we were worried the most about was the over-achieving students who have to have a 100% on everything because on this new scale, the highest you can get is a 95%. Surprisingly not one student (or even more surprisingly, not one parent) complained.

At the end of the year when we analyzed the results we honestly could only thing of one problem - we gave the same importance to missing and late work. We found that there was a VERY small group of students who would consistently blow off assignments and, because of this new system, ended up with a much higher grade than they really deserved. They DID see percents and so for them getting a 45% for doing nothing was a pretty awesome gift. Also, the emphasis should always be to get students to turn in work even if they did only forget it at home. We needed a tweak.

For this upcoming year, if a student does not turn in an assignment we will enter a “0” in the grade book for missing but if they do submit it within a set period of time, that grade will be raised to a 45%. Their grade will still be lower than somebody who had turned in the assignment on time and failed but a 45% increase should be enough of an incentive not to blow it off all together.

Like I mentioned, we all felt this was a HUGE success and we are excited to use this new grading procedure for the upcoming year. If anybody has any questions, please leave a comment here on the blog or you can also send me an email (my addy is along the right hand column).