Over some delicious Greek food, a few of us discussed and debated grading policies. One member of the party brought up her district's new policy of not allowing teachers to "give" a grade below 50%. The rationale, if I remember correctly, is that they do not want to demotivate a student who feels he or she cannot pass a class because their grade percentage is too low. She also mentioned a system of "work effort" (ethic ??) points and "understanding content" points. She made several excellent points about our obsession, my word not hers, with deadlines and such to the detriment of getting the students to understand the content of the course. In a perfect world where the intrinsic reward of learning is valued by all students, I would agree with her. But, as an educator, I have a real problem with a student who does nothing in class all semester "cherry-picking" the assignments he or she will do (memorize and regurgitate) at the end of the term to demonstrate understanding. What about the learning process? I wish we could grade solely on content understanding and allow students to customize the process by which they learn. But, I don't think that artificially allowing a student who has done 10% of the work to get a 50% in the class is the answer. (Picture of the misters above our table in the restaurant courtesy of Brian H. (I stole it from his Facebook page))
Dave West
North Allegheny High School
Dave
ReplyDeleteThere is some merit in the consideration of not assigning a zero for certain assignments.
Think of the student who fails the class because s/he did not do homework, but aced every test. That to me means the content is above the student's level, and maybe s/he thinks the outside work to be boring or redundant.
I will not give 50% for anything other than incomplete homework. My reasoning is that it still allows students to "dig themselves out of the failing grade."
In a perfect world, my marking period would not be only 20 school days, so I feel that I owe it to my students to try to give them as many benefits as I can. However, if the student is not doing homework (50%) and fails tests because of it, that student is still going to fail regardless of the percentage.
Just something to consider.
Karla Erdman
Freedom High School
Bethlehem, PA