I've had a couple of posts now where I reference my new grading policy, but I haven't really said much about the details. I wanted to wait until I had all of the major pieces done. But I think if I wait much longer, I'll never get it posted.
To start, here's the explanation of how it all works. This is actually a subsection of my syllabus and procedures document. It isn't specifically mentioned here, because homework has its own section in the syllabus, but I do not grade homework. (Though I foresee a language shift in my future. Some assessments could be worked on at home, I think... so better to say I don't grade practice problems)
SBG Policy
A lot of these ideas aren't really mine. They come from the great minds of people like Sam Shah, Shawn Cornally, Frank Noschese, Joel Ochiltree, Dan Bowdoin... Shawn was kind enough to exchange emails with me, answering a bunch of questions I had. Many thanks, gentlemen!!
One piece that wasn't included in the policy above was how, at the end of the term, I was going to convert all the standards marks into a letter grade. (As the only person using SBG at my school this year, I still have to put a letter grade and a percentage on the final report card. But we may be moving to a school-wide grading policy - and this one has generated a lot of interest among the other faculty...) I was hoping I'd get more buy-in if the students had input on what was a fair conversion. The conversation quickly revealed a lot of their doubts and fears about this new policy. In the end, I came up with a compromise between my initial impulse (which was very strict) and their I-need-to-get-an-A-so-let's-make-this-easy ideas. (To be fair, I'm not really sure that's what they were thinking, but it's what it felt like!)
This is what it looks like:
Grade Conversion
I'm not really thrilled with the last bit about using my discretion to assign in-between grades, but it was the easiest way to account for the in-between percentages and the wide variety of combinations of marks. There's going to be around 60 skills for the term (broken into units of anywhere from 8 - 12 standards), which means to get an 80% (B-), they need to be about 90% proficient.
I'm going to use the table above to convert their standards marks for the term into a percentage, which goes into the 85% category. On the midterm and the final, I'll grade based on the standards that appear on each assessment, and convert their marks using the chart above into fixed percentages for the 7.5% categories.
So there it is. I'd love hear any thoughts you have. Especially if you've been here and done (something like) this before.
Thursday night is Meet the Teacher Night. I hope the parents are open to this!
Unless the wording is commonly used at your school, the part about "Coincidental wording/mistakes" in the cheating section might sound funny. Other than that, it looks like a great plan. It would be awesome if college professors did this kind of thing...
ReplyDeleteThat's actually been in my syllabus for a long time. I actually had a case once where one girl used completely different variables than the ones given in the problems (like using g instead of r), and her friend had the same variables - on an assignment they were explicitly told not to work together on.
DeleteCorrect work in math will often look very similar if not identical. It's in the errors that I can catch the problem.