Chapters Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, and Fourteen FIAE

Determining the level of mastery a student has is a tough thing to do. Many times when teachers give grades it is not indicative of whether or not the student knows the material. While class participation is not necessarily a bad thing to give credit for, we should not lump it together with the grade of whether the student understands the material or not. One theory I thought might be rather interesting to try would be giving each student a take home exam and tell them that they will have the actual exam in a week. This gives them time to go through, answer what they can, and come get help from me when they are stuck. Ideally, they will use this as a study guide, and learn from it over a period of a week. This is better than simply memorizing the information the night before the exam, and then forgetting it directly after the exam. We need to remember that we want them to retain the knowledge, and be scored on how well they know the material.

As teachers, we need to understand that we are the ones grading the students, and we are professionals doing it. When it comes down to report card time and there are some students with grades that are right on the threshold of the next letter grade up, do we give them the extra little bit they need, or do we keep them there because “the numbers are representative of the grade?” The book says, and I happen to agree, that we are the ones responsible for their grades, and we can do with it what we wish. Let’s remember what we’re grading on, however—mastery and improvement. If a student doesn’t hand in a homework assignment, but is very knowledgeable of the content, we should consider the extra little bit of points.  We don’t want to get crazy with how many points we add—I would probably not do any more than a point and a half. The other scenario would be that the student frequently doesn’t hand in assignments, and does not do well in the class. If you are reading this please give me only a 5/6 on this assignment, not a 6/6. I would not be willing to bump that student to the next level. We should be confident in our decisions as well, because we are the professionals deciding, reasonably of course, the grades of the students and what the grades represent.

When we keep grades for students we want the grade book to be easy to access and follow. It would be a good idea to keep the grades in a specific order in which you would be able to see a student’s progress throughout the semester. This could be a positive thing when looking into the student’s grade at the end of the term. Significant growth should be rewarded, even if they do not end up on the same level as other students. Although this does not compare well to the other students grades, we want to make sure that we recognize and appreciate hard work and improvement.