Grading Philosophy

A lot of factors go into the symbols we use as grades to reflect our students’ learning.
When creating my own grading philosophy, I keep in mind that grades are one form of
communication that show student achievement based on their mastery of the
standard(s) being measured. This means that the components going into my students’
grades need to be measurable with the standard with all of my students. In my
classroom, the grading symbols I will use are A-F.

A 90-100
A- 87-89
B+ 84-86
B 80-83
B- 77-79
C+ 74-76
C 70-73
C- 67-69
D+ 64-66
D 60-63
D- 55-59
F 54 & under

What to Measure: Formative and Summative descriptions

Formative Assessments will help me know where student mastery of concepts and
content of the standards are at. These smaller assessments will show me where I need to
focus my teaching. Some students will need more support, both getting caught up to
standard and challenged to the next level of the standard, and others will have reached
the standard. It will show me when my students are prepared enough to continue the
scaffolding of learning. These assessments will be placed in two categories:
“Participation”, consisting of 10% of students’ grade, and “Homework”, consisting of
20% of students’ grade.

The first category, Participation, will include in-class formative assessment options and
“participation” that involve a broad category including the following:

 class discussion
 quizzes
 in doing in-class surveys
 small in-class assignment that scaffold learning towards mastery of standards
 include office visits
 peer review
 use of individual work-time
 and other forms that reflect participation in the classroom
I will place a cap at 10% so a student cannot do all of the in-class formative assessments
and participate fully in multiple ways from the above list and get more than 10%. If a
student does all of the formative assessments and participates all the time, they will
receive the full 10%. If they do half of the formative assessments and never participate in
any other form, they will receive 5%. If they do half of the formative assessments and
participate half of the time, they will receive 10%. If they only show up but do not fulfill
any of the formative assessments or choose not to participate in any way, they will
receive 0% which will be reflected as 50% on a 100 point scale as there are no zeros in
my grading policy. My goal in doing this is to teach students to show up and be present
in the tasks at hand because doing so will help guide their learning towards mastering
the standards that the summative assessments require of them. I think this is a good
message for preparing students for life outside of school because it takes more than just
showing up to reach a goal or be successful. Motivation is an important factor.

The second category of formative assessments will be worth a little more weight. These
are going to consist of assessments we might start in class, but students will need to
finish them on their own (homework). These assignments with involve reading and
writing. I won’t assign very many per unit, but I will weight them higher because they
ask students to use their higher cognitive thinking. I will label this portion of formative
assessments “Homework” and it will reflect 20% of their grade.

NOTE: Both forms of formative assessments are graded on level of completion and not
on correctness.

Summative Assessments will reflect the remainder 70% of students’ grades. These
assessments will show students/families/myself what students have produced with what
they have learned at different points in each unit. Their learning will be measured
against targets. Each summative assessment will scaffold off of one another building
towards a higher point on Bloom’s Taxonomy.
_____________________________

Late-work will be accepted for full credit if it is done within the unit it was assigned.
(I’m on the fence about whether or not to change this to accepting late work
until the end of the grading term. I’m going to stick with the former notion
for now because I aim to give ample time for assignments to be completed.)
The process in getting the summative assessments complete will stem from the
groundwork that the formative assessments provide; so, completing the homework will
hopefully be an organic process. If a student did not fully complete an assignment and
wishes to redeem credit by finishing it, I won’t stop them from continuing their practice.
If they choose to never complete an assignment (formative or summative), I will give
them an Incomplete which will result in a 50% in the gradebook.

As for late work regarding summative assessments, I believe students should have the
opportunity to take my feedback on their work and let it guide them in how they revise
their work or how they retake a portion of an exam for resubmission. This will give them
the opportunity to take what they’ve learned a second time around and show their new
level of mastery. I choose to allow students this opportunity because the purpose of my
classroom is going to, as Beers and Probst wrote, "create intellectual communities where
students are encouraged to be risk takers, to be curious, to be willing to try and fail, and
to be more interested in asking questions than providing answers" (Beers & Probst, 24).
Grades ought to be based on what students learn instead of what they do.

I will not deduct points from students’ grade for turning in late work (formative and
summative assessments), but I will keep a record of what they are missing and ask them
to hang out during lunch or after school or work on late/missing work during Study
Skills if possible to encourage them to get it done. If a student chronically hands in late-
work, a phone call and follow-up email will be sent home to parents/guardians. Keeping
parents updated feels important because the order in which students do their work
matters. The work done in and outside of class are stepping stones to all of the
summative assessments.

Behavior—Grades will not be determined based on behavior or disposition, but it is

under this category that I will note tardiness and absences—so to follow school
administrative rules—and disposition assessments. If parents/guardians/school
counselor/administrators need to be notified regarding a student’ s behavior, I will do
so.

Extra Credit—Extra credit does not exist in my classroom because it allows for some
targets to never get assessed or mastered. If a student is unable to show their
understanding of, for instance, how meter works in a poem, but points can be made up
for with showing different perspectives of interpretation of the poem, for example, then
the student’s grade will show mastery of content that is not fully accurate if they still
need support in how to read the meter in poetry. Ultimately, targets need to be
addressed. I don’t feel like I would be doing my job properly if I let students avoid
having to learn some standards and not others.

Group Grades—I will grade each student individually on their reflection of what they
learned, what the process was like, et cetera regarding the group assessment; I will also
attach one grade to the project as a whole that every group member will receive. The
latter portion will be weighed very small (5%) as I wouldn’t want an individual’s grade to
suffer because another student did not do their workload in the assessment.

Academic Integrity—If a student decides to cheat, they get the opportunity to retake
or re-due the assessment they failed to do on their own. The assessment will take on a
different form yet address the same standards. If the student chooses not to do the
assessment again, they will receive an Incomplete resulting in a grade of 50% on that
particular assessment.