What does this mean? "This assignment does not count toward the final grade."

[Anonymous]

DD's history teacher has this on a few assignments. I did not see this in previous years. There is a point value assigned to the assignment. It used to be teachers assigned 0 points when the assignment was not factored into the grade.

Is this a mistake or is this the way they are doing it this year?

[Anonymous]

it is not new

[Anonymous]

It means that the assignment does not count towards the final grade. It’s self explanatory.

[Anonymous]

It means that the teacher has created the assignment in order for kids to get feedback about something, so they have given it a score in order to provide that feedback, but they don't want that feedback factored into their grade.

So, for example, I want to find out if my kids know how to download something from google drive, fill it out, submit it to schoology. So, before I give an assignment that "counts", I make a silly get to know you assignment that requires them to do those things. Then I check, and enter the points, and meet with the kids who couldn't figure it out, until I am confident that they all know. Then when I give real assignments, I know that I'm grading whether they did the work, and not whether I uploaded it appropriately.

Alternately, I might want kids to do a "pre-assessment" so that I know what they already know. So, I make an assignment. I'm not going to count it for points, because I don't want to penalize the kids for not knowing something I haven't taught yet. But I grade it so that the kids get the feedback and can use it to measure their progress, or maybe for the outliers, to even make different decisions about class placement (e.g. my own kid got 100% on a similar pre-assessment and his teacher reached out and offered to help advocate for him to move up a level).