Mismatch between assignments and formative grades

[Anonymous]

In a few of my kids' classes (particularly foreign language and English) there seems to be a mismatch between how long an assignment takes and what it is worth. In foreign language, there have been about 10 of these less than 5 minute assignments like an edpuzzle. But then randomly there have been 2 or 3 that have taken hours and hours to do. I'm not clear on why the longer, weightier assignments aren't summatives. The kids aren't stupid and they can see the time suck of the longer assignments and then just won't do them. In English, it is even worse, there has been a firehose of random quizzes (that have no relation to the only one summative!) and take home assignments, with the take home assignments taking 4-5 hours to complete and then these aren't even graded. While these random quizzes are. Is there any kind of oversight of the teachers and what they are assigning? I've been forcing my kids to do all the work, but they tell me most of their friends are no longer doing the assignments that don't count and I've heard from other parents that their kids just don't do homework. Is this a thing? Should I lighten up on having them do their assignments?

[Anonymous]

You need to talk to the teacher directly. Then go to the principal that supervises that subject matter if needed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:In a few of my kids' classes (particularly foreign language and English) there seems to be a mismatch between how long an assignment takes and what it is worth. In foreign language, there have been about 10 of these less than 5 minute assignments like an edpuzzle. But then randomly there have been 2 or 3 that have taken hours and hours to do. I'm not clear on why the longer, weightier assignments aren't summatives. The kids aren't stupid and they can see the time suck of the longer assignments and then just won't do them. In English, it is even worse, there has been a firehose of random quizzes (that have no relation to the only one summative!) and take home assignments, with the take home assignments taking 4-5 hours to complete and then these aren't even graded. While these random quizzes are. Is there any kind of oversight of the teachers and what they are assigning? I've been forcing my kids to do all the work, but they tell me most of their friends are no longer doing the assignments that don't count and I've heard from other parents that their kids just don't do homework. Is this a thing? Should I lighten up on having them do their assignments?

This is us too. My son spends hours on what is basically only going to be a formative assignment. It’s nuts. Then it barely makes a dent in their grade. I finally sat down and explained to him how the 30%/70% works. He could finally see how little the formative assignments count. My only hope is that by doing all the formative assignments, it will help in doing well on the summative assignments and I think that is somewhat holding true. Even though the formative work takes hours (think history), it seems to be paying off when it comes to summatives. My kid has straight As.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:In a few of my kids' classes (particularly foreign language and English) there seems to be a mismatch between how long an assignment takes and what it is worth. In foreign language, there have been about 10 of these less than 5 minute assignments like an edpuzzle. But then randomly there have been 2 or 3 that have taken hours and hours to do. I'm not clear on why the longer, weightier assignments aren't summatives. The kids aren't stupid and they can see the time suck of the longer assignments and then just won't do them. In English, it is even worse, there has been a firehose of random quizzes (that have no relation to the only one summative!) and take home assignments, with the take home assignments taking 4-5 hours to complete and then these aren't even graded. While these random quizzes are. Is there any kind of oversight of the teachers and what they are assigning? I've been forcing my kids to do all the work, but they tell me most of their friends are no longer doing the assignments that don't count and I've heard from other parents that their kids just don't do homework. Is this a thing? Should I lighten up on having them do their assignments?

It’s simply because the teachers don’t want to allow retakes to 100% on them. So they make them formative.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In a few of my kids' classes (particularly foreign language and English) there seems to be a mismatch between how long an assignment takes and what it is worth. In foreign language, there have been about 10 of these less than 5 minute assignments like an edpuzzle. But then randomly there have been 2 or 3 that have taken hours and hours to do. I'm not clear on why the longer, weightier assignments aren't summatives. The kids aren't stupid and they can see the time suck of the longer assignments and then just won't do them. In English, it is even worse, there has been a firehose of random quizzes (that have no relation to the only one summative!) and take home assignments, with the take home assignments taking 4-5 hours to complete and then these aren't even graded. While these random quizzes are. Is there any kind of oversight of the teachers and what they are assigning? I've been forcing my kids to do all the work, but they tell me most of their friends are no longer doing the assignments that don't count and I've heard from other parents that their kids just don't do homework. Is this a thing? Should I lighten up on having them do their assignments?

This is us too. My son spends hours on what is basically only going to be a formative assignment. It’s nuts. Then it barely makes a dent in their grade. I finally sat down and explained to him how the 30%/70% works. He could finally see how little the formative assignments count. My only hope is that by doing all the formative assignments, it will help in doing well on the summative assignments and I think that is somewhat holding true. Even though the formative work takes hours (think history), it seems to be paying off when it comes to summatives. My kid has straight As.

This is exactly right-- doing well on formative and upgraded practice will help students do better on summatives.

The parents who think their children shouldn't do the work unless there is a big grade attached are sending a terrible message to their children and are setting their children up for failure as adults. It's very bad parenting.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In a few of my kids' classes (particularly foreign language and English) there seems to be a mismatch between how long an assignment takes and what it is worth. In foreign language, there have been about 10 of these less than 5 minute assignments like an edpuzzle. But then randomly there have been 2 or 3 that have taken hours and hours to do. I'm not clear on why the longer, weightier assignments aren't summatives. The kids aren't stupid and they can see the time suck of the longer assignments and then just won't do them. In English, it is even worse, there has been a firehose of random quizzes (that have no relation to the only one summative!) and take home assignments, with the take home assignments taking 4-5 hours to complete and then these aren't even graded. While these random quizzes are. Is there any kind of oversight of the teachers and what they are assigning? I've been forcing my kids to do all the work, but they tell me most of their friends are no longer doing the assignments that don't count and I've heard from other parents that their kids just don't do homework. Is this a thing? Should I lighten up on having them do their assignments?

This is us too. My son spends hours on what is basically only going to be a formative assignment. It’s nuts. Then it barely makes a dent in their grade. I finally sat down and explained to him how the 30%/70% works. He could finally see how little the formative assignments count. My only hope is that by doing all the formative assignments, it will help in doing well on the summative assignments and I think that is somewhat holding true. Even though the formative work takes hours (think history), it seems to be paying off when it comes to summatives. My kid has straight As.

This is exactly right-- doing well on formative and upgraded practice will help students do better on summatives.

The parents who think their children shouldn't do the work unless there is a big grade attached are sending a terrible message to their children and are setting their children up for failure as adults. It's very bad parenting.

I do wish the hard work on formatives counted a bit more though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In a few of my kids' classes (particularly foreign language and English) there seems to be a mismatch between how long an assignment takes and what it is worth. In foreign language, there have been about 10 of these less than 5 minute assignments like an edpuzzle. But then randomly there have been 2 or 3 that have taken hours and hours to do. I'm not clear on why the longer, weightier assignments aren't summatives. The kids aren't stupid and they can see the time suck of the longer assignments and then just won't do them. In English, it is even worse, there has been a firehose of random quizzes (that have no relation to the only one summative!) and take home assignments, with the take home assignments taking 4-5 hours to complete and then these aren't even graded. While these random quizzes are. Is there any kind of oversight of the teachers and what they are assigning? I've been forcing my kids to do all the work, but they tell me most of their friends are no longer doing the assignments that don't count and I've heard from other parents that their kids just don't do homework. Is this a thing? Should I lighten up on having them do their assignments?

This is us too. My son spends hours on what is basically only going to be a formative assignment. It’s nuts. Then it barely makes a dent in their grade. I finally sat down and explained to him how the 30%/70% works. He could finally see how little the formative assignments count. My only hope is that by doing all the formative assignments, it will help in doing well on the summative assignments and I think that is somewhat holding true. Even though the formative work takes hours (think history), it seems to be paying off when it comes to summatives. My kid has straight As.

This is exactly right-- doing well on formative and upgraded practice will help students do better on summatives.

The parents who think their children shouldn't do the work unless there is a big grade attached are sending a terrible message to their children and are setting their children up for failure as adults. It's very bad parenting.

I do wish the hard work on formatives counted a bit more though.

Effort should not correlate to grades. Grades should be based on product/output/demonstration of knowledge, not how long it takes to do it or how hard an assignment is.

Ideally, 100% of grades would be assessments, but everyone knows kids would immediately stop doing anything if it wasn't graded, so trivial grades have to be assigned to process grades.

If a student has 2 Spanish assignments worth 10 points each and one will take 5 minutes and the other 5 hours, obviously prioritize the 5 minute one. But to say they shouldn't do the big one if it's a worthwhile learning opportunity with a small grade is short sighted. It won't be long before college when many classes will have homework and readings worth 0 points, but good luck passing the midterm/final without doing the readings and mini assignments along the way.

[Anonymous]

It is because of the ridiculous new retake policy up to 100%. A re take must be given for anything in the Summative category. English has some weird triple edit formula( also ridiculous) for essays/written work that get around the Final submisssion in Summative for not having to grant a retake. Our HS is only allowing unit tests in Summative category except for English and maybe some written World Language assignments( again with some strange edit runaround that goes into formative 2x). Kids have only 2 unit tests that make up 70% of their grade for this quarter. Teachers are making retake tests insanely hard. Because they want to discourage kids who do reasonably well from re takes because they just don’t have the time to deal with this. It is a complete disadvantage to average students that put effort in and try hard. FCPS a needs to get rid of this ridiculous re take policy. Let labs, projects, written/time consuming research etc go back into Summative

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In a few of my kids' classes (particularly foreign language and English) there seems to be a mismatch between how long an assignment takes and what it is worth. In foreign language, there have been about 10 of these less than 5 minute assignments like an edpuzzle. But then randomly there have been 2 or 3 that have taken hours and hours to do. I'm not clear on why the longer, weightier assignments aren't summatives. The kids aren't stupid and they can see the time suck of the longer assignments and then just won't do them. In English, it is even worse, there has been a firehose of random quizzes (that have no relation to the only one summative!) and take home assignments, with the take home assignments taking 4-5 hours to complete and then these aren't even graded. While these random quizzes are. Is there any kind of oversight of the teachers and what they are assigning? I've been forcing my kids to do all the work, but they tell me most of their friends are no longer doing the assignments that don't count and I've heard from other parents that their kids just don't do homework. Is this a thing? Should I lighten up on having them do their assignments?

This is us too. My son spends hours on what is basically only going to be a formative assignment. It’s nuts. Then it barely makes a dent in their grade. I finally sat down and explained to him how the 30%/70% works. He could finally see how little the formative assignments count. My only hope is that by doing all the formative assignments, it will help in doing well on the summative assignments and I think that is somewhat holding true. Even though the formative work takes hours (think history), it seems to be paying off when it comes to summatives. My kid has straight As.

This is exactly right-- doing well on formative and upgraded practice will help students do better on summatives.

The parents who think their children shouldn't do the work unless there is a big grade attached are sending a terrible message to their children and are setting their children up for failure as adults. It's very bad parenting.

I do wish the hard work on formatives counted a bit more though.

Effort should not correlate to grades. Grades should be based on product/output/demonstration of knowledge, not how long it takes to do it or how hard an assignment is.

Ideally, 100% of grades would be assessments, but everyone knows kids would immediately stop doing anything if it wasn't graded, so trivial grades have to be assigned to process grades.

If a student has 2 Spanish assignments worth 10 points each and one will take 5 minutes and the other 5 hours, obviously prioritize the 5 minute one. But to say they shouldn't do the big one if it's a worthwhile learning opportunity with a small grade is short sighted. It won't be long before college when many classes will have homework and readings worth 0 points, but good luck passing the midterm/final without doing the readings and mini assignments along the way.

A key thing I learned in college was that actually I couldn’t do it all. I had to prioritize and so quickly learned which assignments didn’t actually need to be done. That is the lesson my kids seem to be learning in high school and I’m not sure that is what the teacher is intending. But that is the end result from this kind of system. Especially when some teachers assign way too much.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In a few of my kids' classes (particularly foreign language and English) there seems to be a mismatch between how long an assignment takes and what it is worth. In foreign language, there have been about 10 of these less than 5 minute assignments like an edpuzzle. But then randomly there have been 2 or 3 that have taken hours and hours to do. I'm not clear on why the longer, weightier assignments aren't summatives. The kids aren't stupid and they can see the time suck of the longer assignments and then just won't do them. In English, it is even worse, there has been a firehose of random quizzes (that have no relation to the only one summative!) and take home assignments, with the take home assignments taking 4-5 hours to complete and then these aren't even graded. While these random quizzes are. Is there any kind of oversight of the teachers and what they are assigning? I've been forcing my kids to do all the work, but they tell me most of their friends are no longer doing the assignments that don't count and I've heard from other parents that their kids just don't do homework. Is this a thing? Should I lighten up on having them do their assignments?

This is us too. My son spends hours on what is basically only going to be a formative assignment. It’s nuts. Then it barely makes a dent in their grade. I finally sat down and explained to him how the 30%/70% works. He could finally see how little the formative assignments count. My only hope is that by doing all the formative assignments, it will help in doing well on the summative assignments and I think that is somewhat holding true. Even though the formative work takes hours (think history), it seems to be paying off when it comes to summatives. My kid has straight As.

This is exactly right-- doing well on formative and upgraded practice will help students do better on summatives.

The parents who think their children shouldn't do the work unless there is a big grade attached are sending a terrible message to their children and are setting their children up for failure as adults. It's very bad parenting.

I do wish the hard work on formatives counted a bit more though.

Effort should not correlate to grades. Grades should be based on product/output/demonstration of knowledge, not how long it takes to do it or how hard an assignment is.

Ideally, 100% of grades would be assessments, but everyone knows kids would immediately stop doing anything if it wasn't graded, so trivial grades have to be assigned to process grades.

If a student has 2 Spanish assignments worth 10 points each and one will take 5 minutes and the other 5 hours, obviously prioritize the 5 minute one. But to say they shouldn't do the big one if it's a worthwhile learning opportunity with a small grade is short sighted. It won't be long before college when many classes will have homework and readings worth 0 points, but good luck passing the midterm/final without doing the readings and mini assignments along the way.

I didn’t say anything about effort. I wish some formative assignments counted more as they take much longer. The amount it’s worth should increase if the asssignment is longer. It shouldn’t trust be relegated into the 30% pile.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It is because of the ridiculous new retake policy up to 100%. A re take must be given for anything in the Summative category. English has some weird triple edit formula( also ridiculous) for essays/written work that get around the Final submisssion in Summative for not having to grant a retake. Our HS is only allowing unit tests in Summative category except for English and maybe some written World Language assignments( again with some strange edit runaround that goes into formative 2x). Kids have only 2 unit tests that make up 70% of their grade for this quarter. Teachers are making retake tests insanely hard. Because they want to discourage kids who do reasonably well from re takes because they just don’t have the time to deal with this. It is a complete disadvantage to average students that put effort in and try hard. FCPS a needs to get rid of this ridiculous re take policy. Let labs, projects, written/time consuming research etc go back into Summative

This. It really is teacher dependent, though. We have one teacher who says her retakes will only be essays (thanks, hard ass). We have another who assigns so much work to do prior to the retake that it would nearly be impossible to do while keeping up with other school work. And then we have one who simple gives a regular retake (math - thank God).

[Anonymous]

Ugh, one of my kids has done so much work for his language class. Just tons and tons of assignments, all with almost perfect scores. I just counted up 46 assignments in the gradebook so far.

They have taken one test, which has has a 70 on. His grade is a C. ALl of those other assignments didn't seem to count AND also didn't seem to help him learn the subject matter so he could score higher on the test.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ugh, one of my kids has done so much work for his language class. Just tons and tons of assignments, all with almost perfect scores. I just counted up 46 assignments in the gradebook so far.

They have taken one test, which has has a 70 on. His grade is a C. ALl of those other assignments didn't seem to count AND also didn't seem to help him learn the subject matter so he could score higher on the test.

What language? Students have to be actively reviewing the vocabulary weekly or it won’t stick. You may want to consider a language tutor.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ugh, one of my kids has done so much work for his language class. Just tons and tons of assignments, all with almost perfect scores. I just counted up 46 assignments in the gradebook so far.

They have taken one test, which has has a 70 on. His grade is a C. ALl of those other assignments didn't seem to count AND also didn't seem to help him learn the subject matter so he could score higher on the test.

Is he going to do a retake?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ugh, one of my kids has done so much work for his language class. Just tons and tons of assignments, all with almost perfect scores. I just counted up 46 assignments in the gradebook so far.

They have taken one test, which has has a 70 on. His grade is a C. ALl of those other assignments didn't seem to count AND also didn't seem to help him learn the subject matter so he could score higher on the test.

Is he going to do a retake?

That was the retake . The first test was more like 60. Its for French 3. I think we do need to get a tutor. I don't know why its not sticking. The class has so much homework.