AP world history and skills-based grading
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
Do you drop grades in college and say content doesn't really matter, you can just look it up? My college kid at a Virginia state school said that they were told that there are no retakes and all late work is automatically 25% off. There is no retesting of skills, multiple chances to show improvement, dropping of grades, teachers deciding what will be a graded assessment or not, and tests suddenly getting easier at the end of the year. In college, you get a syllabus at the beginning of the year that has some variation of something like 2 tests are 25% each and final is worth 50%. You actually have to show that you learned everything over the course of the semester with a final exam! That's not going on at Madison. I have a kid at Madison where the only quarter grade was from 1 class assignment at the beginning of September. And teacher says "don't worry about it, the grades don't really matter right now." Do you say stuff like that? Because multiple teachers say that at Madison. My kid went to JMHS and said that because schools all over are allowing retakes and late work, it is a shock to students the first year of college. DC went on to say that whatever is going on at Madison is just plain weird - it also changes every year, yes, the grading system changed every year DC was at Madison - so you can never get a handle on it. Do you change your grading system every year? Yes, DC is ok, but DC is a top student and also has strong work habits from a few years in a rigourous private (elementary & middle) and was a competitive athlete. So, I am tutoring my Madison kid at home in every subject and assign reading because homework is hardly ever assigned for freshman now even in honors classes except for math. Yes, I know doing the reading doesn't count in college, but Professor, do you at least assign it? |
Anonymous
I am worried about this too. I am the poster that said things get easier at the end, but things seem to vary by department. World History teacher is saying a B is where you should be to every class. Is AP History teacher saying things like this? If our goal for our kid is to get into the best in-state school possible but the teachers are being told a B and C is where students should be, then we have a problem. It seems that the grade is predetermined for this class. I'm saving every graded assessment and rubric. The grading is vague - I mean I don't think anyone would be able to understand why it was graded like it was based on the rubric. I'm considering contesting it if the B is still there at the end of the year. The stakes are high - I know so many kids from Madison going to out-of-state colleges. I wouldn't care if this grade was deserved but it's just not. |
Anonymous
My problem with how skills-based grading has been implemented at my school is that my child had a B+ in the gradebook until it closed for the reports cards and, when it came back up, they had a D. It is not clear which assignments listed in the gradebook will end up being pushed to "not for grading" and which will be counted for the grade. The teacher's gradebook has 30 grades in it for the quarter, and they are not marked "homework" or "reading" or whatever, just named for the topic. All were calculated into the B+. The gradebook goes dark, and it comes back up with only 6-7 grades NOT marked "not for grading", and three of those are the things my kid scored the lowest on back at the very beginning of the quarter in late October. Their grades from November on are all As and Bs, but their overall quarter grade is a D. In college, I could easily calculate my grade for the class - most teachers put their grading on the syllabus the first day of class. If I had a class that counted the paper 25%, the mid-term 25%, and the final 50%, I could plan accordingly. It made sense that the routine readings and practice essays were not for grading, just for learning the material. The "fluff" work did not count, but I knew it did not count from Day 1, not from my end-of-semester report card. I also cannot tell if my child needs help in class until it is far too late for me to do anything about it. |
Anonymous
|
College classes have like 3 grades total - a midterm, a final and a paper. Maybe one other test in between. There is a lot of reading but they aren’t grading any homework or any in between stuff. You need to read to be able to understand the lectures. And ultimately that will help you in the midterm and final.
There is no need for homework to be graded or all these little assignments - it should just be the tests and/or a paper. Period. |
Anonymous
College classes exist like this and are "known," but some classes, even 500 person lectures have smaller assignments that are turned in and graded by a group of TAs. This "college classes all look like X or Y" tells me that some either didn't go to college or don't remember. Grades on smaller assignments can't help inform a kid on their progress in a topic and "hold them responsible" for their progress. This is a better alternative than retakes and grade replacements that excuse poor progress. |
Anonymous
JMHS? Somewhere else? |
Anonymous
JMHS - have kids there now and one in college. That kid had a different grading system EVERY year while at JMHS. Expect more of the same. |
Anonymous
I completely agree with you. Since I had a kid go through this last year, I got my other kid a tutor for a class I don’t feel qualified to teach and they started working in the summer. For most of the other classes, I do all the class assignments too, so I can stay on top of everything and make sure DC does everything every day. It takes an enormous amount of time, but if you don’t do this, the kids, particularly freshman will not try hard on non-graded assignments. 14 year olds don’t have that skill yet. There is also the problem of teachers never giving back graded practice so kids never/rarely get that feedback. Some teachers do and some don’t. Our world history teacher counts verbal corrections in class as her feedback with no individual graded practice. Many parents at Madison are clueless this is even going on so looks like we are stuck with this awful system. |
Anonymous
| The key to most equity initiatives is lack of transparency. |
Anonymous
In college, I got a syllabus in the first week of the class that spelled out how I would be graded in that class. I didn't have to guess, and I didn't have to wonder which course grade included attendance or class participation and which one was grading me solely on the mid-term and final. I have four post-secondary degrees, so I feel like I've seen practically every permutation of college grading university professors could dream up, good, bad, and ugly. My undergraduate university required a syllabus and required that grading be explicitly spelled out, even the the professor had wide latitude to determine the grading makeup for their specific class. It is not the guesswork that we are seeing with this SBG BS. I could not care less if my kid gets credit for fluffy assignments. I do care if my kid busts their butt to recover from a poor start to the quarter and is then told at the end of the quarter that none of that matters because they're only being graded on six random assignments, three of which are from the first two weeks of the quarter. That is not representative of college grading and does nothing at all to prepare kids for it. |
Anonymous
| Could FCPS be doing more to encourage families with options to send their kids to private schools? SBG that no one understands, neglected buildings, vague hints that they'll redistrict in the name of equity, etc. |
Anonymous
Right. The ‘this is like college’ doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. But good hand-wavy stuff. |