Reply to APS Most Likely Moving to Standards-Based Grading/Grading for Equity Next School Year

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]APS and the School Board last night had their first working session to discuss setting a new grading policy by the end of this school year, with changes driven by equity concerns (based off of the book "Grading for Equity" by Joe Feldman, which 100+ at APS are reading right now and every SB member received a copy of last night).

Some proposals include:
a) Eliminating late penalties for turning in homework late
b) Allowing retakes of tests
c) Eliminating extra credit
d) Having more ungraded formative assessments (and presumably less graded homework, classwork and labs)

Here are the board slides:
https://rb.gy/cl2icr

And the working session video:
https://www.apsva.us/school-board-meetings/school-board-work-sessions-meetings/

Thoughts?  Anyone know about empirical results?  Downsides?[/quote]

This is an absolute disaster for college- or work-preparedness.  There are consequences for late work.  There aren't re-dos for everything.  You don't always get opportunities to make up for lost or incomplete work or missed deadlines.

It's also bad for academic learning, particularly in subjects that you need to know certain material before learning the next level of material, like math.  If you aren't doing your homework during the unit, you're missing out on reinforcement of the learning and the opportunity for your teacher to know you're not getting the concepts before the exam.  It's such a waste of time to allow late homework and retaking the tests.  that's just student self-paced learning with unnecessary premature test-taking and re-taking tests later when you're finally ready to do well.

Also, students - especially younger ones - need specifics, not vague abstract grading criteria.  Right now, they know 90 is an A and 65 is a D.  With SBG, they don't know what to expect and it will take a good bit of time to figure it out and adjust.  They'll also likely need to figure it out and adjust with just about every new teacher they have each year.[/quote]

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