Reply to Mismatch between assignments and formative grades

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=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? [/quote]

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.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

I do wish the hard work on formatives counted a bit more though. [/quote]

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. [b]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.[/b][/quote]

Ugh - so true. [/quote]

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