Anonymous wrote:I teach in FCPS and worked at a school with this grading but moved to an IB school.

There is no way, whatsoever an IB can adopt this approach to assessments -- these schools have to align their grading practices to the IB standard, which do not align whatsoever with standards based grading as used in FCPS. I actually asked about this when I joined this school and they made it very, very clear it would be impossible to run two different grading systems in the school, so they are going to stick with IB assessment protocols.

So, net-net, if you want to avoid this, I would recommend considering an IB school.

Just send your kids to Marshall or South Lakes and call it a day if you hate this so much.

Anonymous wrote:This is the issue I’m seeing - teachers aren’t grading the practices - they are marking them “not for grading” or just giving the answer key and then an A because the practices don’t count. Then when it comes to assessments they are being graded, but the student does not get to take the assessments home because teachers want to reuse the tests. So not only does the student not get to learn from the practice they also do not get to study what they got wrong on the test to prepare for the next time the “skill” is assessed. It is a hot mess - by the way I am a new poster on this thread.

This is what I’m seeing as well. In some classes (for math) this is ok because there are a ton of grades each quarter. But in most of the others, there are 4-5 “practice” grades that aren’t actually graded and only 2-3 real grades. So much pressure on the kids. So much confusion for teachers, parents, and most importantly the students.

Its rolling gradebook

Anonymous wrote:In addition, about a third of college attendees don't graduate, so I don't see why we want to bring down a grading policy from college to high school which is mandatory and hopefully creating an environment where everyone can graduate with skills learned from the classes they take. High school students are not college students. They aren't adults.

I completely agree with you that high school students don’t have the motivation of college students, but this grading system in no way resembles college. Wait until quarter grades disappear and get replaced. It doesn’t prepare kids for college where they will be told there is no path for grade replacement.

Anonymous wrote:What exactly is wrong with students continuing to work on and be assessed on skills they haven't yet mastered throughout the year, rather than one-test-and-done?

What is wrong with grades reflecting the end of the year accomplishment?

Because here is what the outcome of this system is in practice versus how it is described.

Kid A who fails all year gets an easy assignment at the end of the 4th quarter and gets a C for the course.

Kid B has an A all year long and misses a “key” 4th quarter assignment because they are on a college visit or is ill and they then get a B for the course.

So those with As now beware and stay on top of every assignment or see that A slide to a B.

This is the issue I’m seeing - teachers aren’t grading the practices - they are marking them “not for grading” or just giving the answer key and then an A because the practices don’t count. Then when it comes to assessments they are being graded, but the student does not get to take the assessments home because teachers want to reuse the tests. So not only does the student not get to learn from the practice they also do not get to study what they got wrong on the test to prepare for the next time the “skill” is assessed. It is a hot mess - by the way I am a new poster on this thread.

if you've been a professor over a 10-15 year period, how have students coming in from public school shown skill or lack of skill through these types of educational changes? The areas the students are more prepared in, likely the high school did well in teaching these skills. The areas the students are less prepared in, likely the public schools didn't emphasize these skills.

In addition, about a third of college attendees don't graduate, so I don't see why we want to bring down a grading policy from college to high school which is mandatory and hopefully creating an environment where everyone can graduate with skills learned from the classes they take. High school students are not college students. They aren't adults.

Homework in FCPS elementary is not a standard policy anymore. For the past five years it's been phased out of a lot of schools. There are a lot of elementary schools, so perhaps yours is one that still has homework. Even in middle school there is less of it, although there is a class in middle school, they can do homework in. Less homework has been in response to educators who again think homework is some factory-initiated policy and because a lot of students have other responsibilities after school or no place to study.

Standards Based Grading only permanently grades assessments and no homework and in Madison there are also no retakes. Just revisions to grades based on future assessments.

https://northernvirginiamag.com/family/education/2019/08/09/fairfax-county-elementary-school-principal-talks-no-homework-policy/

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You will see SBG spread quickly across FCPS. Sure they will use the 100 point system for final grade conversion. Schools will have mostly Bs and Cs but that’s how you achieve equity.

Do you want your child to get a grade they didn't earn? My Madison HS student, junior, just got his report cards and it is all As and one A-. All AP and honors. My guess is his friends did just as well.

He achieved those grades because he learned the material and did the work.

The weird poster is back.

Uh, this is my first post on this thread (I think--I guess I could have posted back in August when it started?).

I am just trying to look at this rationally and as a college professor. My students are expected to do all of their work, graded or not. If they skip non-graded assessments, their overall grade MAY suffer if they don't master a skill before a test or an essay. Or--they may excel on the essay and their grade isn't lowered or elevated by homework that they did or didn't to. Sometimes, they have to make decisions because of time and commitments and that is all part of learning.

I certainly wish students learned this BEFORE getting into my classroom. Right now, many of them think my job is to puff up grades with completion assignments. My job is to teach them the course content.

Dear college professor,
In FCPS, kids don't start getting grades or homework till middle school. It's hard to understand what a 1-4 grade is in elementary. If kids get a grade on an assignment in elementary, there is only a number at the top or the page or some score that shows up on a website they don't usually look at. Few comments. Mostly experiential learning and no homework. Very few tests in elementary anything worth studying for and preparing for. Most work is on a day-to-day basis or longer group oriented projects done in school. Kids are not taught during this time to do work on their own except in class. By the time kids start high school they have had two years of grading and homework prior in middle and other than high school level classes, these grades do not carry forward into high school. As you can imagine, a lot of middle school students are still getting used to homework and individual work by the end of their middle school years whereas in previous generations, this habit would have been better formed in elementary school.
All of a sudden in high school they have seven classes each year that actually have an effect on their future and homework in many classes. Unlike college, this teaching is broad based to give them breath in education and may or may not be something they are interested in pursuing long term. The purpose of high school is not to specialize but to get a broad-based education and to figure out what to specialize in whether in college or another profession. Unlike college in which grades may or may not have an impact on their future, these grades are scrutinized by college admissions, so they do matter to their future. In college, grades are less emphasized compared to the degree a. In college, students also get to pick their classes and have more ownership over them, and they are older so understand that as adults they are completely responsible for their learning. It is not required by the government to attend college and often kids are paying their own way. In high school this isn't the case. With only two years of grading and individual assignments, most kids in FCPS do not know how to manage a complicated high school schedule well. If grading only really matters for assessments which is what ends up happening with skills-based grading, and there is no initiative to do well on practice or for teachers to grade practice, many students without the individual study habits of past generations just don't take the practice work seriously. Add in long classes with block scheduling and computers with all sorts of distractions on them and even the class time isn't taken seriously. With nothing to prep for class, kids come to class unprepared each day waiting to be spoon-fed material. If they have working memory problems, which many of them do, then the assessments penalize them further because they are more comprehensive and since they likely didn't practice as much as if they were graded on practice, their working memory is lower.
If the assessments only use whole letter grades rather than incorporating pluses and minuses, then it also discourages students from caring about grades because the discrepancy from one grade to another is so large that the grade starts to feel irrelevant similar to the grading of 1-4. It's hard to measure incremental improvements when the grades differentiate by 20-25% of an assignment. It's also makes it more complex to review an assignment with four grades that aren't very specific than one that is. Do you have four grades for each of your assignments that get graded? There is also no incentive to re-learn material because students are told they can just do better on the next unit despite the next unit teaching different subject material. Retakes are eliminated in place of just replacing the old grade with a new grade per your next assessment making it hard to remember or understand what skills you understand well or incentivize you to go back and relearn the material you missed.
You yourself are graded on a daily basis by how you conduct your classes and not just the final grades of your students. In life I'm sure your job hinges on both daily duties and large breakthroughs through your own innovative work. Skills based grading does not emphasize daily schoolwork no matter what it says it's supposed to do. Rick Wormeli even has a slide that says that apples at a market only matter, not the cart it comes in as if somehow this product just shows up at the market. The process is not important, just the product. He's part of a long line of educators that were wrongly fed the line that education in America was born out of factory needs and not actually educating the population, and therefore takes a negative view of daily habits that are too "factory-like" to him. Standards based grading of assessments only doesn't teach good study habits which I'm guessing are at the core of your issues since you kids seem to care about their grades and are interested in doing the work, just not making doing work a regular habit. From elementary to high, FCPS is teaching children that daily work and study is not important compared to final assessments and experience. Standards in teaching material have been a part of FCPS for a long time. This grading system is not really about them, but about removing grades for practice work and complicating grading for assessments in an effort we are told to help create some sort of mean of grades for all students to create equity in grading but no real method of how students actually learn more with this system to create equity beyond the grade itself. So, you get a lot of kids in college probably not used to doing daily work and not really understanding how to achieve higher grades and then trying to catch up later.

Wow, what the hell are you talking about? Not the case at my kids’ elementary school at all. I had one in AAP and one in gen Ed and both had/have plenty of homework. It was usually math, some LA and studying for any Sci or SS tests. Both of my kids have even had to finish up Art projects from Art class at home.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I teach in FCPS and worked at a school with this grading but moved to an IB school.

There is no way, whatsoever an IB can adopt this approach to assessments -- these schools have to align their grading practices to the IB standard, which do not align whatsoever with standards based grading as used in FCPS. I actually asked about this when I joined this school and they made it very, very clear it would be impossible to run two different grading systems in the school, so they are going to stick with IB assessment protocols.

So, net-net, if you want to avoid this, I would recommend considering an IB school.

Interesting with all the back and forth people just don't pupil place to IB schools and call it a day.

A lot of them allow few transfers.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You will see SBG spread quickly across FCPS. Sure they will use the 100 point system for final grade conversion. Schools will have mostly Bs and Cs but that’s how you achieve equity.

Do you want your child to get a grade they didn't earn? My Madison HS student, junior, just got his report cards and it is all As and one A-. All AP and honors. My guess is his friends did just as well.

He achieved those grades because he learned the material and did the work.

The weird poster is back.

Uh, this is my first post on this thread (I think--I guess I could have posted back in August when it started?).

I am just trying to look at this rationally and as a college professor. My students are expected to do all of their work, graded or not. If they skip non-graded assessments, their overall grade MAY suffer if they don't master a skill before a test or an essay. Or--they may excel on the essay and their grade isn't lowered or elevated by homework that they did or didn't to. Sometimes, they have to make decisions because of time and commitments and that is all part of learning.

I certainly wish students learned this BEFORE getting into my classroom. Right now, many of them think my job is to puff up grades with completion assignments. My job is to teach them the course content.

Dear college professor,
In FCPS, kids don't start getting grades or homework till middle school. It's hard to understand what a 1-4 grade is in elementary. If kids get a grade on an assignment in elementary, there is only a number at the top or the page or some score that shows up on a website they don't usually look at. Few comments. Mostly experiential learning and no homework. Very few tests in elementary anything worth studying for and preparing for. Most work is on a day-to-day basis or longer group oriented projects done in school. Kids are not taught during this time to do work on their own except in class. By the time kids start high school they have had two years of grading and homework prior in middle and other than high school level classes, these grades do not carry forward into high school. As you can imagine, a lot of middle school students are still getting used to homework and individual work by the end of their middle school years whereas in previous generations, this habit would have been better formed in elementary school.
All of a sudden in high school they have seven classes each year that actually have an effect on their future and homework in many classes. Unlike college, this teaching is broad based to give them breath in education and may or may not be something they are interested in pursuing long term. The purpose of high school is not to specialize but to get a broad-based education and to figure out what to specialize in whether in college or another profession. Unlike college in which grades may or may not have an impact on their future, these grades are scrutinized by college admissions, so they do matter to their future. In college, grades are less emphasized compared to the degree a. In college, students also get to pick their classes and have more ownership over them, and they are older so understand that as adults they are completely responsible for their learning. It is not required by the government to attend college and often kids are paying their own way. In high school this isn't the case. With only two years of grading and individual assignments, most kids in FCPS do not know how to manage a complicated high school schedule well. If grading only really matters for assessments which is what ends up happening with skills-based grading, and there is no initiative to do well on practice or for teachers to grade practice, many students without the individual study habits of past generations just don't take the practice work seriously. Add in long classes with block scheduling and computers with all sorts of distractions on them and even the class time isn't taken seriously. With nothing to prep for class, kids come to class unprepared each day waiting to be spoon-fed material. If they have working memory problems, which many of them do, then the assessments penalize them further because they are more comprehensive and since they likely didn't practice as much as if they were graded on practice, their working memory is lower.
If the assessments only use whole letter grades rather than incorporating pluses and minuses, then it also discourages students from caring about grades because the discrepancy from one grade to another is so large that the grade starts to feel irrelevant similar to the grading of 1-4. It's hard to measure incremental improvements when the grades differentiate by 20-25% of an assignment. It's also makes it more complex to review an assignment with four grades that aren't very specific than one that is. Do you have four grades for each of your assignments that get graded? There is also no incentive to re-learn material because students are told they can just do better on the next unit despite the next unit teaching different subject material. Retakes are eliminated in place of just replacing the old grade with a new grade per your next assessment making it hard to remember or understand what skills you understand well or incentivize you to go back and relearn the material you missed.
You yourself are graded on a daily basis by how you conduct your classes and not just the final grades of your students. In life I'm sure your job hinges on both daily duties and large breakthroughs through your own innovative work. Skills based grading does not emphasize daily schoolwork no matter what it says it's supposed to do. Rick Wormeli even has a slide that says that apples at a market only matter, not the cart it comes in as if somehow this product just shows up at the market. The process is not important, just the product. He's part of a long line of educators that were wrongly fed the line that education in America was born out of factory needs and not actually educating the population, and therefore takes a negative view of daily habits that are too "factory-like" to him. Standards based grading of assessments only doesn't teach good study habits which I'm guessing are at the core of your issues since you kids seem to care about their grades and are interested in doing the work, just not making doing work a regular habit. From elementary to high, FCPS is teaching children that daily work and study is not important compared to final assessments and experience. Standards in teaching material have been a part of FCPS for a long time. This grading system is not really about them, but about removing grades for practice work and complicating grading for assessments in an effort we are told to help create some sort of mean of grades for all students to create equity in grading but no real method of how students actually learn more with this system to create equity beyond the grade itself. So, you get a lot of kids in college probably not used to doing daily work and not really understanding how to achieve higher grades and then trying to catch up later.

Anonymous wrote:I teach in FCPS and worked at a school with this grading but moved to an IB school.

There is no way, whatsoever an IB can adopt this approach to assessments -- these schools have to align their grading practices to the IB standard, which do not align whatsoever with standards based grading as used in FCPS. I actually asked about this when I joined this school and they made it very, very clear it would be impossible to run two different grading systems in the school, so they are going to stick with IB assessment protocols.

So, net-net, if you want to avoid this, I would recommend considering an IB school.

Interesting with all the back and forth people just don't pupil place to IB schools and call it a day.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You will see SBG spread quickly across FCPS. Sure they will use the 100 point system for final grade conversion. Schools will have mostly Bs and Cs but that’s how you achieve equity.

Do you want your child to get a grade they didn't earn? My Madison HS student, junior, just got his report cards and it is all As and one A-. All AP and honors. My guess is his friends did just as well.

He achieved those grades because he learned the material and did the work.

The weird poster is back.

Uh, this is my first post on this thread (I think--I guess I could have posted back in August when it started?).

I am just trying to look at this rationally and as a college professor. My students are expected to do all of their work, graded or not. If they skip non-graded assessments, their overall grade MAY suffer if they don't master a skill before a test or an essay. Or--they may excel on the essay and their grade isn't lowered or elevated by homework that they did or didn't to. Sometimes, they have to make decisions because of time and commitments and that is all part of learning.

I certainly wish students learned this BEFORE getting into my classroom. Right now, many of them think my job is to puff up grades with completion assignments. My job is to teach them the course content.

When are there non-graded assessments in college? So you’re saying that you teach in a college environment that focuses on skills?

I teach writing and literature. I assign readings and require drafts etc for all essays. But I am not grading all of that. We discuss in class, go over homework, but yeah, there are plenty of non-graded assessments. Their grades, though, are based only on four essays and a capstone project. They learn with their first graded essay or test that they probably should have done the readings or in class work.

I honestly can't think of any my colleagues in other departments who assign piddly HW assignments that are worth any real weight.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You will see SBG spread quickly across FCPS. Sure they will use the 100 point system for final grade conversion. Schools will have mostly Bs and Cs but that’s how you achieve equity.

Do you want your child to get a grade they didn't earn? My Madison HS student, junior, just got his report cards and it is all As and one A-. All AP and honors. My guess is his friends did just as well.

He achieved those grades because he learned the material and did the work.

The weird poster is back.

Uh, this is my first post on this thread (I think--I guess I could have posted back in August when it started?).

I am just trying to look at this rationally and as a college professor. My students are expected to do all of their work, graded or not. If they skip non-graded assessments, their overall grade MAY suffer if they don't master a skill before a test or an essay. Or--they may excel on the essay and their grade isn't lowered or elevated by homework that they did or didn't to. Sometimes, they have to make decisions because of time and commitments and that is all part of learning.

I certainly wish students learned this BEFORE getting into my classroom. Right now, many of them think my job is to puff up grades with completion assignments. My job is to teach them the course content.

When are there non-graded assessments in college? So you’re saying that you teach in a college environment that focuses on skills?