My son’s history teacher is using weighted categories very oddly — at least I think so — but I can’t find enough discussion of the practice of weighted grades to point it out to him.
Teacher has 4 different categories and the two I'm looking at in particular are Homework and Maps. Teacher's Homework category is assigned a 15% weight and Maps is assigned 30%, making it twice as important. That’s not so bad on the surface, but at the end of the quarter Homework will have about 150 possible points (a dozen or more assignments) and Maps will have only 10 points (3 assignments).
Here’s where is gets very, very frustrating. At the end of the quarter, before factoring in the 10 possible points, my son will have a rock-solid 95%.
On two of the three assignments for Maps, he missed one point, getting only 8/10 points for the quarter… but because this little category with only 3 assignments and 10 possible points counts for 30% of his overall grade, his 95% is dropped to a very depressing 89%.
His homework contained many assignments with a Map-related component, any one of which required considerably more time than all of the in-class Map assignments that made up that all-powerful category. Yet he could have had 1500/1500 points in homework — having done 150 times more work — but because the teacher assigned 30% of his overall grade to 3 piddly assignments, my son gets a B in the class.
I've spent a bit of time today trying to find a “Best Practices” type white paper — anything, really — that discusses how to properly assign weights to various categories? This is nuts, but I have to come to the table with more than my helicopter-parent intuition. Mr. Teacher has a string of letters after his name and won’t take kindly to a neophyte questioning his masterful ways.
Any ideas?
(I'll share my $3.5million windfall with anyone who helps!)
