Here is an example of not much control.
My son last year was in 5th grade. He did a bazillion assignments per class per nine weeks. Many of them perfect. Many of them homework. Many of them classwork. Some small assignments, some more involved projects. Projects that he would spend tons of nights doing that included visual aids of some sort, report, presentation...might get graded and feed back but never entered into grade book. Some random 5 question quiz gets put in the grade book and sometimes the quizzes didn't go with what they were studying at the time but were review of 4th grade work that "might" show up on the end of they year test and they were trying to keep that in their memory and my son would get a 2 out of 5. No chance to review those concepts and retake. The whole grading thing was so RANDOM. How could he set goals with that? Put hours and hours into stuff (some written/presented in a second language in addition to presenting in material that he had to research) and it takes second fiddle to a 5 question random quiz. I completely gave up trying to make sense of the whole thing and just knew that although 5th grade was lame and totally random, he needed to be there to mature and grow and grades just didn't matter.
