Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion What percentage equals an A ??

I don't understand. A student's grade over a marking period will depend on many quizzes and homework assignments and a few tests. It's not necessary to have a 90% on each quiz in order to get 90% of all points. My son has A's or A-'s in his classes, because he tends to very well on tests but often gets 4/5 or 8/10 on individual assignments.

How often to assess students and what fraction of grades appearing on report cards should be A's are separate questions.

Yes, NC is presently on the 7 point system and has been for years. They will be changing it to the 10 point system next year for high schools only.

100-93 (A)
92-85 (B)
84-77 (C)
76-70 (D)
69--(F)

90% is only an A-. If you have 20 tests, each out which is out of ten and you miss a question on each of them, then you get an A-, not an A. You need to get perfect marks close to half the time if you only miss one question on the other tests. And for every extra point missed on a test, that's another you need to get 100% for, to balance it out.

Hmmm.... I'd argue that in addition to what Bostonian posted, this is actually a problem with high-stakes and low-VALUE summative assessment practices.

It's not the frequency of assessment which is the problem-- it's that mistakes are so COSTLY in some schema.

It's no better to have just two graded assessments for an entire class, really-- because if you have one bad day... well.


Suppose that there are two extremes:

1 class teaches with "daily" formative quizzes and eight weekly take-home exams to be completed in a student's own handwriting-- 50% of the course grade is those daily quizzes, worth 5 points each (or so) and by design, are not difficult. The other half is from the summative exercises which are by intention more difficult. The key is this, though-- this kind of scheme has a LOT of points in it-- maybe 1000.

The other has a final exam only-- 100 points, and what you score is your percentage.


Now, someone who has never seen a very bright child that cannot test well might not immediately see the problem with option two, but speaking as someone who has counseled a lot of struggling college students, that segment of people is real, and they aren't all just failing to master the material. Some of them simply have anxiety re: exam performance. I think that some of THOSE students deserve an A which reflects their mastery of the material.

I also believe that some students who simply "test well" probably don't deserve that A, but an A-, B+ instead.

The combination of formative/summative and exercising more LOW-STAKES, high-difficulty assessment does lead to a more equitable distribution of grades. Students also tend to retain more of the material.

I know this one because I've done things both ways. (I was forced to do it the latter way when I was teaching a course for another professor.)

Apples to apples comparison is that some students find the relentless grind of daily work to be a pain and they whine about it, but it's still better than having a single bad day mean that you can no longer hope to "demonstrate excellent mastery" of the material in a class.

Th problems that I'm seeing now are that "efficiency" and "high throughput" are being confused with high quality in teaching and assessment practices. Those may be mutually exclusive concepts, quite frankly, when one is discussing real students and authentic learning. There may just not be any non-labor intensive means of doing teaching right.

So teachers/faculty don't assign much graded work because they don't want to spend so time grading it, students who most need it lack formative assessment feedback which is meaningful, and the result is rather predictably that students tend to focus on testing well rather than learning well.

It's also true that human beings all write assessment items a bit differently from one another, and those quirks matter a great deal when you offer summative assessments. Students have to have some way of knowing what it is that you're going to ask, HOW you're going to ask it, and what you're going to look for in their responses. Without that information, it's really a bit unfair. KWIM?

College professors have generally gotten round that one by being extremely generous with partial credit and by avoiding over-reliance upon test bank questions and cloze/multiple choice/true-false testing. Offering more open-ended testing is a great way to see what students actually know and understand. If they get a short-answer question wrong, odds are good that they have some parts of the concept right, just not enough of them to be "correct."

It's not just about the top end of the distribution, though that tends to take care of itself in this kind of grading philosophy as well. I prefer that because it promotes growth mindset in students who can see that NO mistake is ever catastrophic in terms of their grade. The grade is just a reflection of learning/mastery, ideally.

Personally, I'm of the belief that infrequent assessment sucks even more than the frequent variety.

I am so with you on this. Law school mostly consists of classes with one final exam or paper which counts for 100% of your grade. Brutal if you have a bad day.

I get it.

Our biggest strides come when ds is up against a lower grade and still has the opportunity (through frequent assessment) to chip away and bring it back up to an A. It almost seems as he sets himself up for this. Sure is a lot more work this way.

Actually, I am a convert to the frequent assessment approach for the reasons indicated in Bostonian's article and HowlerKarma's post. For a few years, I was exasperated and felt bad for my kids until I realized that being accountable most days had resulted in development of superior learning, performance and executive functioning skills.

Personally, I would have had a hard time under this approach, but I also believe it would have forced me to become a better student before college. It was a dangerous habit for me to be able to tune out in class, skip most of the daily work and simply cram the night before to ace exams and therefore the courses in high school.

Furthermore, in many of DS/DD's classes, the big unit assessments tend to be mostly basic material not meant to challenge and generally not difficult to ace. The daily work, on the other hand, fell into two distinct categories. Most often, they were basic questions/problems to confirm understanding. Sometimes, however, they were extensions/applications meant to challenge the students, which also allows the teacher to distinguish the high ability students. However, since these challenging assignments are low-value (5-10 points), it is still very possible for hard-working conscientious students to get an "A" even if they fell short of these challenges.

I also prefer frequent assessment. DD bombed a unit math test (very uncharacteristic--in fact, it has never happened before) earlier in the year because she was coming down with strep and had a killer headache and fever. (No, she didn't ask to go home, because....??) It did take her grade down for a while, but she had enough other assignments to make it turn out okay-- which was very fortunate, because that semester was high stakes for middle school admission.

Speaking from experience, tuning out, skipping work, and cramming works better in law school than in undergrad engineering.

I remember several classes where, since the material was cumulative, the grade you earned on the final was your final grade if it was your highest. I remember teachers saying that you would have had to go back and figure out what you hadn't known on the earlier tests and quizzes. If your score was lower, then you were given your average. Personally, that was my favorite way. Although I used it as a way to slack until the end, I did see it benefit peers who were truly working and improving as the courses went along.