<p>Our daughter is getting 100 pc on all assigned work and then getting 80 pc on the quizzes and tests. I wonder how this was possible, as I assume teachers are looking at what is turned in and can see if students are showing all the work and mark as necessary. Geometry teacher just emailed me to tell me he doesn't actually grade work. That's up to the students during the homework review. As long as they participate and have something done, they get 100 pc. The homework then inflates the overall grade, even for struggling students. For example, my daughter has a 90 pc overall, even though she is clearly struggling as a borderline C student on exams. Isn't this laziness on the part of the teacher or is this the new normal in teaching?</p>
<p>I don’t know if it’s a “thing,” but in my math classes, the teachers do/did not correct homework; homework was checked for completion/attempt made, but the actual solutions were discussed during homework Q&A.</p>
<p>In my school homework is graded for completion in alg1/geo and counts for roughly 15 to 20 percent of your overall grade. While in trig/alg2 and beyond homework counts for 0% of your grade. And like skieurope said above the answers were discussed in class. </p>
<p>I think because Math isn’t for everyone, teachers don’t want to grade a student solely based on how well a student does on tests/quizzes so they give a lot of weight to homework.</p>
<p>Graded for completion was pretty normal in my jr high/high school math classes. </p>
<p>Thank you. I just don’t have the time to watch her homework each night but now it looks like I’ll have to.</p>
<p>My son had a math teacher that did this and I didn’t realize it until parent teacher conferences when I said I was concerned about the disconnect between his homework grades (high) and quiz grades (not so high). It bothered me a lot. </p>
<p>Yes, luckily some digging on the grading website exposed this early on. But if I just glanced at the grading website, I’d see a decent overall %. This must certainly set many students up for failure on final exams and ACT/SAT @2016BarnardMom what was your strategy moving forward ?</p>
<p>My son is a junior in private school. Homework is not graded and I don’t believe it is even checked to see if it is completed.</p>
<p>Op,
This is how it was for my kids school for all math. An answer key with the manner of solution is provided. The kids are supposed to check the answers and if their answers are incorrect, they are supposed to try to figure out why. The ones that they cannot figure out why are the ones that the teacher goes over in class. They get HW credit by turning in the HW regardless of it is correct or not.</p>
<p>Of course, with a son with ADHD - inattentive type, he still got 0s on many HW assignments which he did do and forgot at home. Grades on tests and quizzes were A and B range, but his low scores on his HW assignment did reduce his grades. So while the HW for credit often can serve to inflate grades, it doesn’t in my son’s case.</p>
<p>This was a thing during all of my high school math teachers. Some checked homework, others left it as part of the student’s responsibility. It is up to the student to do the work and practice. So yes it is perfectly possible to have a high homework average and a low test and quiz average.</p>
<p>Most teachers don’t collect the homework and grade it because they simply don’t have the time and you are much more independent in high school than in middle school</p>
<p>Usually in high school my math homework wasn’t graded for correctness. There was a check that it was done, and that was it. I think I had one class where homework was graded for correctness, but it was always just 1 random assignment a week or something. </p>
<p>My older son had a calculus teacher who told the students to just do as much of the homework as they needed to to feel comfortable with the work. (Which wasn’t very many for him.) I don’t think this is such a bad approach, but your daughter is going to need to be more proactive. If she doesn’t understand the explanations in class she will need to go to whatever extra help/tutoring sessions the school provides, or go over the homework again at home after the school to see if she can do it.</p>
<p>When I was in college one of my jobs was correcting Calc 1 homework. I would go through and mark everyone wrong or right and then give them a sheet of explanations for the problems for which a significant number of people in the class got wrong. They didn’t get grades on the homework either, but it was all checked.</p>
<p>This may actually given them a taste of what college is like, because homework is often used for very little of the course grade, compared to tests. Of course, it is more like college in that the student needs more self-motivation to learn the material and do practice problems, rather than being externally motivated (by the value of the homework in the course grade) or hand-held as is typical in high school.</p>
<p>I did more oversight of the homework once I knew. In this case I felt like it was simply grade inflation. S was still pretty successful in math over time so it didn’t hurt him.</p>
<p>Same with my kids. Homework was 10 percent of grade but was based on completion not accuracy. </p>
<p>If the purpose of homework is to reinforce what was learned in class then it should not be graded and included as part of the overall grade. It should be part of a “participation/attendance” part of the overall grade - only to indicate it was attempted (notice I don’t say completed since sometimes a problem may not be understood and then subsequently reviewed in class). Test, quizzes, etc are measures of how well a student has learned something and therefore are graded - math homework is a part of the process of learning not a measure of the end result of the learning. Any good math teacher will review homework with students and allow some time (extra help, office hours) for students to be helped with homework they could not complete. Math is a subject where you must learn by doing and every math class needs nightly homework.</p>
<p>This is different in other subjects (history, english, etc.) where an essay or other assigned homework is actually a “take home” test where the student is given more time that would be allowed in class to show that they understand the given material.</p>
<p>Agree with you kiddie.</p>
<p>Jay, I would encourage your D to see the teacher if after they go over the HW in class she gots a lot wrong, or has questions. Or perhaps she could start a study group. Another idea is to write down the correct answer then redo those she got wrong the next night. Then if she is still not coming up with the correct answer she needs to get help.</p>
<p>I’m more familiar with the scenario in which a bright kid masters the material and does very well on tests and quizzes, but is downgraded for not turning in homework that is for them meaningless. I think that’s ridiculous. If the teacher goes over the homework in class, and addresses problems that kids have trouble with in more detail, what more could you want? The point is to master the material. If your student is turning up in class every day with a lot of wrong answers, then it is his or her responsibility to pay attention and find out why during review. If that isn’t enough, then s/he needs to ask the teacher for help.</p>
<p>My H taught a pre-calc class at a local college as an adjunct. He was instructed by the regular professor, who was taking a leave, to just grade homework as done or not, although wrong answers were noted. I helped him with this, and it was VERY obvious that many of the students in this class were simply copying down the answers in the back of the book, showing no work. They made no attempt to actually do the problems, week after week. They then flunked the tests–and the course–en masse. This was the norm at this college in this course. The pre-test review, BTW, worked through the <em>exact</em> same problems that would be on the test, but with different numbers Some of these students then claimed that things were on the test that they had never been taught! These were students who had never learned how to learn. </p>
<p>If they are having difficulty with tests & quizzes, but not in a situation where they can take as much time as they want and use all the resources they need, they may just need more time on the test.
Try practice tests at home.</p>