Ways to grade students

College Life
1

<p>You're teaching a high school or college class. How do you grade it?</p>

<p>It is good for the transcript grade in a class to be calculated in a way that encourages:
[ul]
[<em>]effort early in the term.
[</em>]effort at any point the term, because it's never too late to hope for a higher grade, not because a lower grade is feared at every point.
[/ul]
The following system implements it:</p>

<p>class grade = (h + f) / (h + 100%)</p>

<p>where</p>

<p>h = homework grade
f = grade on the final
(There are no midterms. Late homework is penalized, maybe docked or unaccepted outright.)</p>

<p>So let's say...
there are 20 homework assignments on which are earned nine 100%s, two 80%s, three 70%s, and six 0%s (i.e. work not turned in or not accepted).
65% is earned on the final.</p>

<p>homework grade = ((9)(100%) + (2)(80%) + (3)(70%) + (6)(0%)) / ((20)(100%)) = 63.5%
final exam grade = 65%</p>

<p>class grade = (63.5% + 65%) / (63.5% + 100%) = 78.6%</p>

<p>It has the following properties:</p>

<p>[ul]
[<em>]The class grade is at least the grade on the final exam.
[</em>]Doing any homework assignment is guaranteed to improve the class grade unless 100% is earned on the final exam or 0% is earned on the assignment (simply failing to affect the class grade). So it can't hurt to try.
[li]Given a 100% homework grade, the final exam grade can be twice as far from perfect to get the same result as a 0% homework grade. Assuming a standard non-curved scale, 80% is the new A, 60% is the new B, etc.[/li][/ul]
Does anyone have experience grading or being graded like this? Can it be improved? Are there better, yet totally different systems?</p>

<p>And let's not lose sight of the purpose of the whole "grade" idea. After the class is over, the grade should represent the quality of the student's current understanding of what has been taught, focusing on how it indicates future performance:
F = complete waste of time
D = learned something valuable, but should retake or specialize in something else
C = ready to move on
B = is likely to succeed after progressing
A = no significant flaws in understanding; maybe forgets a mathematical formula or the name of a historical figure, but would easily understand the relevance of forgotten/unlearned information if presented with it.</p>

2

<p>One of the main problems is it puts a lot of pressure on the designer of the final to make a test that is appropriate and fair. Not an easy task if you’re doing any sort of advanced subject. I’ve liked the classes I’ve TAed (too many of them) where we generally have two midterms plus a final for a quarter-long class. Curving is then based off of the natural groupings we see in final grades.</p>

<p>Also, not gonna lie, not turning in nearly 1/3 of the homeworks and getting a 65% in a class shouldn’t get you a C+ in the end.</p>

3

<p>Yeah, I prefer having 2-3 exams to just one, even four is fine with me since there isn’t as much to study for each one. </p>

<p>The final grade also looks too lenient when the homework grade is low, getting a 30 percent on homework should hurt you in my opinion. Though, it is kind of a built in curve, which is good if the exam average is low. (90 on homework and 60 on exam (say average is 50) gives a 78 in the class). Perhaps adding in a penalty for missed homework, maybe 2 percent per missed assignment or something.</p>

<p>Or something like (h-50+f)/(50+h), 50 is just an arbitrary value. Then a homework grade lower than 50 hurts you, but a higher homework grade always helps. I haven’t tried a bunch of grades to test this out though.
Not sure if this would give a better grade distribution than a normal grading system with homework being a small percentage of the grade and curved exams.</p>

4

<p>Too complicated. </p>

<p>Assign a weight for every exam and for every homework/project. Then figure out what some reasonable grade cut-offs would be based on what the grade distribution is at the end of the class. Basically, what’s done in every one of my classes. </p>

<p>It’s very hard to keep a class the same difficulty throughout time. As such, it’s very important that there be some flexibility in assigning grades. It doesn’t make any sense to try to do something complicated and rigid.</p>