Tag Archives: marking

A message to high school teachers

If you are in a semestered high school, you are about to finish semester 1 and start semester 2. That means it’s time to give students final marks in half of their courses. How do you work out their marks? Is it a matter of just looking at your mark book and averaging or tallying up marks from September to now?

Consider this little analogy I’ve shared before… and ask yourself if there’s a kid or two who might deserve a better mark considering how they are doing now compared to 4 months ago:

__________

The Parachute Packing Analogy

I love the simplicity of this example! There are 3 students who are in a parachute packing class:

Students take 3 tests during the course.

Student A starts off strong and gets an A on the first test, gets a B on the second test, is over-confident, flounders and gets a C on their final test.

Student B is a solid B student and gets B’s on all 3 tests.

Student C struggles on the first test and gets a C, starts understanding the concepts and gets a B on the second test, then totally understands all the concepts and finishes with an A on the final test.

All 3 students have a ‘B’ average in the course.

Which student do you want to pack your parachute?

__________

You don’t ‘need’ to mark the way you used to. You don’t ‘need’ to mark the kid getting 46% just by the numbers, especially if their mark was 36% at the start of the year and they are much more successful now. You can bump the one kid up 2% for the ‘A’ because they did poorly on one test the whole semester… And totally justify not giving another kid that 2% because they are short of getting an ‘A’ from consistently getting the harder questions wrong, and have not demonstrated that they are a ‘A’ student.

Equal ≠ Fair

Equal is not equal to fair. You can be fair without treating everyone equal… with assessments, with support, and even with how much homework you give them.

Assessment isn’t just about averaging and tallying marks, and fairness isn’t determined by equal treatment.

Why letter grades/percents?

Shared this on Remi’s blog post as a comment. I thought I’d share it here for now, before I expand it into a full blog post on Pairadimes some time (soon). 

___

Why letter grades/percents? It goes “Beyond TTWWADI” (Google it)!

Fear has a lot to do with it… what will the parents say? What will the admin say?

Well, I actually did it… and in Grade 10 too!

Students got 2 marks (percentages) all semester for Planning 10 in my class. They got a mid-term and a final mark, required on report cards, and I didn’t chose it, they did! They picked a mark and then we discussed it based on conversations, expectations and comparisons with what I thought was exemplary work. In 2 classes of 28 and 29 students, I helped guide a total of 4 or 5 of them up or down a few percents, and beyond that, they picked their own grade… doing a very good job of it I might add!

One interesting anecdote from that experience, I had one class that was almost all IB students where marks really mattered. Anecdotal feedback without marks attached drove them a bit crazy to start… but, one kid at the end of the term, after picking his own mark, told me, “That’s going to be my lowest mark this semester.”
But he wasn’t arguing, he was only making a statement. He knew he could have done better and he also knew he could have done more and earned a better mark, (you see I also allowed students to go back to their digital projects and improve them at any time, because Learning Outcomes don’t come with teacher timelines only semester timelines. He was willing to accept the self-imposed low ‘A’ rather than put more work into it.

So, what’s stopping us from purely anecdotal report card up to Grade 8? The marks are not needed for university… there are no excuses but FEAR and TTWWADI!