My Grade Book

I've had a few questions about my grade book.  So I thought it was time I showed it to you.




Here is my outcome on Solving Absolute Value Equations.  Please ignore the third student, he dropped the class at this point.  This is only a partial copy of my class, there were 18 students total enrolled, but this sample is a good representation of the whole class.  (When I put the whole class on here the image was too small to see).

Here's what the letters stand for:

U: Unrated
G: Green
Y: Yellow
R: Red
B: Blue
N: Not Yet Proficient
P: Proficient
H: High Performance

I started this outcome by having the students complete a worksheet with a few problems.  About half the class seemed to know what they were doing, so the next day I focused my teaching on any misconceptions and had the class do a second worksheet also focusing on those misconceptions.  And you can see those two lines in my grade book.
Line 1:  "WS 1"  3 greens, 3 yellows, and 1 student absent.
Line 2:  "WS 2"  4 greens and 3 yellows.

For some reason I felt the class was ready for a test and you can see that in line 3.  Unfortunately, I was wrong.  Only 2 out of these 7 students earned green.  One student was absent and never took a re-assessment on a Flashback :(

At this point I grade the outcome.  You can see that at the top of my grade book with the Ns, Ps, and Hs.  My grading is heavily dependent on the test grade.

*Note*  G, Y, R, and B are for individual assignments, N, P, and H are for outcomes.
*Also Note* The colors on the N, P, and H are for my benefit only (not the students).  I like to see at a very quick glance how the class did as a whole in a particular outcome.  If I see a lot of red, I have work to do!!

You can see in line 4:  "Retest" that most of the students took the time to do better on this outcome and bring their grade up from N to P.

Blue:  My tests are straight forward, no tricks or surprises for the students.  I save that for the high performance tests.  Proficient questions are based on the skills that I ask of the students.  High Performance questions are based on above and beyond skills.  Skills that I did not teach the students.  If a student can apply their knowledge, they are considered High Performance in that outcome.

*Yet Another Note*  A student may not be marked High Performance until they have proved they are Proficient in an outcome.


Click here to see the prescribed set of practice problems.
Click here to see the retest.
Click here to see the High Performance test.


I will post later about how our department converts all the Ns, Ps, and Hs into a number grade.




Comments

  1. Looking at your practice questions along with the tests, I realize that you don't give too many questions...which explains why you can grade every single question on an assignment. I'm so used to giving several questions on a homework assignment that this seemed impossible to me. Thank you...you are quickly shifting my paradigm.

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  2. I can't wait for your next post! Also, what software do you use for your gradebook?

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  3. Once again you have inspired me! I needed to see a working model to help solidify it in my mind. Thanks for sharing. And I agree with Nutter... I can't wait to see your next post.

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