With the start of the new school year, a new grading system has taken effect on campus. Instead of having both minor and major grades, all grades will be weighted the same. The new system encourages frequent re-assessing of material for teachers to better see students improvement over time.

“We’re still doing assessments across the whole entire grading period, multiple assessments of one topic across time, so we can track how students are growing over time,” chemistry teacher Brock McNeal said. “We are able to test the same things over and over with these assessments, without it being very high stakes at the very end of the unit.“

Constant re-assessing sounds helpful in the long run for senior Jaena Orozco.

“The new system will help the students not cram an entire unit the night before an assessment,” Orozco said. “I’m honestly a bit skeptical because constant assessments sounds a bit intimidating, but after first quarter, we’ll probably get used to it so, I think it’ll be alright.”

For many classes, all classwork assignments must be completed in order for final assessments to reflect mastery and to have the finalgrade replace previous assessments throughout the unit.

“I think [the new system] will make students realize that your practice assignments on your classwork assignments are just as important as your quizzes and tests or in this case assessments now,” math teacher Yasmine Seacrist said. “That way, [students] take more ownership in your own learning.”

Seacrist hopes this makes students realize improvement is worth more than a number grade.

“[Students] are sometimes more focused on the number grade and not actually, did I master the standard,” she said. “So I think you’ll be better mathematically to make sure you’re always practicing that we can retain the knowledge.”

The new system also helps teachers in terms of creating these assessments.

“It also helps us because we can like design our quizzes in our tests, our assessments to basically all be the same difficulty level without having to make easy, medium, and then hard questions for where we expect students to be at the very end,” Mcneal said. “Basically, when we give an assessment, that is over everything that we will learn about that topic.“

In terms of what goes in the grade book, Seacrist thinks that as long as students put in the effort and get their assignments done, their final grade should show their final mastery. 

 “I do not have to put everything in the gradebook, just the final assessment. That way, say I have students working really hard and they improve they got a 60 on their first assessment and 70 and then all of a sudden the final they’re getting an 80 and I see that they were doing what they need to do,” Seacrist said. “I can go ahead and feel comfortable with changing those grades to show their mastery.”