December 8, 2011
December is always a difficult month. In addition to the regular world stress of holiday shopping, family visits and holiday decorations, no one wants to be at school. Students are squirrely. Everyone’s forgotten everything they need to know for the final and somehow it all has to come together before December 19th. All in all, it makes for a very stressful month. *Steps off soapbox*
So I finally caved. SIS has caused too many problems and too much confusion between administration, SSD teacher and others who need regular access to student grades but have not talked with me at length about my grading system. Prior to now, I had been putting the 5-1 grades in SIS and telling students to ignore the SIS percentage and average their grade together themselves. The aforementioned other people were unaware of this truth or forgot or didn’t understand or whatever the case may be and multiple students were being reprimanded for a grade that wasn’t correct. So I translated the mastery levels into the percentages by the same chart I use at term to assign term grades. It’s really a lose-lose with this bloody thing because the mastery level gave invalid percentage but the percentages, while closer to their actual grade, are still not correct and put the emphasis back on points. However, the saving grace with the percentages is that now I can confidently say their grade on SIS is a reflection of 100% knowledge. There is nothing to inflate or deflate a student’s grade other than their performance on a summative assessment event.
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