Grading and Evaluation Philosophy

In most traditional classrooms, very little meaningful data is presented in a students grade or a transcript. For example, consider the student who receives a “C” in an English class. What does a “C” tell us about that student’s skills and abilities? Is the student getting A’s on papers and tests, but not doing the homework because he considers it busy work? Is the student’s native language something other than English and despite re-writing papers two or three times is unable to achieve high scores?

The problem can more clearly be demonstrated in the scenario regarding late papers. In traditional classroom, most teachers who accept late work usually give some sort of penalty. On a major research paper, it might be ten points per day, or a grade per week. A paper that might have otherwise earned a “B+” might be lowered to a “C-” after a few days. As soon as the teacher enters the “C-” into the grade book, we have lost almost all meaningful data about that student’s skills and abilities. We can no longer tell why that student received that grade.

At NTHS, students will get several grades for assignments, projects and papers. Typically, a paper could be graded in up to four separate categories:

• Content:
  How well did the student understand the material covered.
• Writing:
  How well did the student adhere to the conventions of good writing (spelling, grammar, organization, etc)
• Critical Thinking:
  How well did the student demonstrate an ability to evaluate, predict, or reflect on the topic.
• Work Ethic:
  How well did the student meet the requirements of the assignment (due date, appearance, length, etc)

When a student turns a paper in late, only the Work Ethic category is affected. The paper might still be an excellent demonstration of mastery of content and writing skills. All four of these grades are recorded separately in our custom built grade book system. On a major project there might be several evaluation measures in addition to those mentioned above including collaboration skills and presentation skills. A test, on the other hand, only shows one thing … course content.

When a student or parent views a grade report published on the web, the NTHS grade book tallies and averages the scores of each category separately. For example, in calculating the student’s score in Writing, the grade book gets all the writing scores from any assignment that was evaluated in that category and calculates a grade based on the sum of those evaluations. The grade book then generates a report that shows the student’s performance in each of the skills being evaluated by that course.