The following is a true story.
I am an advisor at my school. There are five students who make up my advisee group. One of my primary functions as Advisor is to monitor their academic progress (aka grades) and communicate to their parents how the advisees are doing. This means I send emails every two weeks to my advisee parents in which I write their current grades and my spin on those grades. You know, progress reports. Mostly, the parents care about the grades.
One of my advisees, let's call her Chris, is in AP Chemistry. Her parents have emailed me all of two times in the year and a half that I have been her advisor. So, you can see they are not the most hands-on parents. Thus, when Chris came to me with a question about her AP Chem grade, I figured it was from her, and not from her parents. Before Christmas break, Chris had a B+ in AP Chem. Since that report, Chris had earned an A for Participation and an A on the alternative assessment (a substitute for a final exams which were cancelled due to school being closed early... but that's a different story). So, essentially, she had a B+ in the class, and then two more grades were added to her AP Chem gradebook that were both higher. Her final grade for the semester? B.
So, Chris emailed me and asked me about this. I had not yet had a chance to notice the change in grades. I was happy she brought it to my attention. I looked into it and discovered that her grade had gone down despite her last grades being better. The reason? When the teacher had initially set up his computer gradebook, she had not set it up properly, or it had been changed on her, and the weighting was off. So, she had readjusted her weighting and that had changed grades a lot and resulted in Chris's grade dropping.
Do you know what a weighted average is? Google it. Teachers use it all the time. A grade may be on a 100-point scale, but those points are not distributed equally among the different kinds of assessments. Teachers usually calculate averages for each category, and then weight them according to their significance. For example, tests could be worth 60%, quizzes worth 25%, and homework worth 15%.
Anyway, the AP Chem teacher, let's call her Amy, weighted her assignments this way: tests 25%, quizzes 25%, labs 25%, homework 20%, and participation 5%. On the surface, there is nothing terrible with this distribution of weights. It is perhaps odd that tests and quizzes have the same weight, but I can imagine how this might be appropriate. Dig a little deeper, and an interesting fact emerges: there were only two quizzes while there were four tests. This means that each quiz was worth 12.5% (25% divided among two quizzes) of the course grade while each test was worth 6.25% (25% divided among four tests). Or, to put it another way, the teacher's weighting meant that a quiz was worth twice as much as a test in the course grade.
Now, I did not know how Amy viewed tests and quizzes for her AP Chem class, so I asked Chris about what her AP Chem teacher had said regarding the importance of quizzes. Chris remembered that her teacher had said quizzes were worth less than tests. Unfortunately, Amy's weighting did not make that a reality in the calculation of the course average.
I sat down with Chris and we looked at her averages and calculated her course average using a variety of weight distributions. In the end, it did not change Chris's letter grade. It certainly changed her numeric average, but it did not take her from a B to a B+.
However, it would be very possible that a change in the weighting could change the letter grade of a student whose numeric course average was on the cusp of the next letter grade.
For example, suppose Cory had a 92 test average, an 84 quiz average, a 90 lab average, a 90 homework average, and a 93 for participation. Using Amy's weights, Cory's numeric course average would be 89.2, which would be a B+. If the weighting were changed so that tests were 40% and quizzes were 10%, then Cory's average rises more than a full point to 90.4, an A-.
For those of you who know, the difference between a B+ and an A- to the University of California is huge. A B+ gets a score of three while an A- gets a score of four in Grade Point Average (GPA) calculations. Thus, this teacher's seemingly arbitrary designation of grade weights could have a very real consequence to a student in the college admissions process.
Do you still believe in grades?
