Mid Term Grade Calculator

 I am overweight.  I know I am.  I also know that me just saying, "I'm going to eat less and lose weight," just won't cut it.  I need a plan.

Students are the same about their grades.  I've also notice that many, especially the lower levels, struggle with understanding how grades actually work.  Let's blame the math teachers on that (one of the pers of being an English teacher, after all).

One thing I have done that works well is I give them this grade calculator.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CTYHEEzfn3DcWjRJs5IhOmnijTM4unQt/copy

Many students don't understand that an average of two quarters means the middle.  The math is just for every point your Q3 grade is below your desired grade, you need to be that many points above your desired grade for your Q4 grade, or conversely, for every point over your desired grade, you can go that many points below.

This is based on a semester-long course.  It factors out what grade they need to make before the exam.  

How this helps students - well, if you keep your grade book up to date (and we know all extreme teachers do), students will know what their magic number is (the grade they need to make for Q4) and can watch the grade book.  When it dips below that magic number, they need to act fast.

What about exams?  Well, they are really not as important as they seem.  At my school, the exam is worth 20%, which makes it by far the most weighted single grade in the course; however, the two quarters combined are worth 80%.  They have so much ore weight.  If a student goes into a state test or teacher-made final exam and try their best, they should probably make close to what they are making in the class, plus or minus ten points.  If your district is like mine and uses a 40-40-20, then the exam only impacts the final grade 1 point for every 5 points it strays from the Q3/Q4 average.  In other words, if a kid has a 77 for his average, he will need to make 15 + 77 (92) on the exam in order to move it 3 points to an 80 to get that B.  Conversely, he would need his exam grade to be 35 points lower than a 77 in order to drop it to a 70 - 40 points lower to break into the D category.  

Do the math.  It works!  Give this chart to your kids and help them to find the magic number.  Go further and have them analyze what they are going to do differently to bring that grade up.  Help them find their goal!

Two Fun Test/Quiz Ideas

 I saw this on Facebook, so I cannot take credit for it.  I have also lost it on Facebook and cannot give credit to where it is due.  :(  

But the ideas are too interesting to pass up, so here they are:

This first one allows students to pick the number of points allotted for each question.  No question can be zero and you can set a limit on how much one question can be worth.  This gives the students a feeling of power over their performance and it gives the teacher a snapshot of where class confidence it (especially if the class overwhelmingly picks one question to low ball).    For my regular ed kids who will only see this as a nightmare to figure out mathematically, I am thinking about giving them some cheap stickers and they can put a certain amount on questions that they want to boos the worth of.  I am also thinking of using a variation of this on my next AP test.  I'll have a page with three short answer questions and they can pick one to be worth 3 points, one to be worth 5 points, and one to be worth 7 points (or something like that).

The other one is:

In this version, a student brings up their test/quiz and I look it over and tell them how many they got incorrect.  I do not tell them which ones are incorrect, though.  The student can then go back to their seat and try to figure out which ones they get wrong.  This works best with easy to grade questions like multiple choice.

I'm excited to try these out.  It will bring a bit of variety to the class and allow students a chance to showcase their skills and learn from their mistakes.