Grading is always a touchy topic for math teachers. It seems like everyone has a different philosophy about how to grade assignments fairly in their classroom or in their school district.
I‘m going to preface this blog post and say that I am not going to tell any teacher how to grade in their classroom. I am just going to share my personal preference, the research that I’ve done, and my experiences with grading and missing work.
I want to start by addressing the hottest topic: missing work and grading assignments as zeros. There are two sides to this debate: zeros are necessary vs. zeros are detrimental.
My personal opinion is that zeros are absolutely necessary, but let’s unpack both sides of this argument. Leave a comment on this post with your opinion!
Giving zeros shows a true representation of what the student understands. If a student isn’t actually turning in any work, then you’re not able to see how much they know about that topic right?
In very rare cases a student is able to turn in no homework, understand all of the material based on what they’ve done in class, and then do well on a quiz. However, most of the time when a student doesn’t turn in their work that reflects on their assessments.
As teachers we start to question whether it is even worth the time grading formative assessments like classwork or homework. Grading these assignments takes up so much of our time that could be used to do something more beneficial to our students.
Why you shouldn't grade zeros
I have seen teachers, educators, and educational researchers suggest instead of giving zeros to give students a 50 for their incomplete work.
The reasoning behind this grading practice is to not skew a student’s overall grade because of missing assignments. This matches up well with standards based grading practices where a student’s grade is reliant upon the best evidence that they have to prove their understanding.
This seems like a good idea for those students who don’t complete formative assessments but still do very well on tests and quizzes. However, it doesn’t really benefit anyone else. It is just perpetuating the idea that you don’t have to do your best work to get half credit.
Assigning homework
One philosophy that I do have that I do stand very strongly behind is not assigning homework unless it is absolutely necessary. Typically, I assign work that can be done in class while I’m there to support my students or while there are other students around to support each other.
I always tell my students that I don’t want them to go home and not know what they’re doing. There are two general outcomes when this happens. 1. The students do all of the homework wrong then come back to class and have to relearn it. 2. They don’t understand the assignment, get frustrated, and give up. Both of these scenarios just further perpetuates math anxiety and frustrations all around.
With that being said, if I’m going to assign homework it’s because my students were messing around in class. The expectation is that they take advantage of having me there to support them and if they don’t, then they need to bring the work home to complete.
I also don’t believe in grading homework every single day. I think that there is a time and a place for grading and practice is not the time for that. There are a few factors that come into play here.
1. Grading for accuracy is overwhelming and time consuming.
2. Grading for completion doesn’t represent what a student actually knows how to do.
3. Not grading homework enables students to not complete it.
All of these factors have their own pros and cons, but there are ways to find a somewhat happy medium. Personally, I will never just grade homework for completion because I know that it doesn’t work for me in my own classroom.
In my classroom, grading assignments fairly looks like grading for accuracy only. I want to know what my students actually know how to do. If they are just throwing random numbers on a paper or copying off one of their classmates, that doesn’t mean anything to me.
The result
The one drawback of this system is the result at the end of a unit. There are always a handful of students who don’t complete the work in class because they think that they don’t need to. Since they have barely done any work throughout the unit, they get to the test review and are completely lost.
At this point, I usually get a panicked email from the student, their parent, their counselor, or a special education teacher asking what they need to do to bring up their grade. In reality, what they needed to do was actually put in the effort during class time to do the work and ask questions when they were stuck.
So I can fill their gradebook with all of these zeros and give them a list of missing assignments, but at what point will it become the student’s responsibility to manage their time and schoolwork?
Final thoughts about how to grade assignments fairly
It comes down to what you and your school district value in terms of the education a student is receiving. If your school district has adopted solely standards based grading, then there isn’t much wiggle room when grading participation and homework completion. Your students’ grades will only be determined by the evidence they have turned in to demonstrate their mastery of each standard.
Many schools have adopted this philosophy. However, since the beginning of the pandemic, many educators are rethinking their values and what they want their students to actually learn in their classrooms. It is up to you to decide what skills you want to prioritize teaching in your classroom.
If a student does not complete the assignment, call it an F versus a 0. The rationale to average it in as a 50 is not to give half credit, but because it’s often mathematically impossible to recover from 0’s that get averaged into a grade (if grades are determined on a 100 point scale). Each letter grade can vary 10 points (A’s = 90-100). But the range for F’s at most schools is 60 points (F’s = 0-59). Averaging a 0 in on a 100 point scale is disproportionate.