Not sure if this is posted in the right place, but…
Our high school, in a continuing effort to be innovative, has decided on two major changes with a goal of reducing stress for the students:
There will no longer be a midterm week and a final week. Instead, it will be up to each teacher to figure out how best to assess their students, which likely won’t be in the form of a 2-hour exam.
There are no longer 4 marking periods, just one long year full of grades. The thinking is that the marking period deadlines are arbitrary, and teachers often rush to squeeze in work, thereby stressing out the kids.
Is anyone else aware of anything like this being done? I don’t think I have a feeling yet one way or the other, but I do question how the school will give colleges “first quarter” or “first semester” grades for senior. I’d love to hear what other people think about this.
I imagine they’ll give colleges a grade for whatever time period seems appropriate. I actually think your high school’s plan sounds intriguing as long as teachers are good about making sure students know how they are doing all along.
I am skeptical as to this reducing stress. Kids that get stressed will still get stressed. The good thing about marking periods is that it gives the kids an interim look at where they are grade-wise. If there is a bad grade one marking period, it may motivate them to step it up. If it is just a test or two, kids (at least the ones that live in my house) are more likely to dismiss its impact on their grades.
The thing with mid-term and finals week is that there is some control. No more than 2 tests in one day. And no other classes meeting so no homework assignments. I would be interested if this has been tried elsewhere and what the outcome has been.
My D and her friends like the idea of a “clean slate” that’s provided at the start of each marking period. If the child is a bit of a slacker, they may feel like they have an entire year to make up for a bad grade, rather than the imperative of fixing it in the next few weeks.
D also made the same point about finals. Teachers can still choose to give them, but in the new world it will be in a shorter class period, and may overlap with others.
Our HS got rid of Mid terms and introduced “Quartlies”…sort of a final for each marking period. They are worth 20% of the marking period grade. I am not sure if it reduced the stress because it was on less material and there was more of them, or more because it was like having midterms 4 time/yr.
Having routine major exams and marking periods helps students prepare for that in college. One think my HS did eons ago was to have final exams covering the entire year- ouch, a semester is so much better.
I think the marking periods are helpful for students to asses where they stand. The quarterly exam week is helpful in that different subjects can only test on certain days so students can’t have more than 2 quarterlies in a given day. I agree that the exams, while stressful, are important prep for college life. IMO a good thing our HS does is to only include final grades on the transcript (no marking period grades, no final exam grades etc.) so if a student has a difficult marking period he/she can recover since only the final grade will go to colleges.
A student, after 4 years of exposure to this innovative approach, might get a rather rude and unpleasant awakening to the speed and demands of a say 10 week quarter system
Personally I like a finals week. A little stress and accountability for a semester’s worth of material is a good thing in my opinion. I said semester because I think it is a reasonable length of time and at our high school there are a lot of 1 semester (half year) courses.
An important component of the OP’s situation is how expectations are communicated by the teacher to the students. Formative versus summative weighting in grades and providing a rubric would be important…actually, as I typed that, I realized it’s important in all grading. I appreciate that in our district, grades are available online for students and parents to view. I don’t know how prevalent that is across the country.