MFM2P - Day 63: Test, Day 2 & a Little Around Grading

Today my students worked on their tests. Many got stuck, but kept going with prompting from me. I particularly frustrated one student who kept trying to hand in the test which I kept returning while saying "Oh, you know how to do this... this is just like the visual patterns we do..." or "What kind of triangle is this? ... What information do you know?". As I have said before, I don't want them handing in the test unless it is a fairly accurate reflection of what they have learned and can do. Some asked me for 10 more minutes at the start of tomorrow's class because they need to practice something (trig, for the most part) tonight. Yes, you can go do more math and show it off for me tomorrow : )

Elissa Miller was asking about what goes into each student's grade at the end of the semester. While not completely addressing her question, I thought I could share some of how I record and come up with a grade. Each test is clearly broken down by curriculum expectation. Each student gets a level, from 1 to 4, or an R (reassess) for each expectation which I then record on a sheet like this, for each student. It looks like this:

The expectations are listed across the top. I can then look across a row and give an overall grade for each test (or other assessment). I can also look down each expectation column at the end of the course to see the student's progression.

I also put all this information into a locally-developed program called MaMa. Here is a sample:

I have colour-coded the results so that tests 1 and 2 are yellow, test 3 is orange and test 4 is red. This helps me quickly see the most recent and see the progression (if any). I looks like this student had trouble in cycle 3, but picked things up and really showed improvement at the end of cycle 4. I use this, along with my professional judgement and my observations in class, to assign a level (grade) for each strand (linear, quadratic, trig/measurement). Additionally we have a board-wide summative and an exam broken down by strand. This same student achieved the following levels on the end-of-year evaluations:

Again, this lets me see the level at which this student is achieving in each strand at the end of the course. This way of keeping track of everything by expectation also allows me to have meaningful conversations with students (or parents) about where they need to focus their efforts to improve.