Glad to help – thanks for sharing your system on your blog. I’ve stolen from you too!

As someone who’s also trying to tweak and adjust an SBG system, I really appreciate the way you described your levels 1-4 in terms of what a student can do in relation to how independent they are (ie: a 1 is completely non-independent, a 3 is almost-independent, etc). I also like your explicit description that this is the *maximum* score you can get while still making these types of mistakes. Finding the right words to describe what separates a 1 from a 2 from a 3 has been the most difficult part of implementing SBG for me, and I think your descriptions are a step-up from mine. Reading your description made me realize that I’ve been making the same judgments, especially about independence, without communicating that to my students. So, in summary: I’m stealing some of your words. Thanks for sharing.

-Mathy McMatherson

Evan,
Thank you, this clarifies things for me. It makes sense to have that base grade, otherwise I was wondering how to justify 4/5 with an 80% when it is showing high proficiency.

The standards grade has two components. One is a set of five points that are automatically given to each student for each standard for each unit. I call this the base grade. This means that a standard grade of 1/5 really is a 6/10 when the five base grade points are put in. This is initially confusing to students, but they learn pretty quickly what it means. When they see their grades on PowerSchool (which is what we use) they see both a series of standards grades (1,3,1,5,2,2,3,4) and base grades that are all 100%. I like that the students see a 3/5 as a 60% and are unsatisfied, so they work to raise that to a 4 or 5. It doesn’t always translate that they are really pushing themselves from an 80 to a 90 by working to push a 3 to a 4.

Does that make sense, or do you want me to clarify further?

Hi Jake – nice job on getting started with blogging! It’s good to hear from you since we met in January.

I don’t think I’m going to go back, unless required to do so by administration. A standards based report card would be interesting but I’m pretty sure we aren’t headed that road. The 1-5 works well for me – fewer levels than that make me a bit uneasy in terms of describing progress, as I described in the post. The main thing I like about my system in the context of my current school is how it matches with the six level scale it has devised from novice to experienced. I didn’t know about this when I put it together, but the alignment makes me feel good about it.

I love the fact that you made a similar reflection on SBG on your own post – clearly we were on the same wavelength during the writing process!

Great post! Met you in Hong Kong this year and wish we had had more time to chat!

I love your description of the progression from the binary system to the system with more levels. Now that you’ve had a year under your belt and you are more familiar with the standards do you see yourself ever going back? What if you had a standards-based report card? (I’m assuming that you currently do not at your school, like me.) The more I try and make the SBG structure fit into a traditional 0-100 system the more I think I would want fewer levels when we’re reporting on the standards as a school.

-Jake (from Delhi)

Hi Amanda,

All of the standards were content based. No homework grades or behavior were part of the overall grade. I certainly addressed them in my feedback to students on their progress toward the learning standards, but I think that keeping behavior separate from the grade as a measure of learning is the way to go.