by Riley Voss

In the gradebook currently, summative assessments makeup 90% of a student’s grade, while formative assignments are only worth 10% of the grade. This is a flawed system for multiple reasons: with formative assessments having such a small impact on a student’s overall grade, students are able to skip doing the practice assignments while still passing the class with above average marks. Also, making tests and quizzes such a large portion of the grade puts students who have a hard time taking tests at a disadvantage, meaning that even if they are a good student and do well on the practice, their below average performance on the test due to stress and pressure will pull their grade down and inaccurately represent their understanding of the material.

As of the writing of this article, formative assignments are only worth 10% of a student’s overall grade. This means that the practices and worksheets that students are assigned will hardly make any impact on the letter grade of a student. This encourages slacking off on formative assignments, as it is easy for a student to skip all of the practice worksheets and still maintain a B average. This ruins the work ethic of students, as it gives no incentive to complete the work. The students will get by just fine with zeroes on every formative, while completing the summative assessments and maintaining a good grade.

The gradebook also currently awards 90% of the student’s grade to summative assessments such as tests and quizzes. This puts students at a huge disadvantage as many people who are normally great students and do very well on formative assessments have test anxiety or stress that causes them to underperform on test day. However, because of the huge weight that is put on summatives, those people, who should be A students, are sitting at C’s and D’s because of their tendency to make mistakes under pressure during a test. Making summatives worth 90% creates an unfair assessment of these students’ grades, and makes it seem as though they are slacking off and not trying their best when in reality they are A level students who are just bad test-takers.

The current ratio of summative to formative assessments in the gradebook is highly flawed, as it both encourages slacking off on formative practices, while simultaneously putting students who complete the formatives but underperform on the tests due to anxiety at a disadvantage.