Should i grade homework

Cancel reply. Your email address will not be published. Recent Stories. Issuu Our Sponsors. The Oracle. Submit Search. About Share your ideas Staff Advertise with us. Search this site Submit Search. Forum Should homework be graded based on accuracy rather than for completion? Written by Madison Nguyen With new teachers, harder classes and more homework, the start of each school year is a shift for everyone.

Navigate Left. Navigate Right. Gunn High School. Feature photo by identity chris is. All we need to do is keep learning, growing, and depending on Him. I'm here to provide practical advice and Biblical encouragement so you'll have the confidence and perspective to not only inspire your students but reach their hearts as well.

I have been struggling with these issues since school started. These are brilliant suggestions and I am very excited to try them! Especially having them re-do an assignment when not following directions! I really identified with your issues in grading homework. I can see how your idea of taking 5 percentage point off for each incorrect problem and 15 percentage points off for each problem that was not attempted can motivate students to complete assignments. At the same time, it does not discourage the students from making and learning from mistakes.

I teach primary grades. What I have noticed with my class in particular is that my students are heavily assisted at home when completing their homework.

At times, the homework is returned in their parents handwriting. How is it possible for these homework assignments to be graded fairly? Yeah, that is tough. My best advice is to 1 only count homework for a small percentage of their final grade.

I taught in the social studies department and many times could not read an answer due to horrible handwriting. I believe it is important that students be held accountable for their effort in learning as well as what they learn.

It is hard to strike a balance where they begin to take responsibility for the work they do while having grading policies to back that up but not kill the grade at the same time. Thanks for great insight on a very relevant topic.

I grade homework unconventionally as well. Each assignment is worth 10 points. They receive 5 points in class just for completing the assignment according to the directions. Then, in class, I present all of the answers and allow the students to ask questions and correct their answers.

Then, I grade 5 problems for accuracy. If they had an answer wrong and correct it during class, that counts as a correct answer.

My hope is that they are paying attention and learning from their mistakes. So far, it seems to be working. I like your method. I am trying to rethink my homework grading policies and this seems to resonate with me the most.

Thank you. Completion checks and self-correcting to understand what practice went well and what needs work gives accountability for most kids, especially in math. Writing is completion with some grading by me. Make ups for missed homework is required during all class enrichment time others can chose their activities. It has been effective so far…. What about for writing homework?

As a parent, I agree with your grading scheme. After all the blood, sweat, and tears we have to endure to make our kids do their homework, it is really disheartening to get no feedback or only a star showing that the teacher saw a paper with some writing on it.

Then they usually correct only the comments I made and none other. Each paper is unique. What is wrong on paper might not be so wrong on another. So sigh. Oh, yes, this is its own challenge. I came up with a way to grade writing much more quickly by using a checklist instead of a rubric.

Saves tons of time on writing comments, too. Got it back the next day with a giant red sharpie X on it and a 0 points next to it. My daughter was so discouraged because she was so proud of that paper and thought she got most of them right. The following year her teacher had a system with a rubric and it went phenomenally better.

Last year not so much. Now we are homeschooling. I came across this looking for a decent way to keep grades for a 4th grader but not be so stringent. She wants into a program that requires us to submit grades.

Thanks for all these ideas. I agree that students who are trying and completing homework should not have their averages go down because they are making mistakes during the learning process. I teach middle school and have 70 students. Sometimes I rotate what weeks are completion grades vs fully graded, but yes, some kids start guessing — would it be a completion week , and the quality went down.

I have the opposite problem from parents doing homework. I teach in a very low socioeconomic neighborhood where students are dealing with extreme circumstances and problems beyond our school walls. A student who participates in class, completes class work, does well on assessments but never turns in homework is a situation I see over and over again.

I almost prefer when they sign up for enrichment after school programs and wish that could count as homework. I do give a weekly packet that is due Friday. They could do a page a night or if they have a club after school or responsibilities at home, they could double up another night.

Thanks for sharing these ideas. I like your suggestions, I allow my 4th and 5th graders to return an assignment as often as needed until they reach If not, I am always willing to help. It does take more work some nights, however I know my students are understanding a concept and not just skipping over the concept.

I have been blessed by your posts, the webinar, and now am going through the Classroom Management course. Though I have been teaching for 13 years, I see that I can always learn more strategies for motivating and interacting with my students differently in order to better manage my classroom. I am struggling with finding a succint way to do that. I am loving this concept though! Thank you!!! Grades should measure knowledge gained in the curriculum. There are 5 kinds of students in this example you can probably come up with more, but 5 for sure.

Translation, an F means they have no knowledge what so ever of the standard s attempted to practice. How can giving homework a grade be VALID grading and honest communication of learners progress through the curriculum? If a teacher was not well organized, they really struggled finding the space to give their major assessments. It put the responsibility on teachers to plan. Homework was harder to get a handle on. Departments did different things although we were able to get most departments to monitor the way homework was graded among their teachers.

Remember it was a smaller school. The most responsive school that I worked at was Marlborough School. As Director of Studies at a grade school and the person in charge of the Educational Council, which had authority for setting academic policies, we were able to create school-wide policies in areas such as test make-up, late work, extra-credit, and homework.

As a high-end girls school in LA, the faculty, school, and community were quite sensitive to academic stress. Marlborough is a high-achieving school with a great number of type-A folks. Lots of pressure and lots of homework. When I arrived and became the Director of Studies like Dean of Faculty at WMS , I was able to guide the department chairs to think seriously about policies that helped manage the academic environment and made it reasonable.

The only thing on homework that we were unable to really accomplish is the part about relevant and meaningful. That issue was a nut that was hard to crack.

Teachers were still wedded to their—20 math problems at the end of the chapter, 30 pages of reading a night, some worksheets in MS earth science, etc. I think this issue is a tough one as you mention.

Hard to get a handle on and move faculty in a positive direction. Of course some of the homework students receive is very meaningful and very necessary. I get concerned that a good deal of it has the effect of turning them off vs. And these are good teachers, at least I think they are. That concerns me for students.

It might be interesting to do a quick and easy anonymous Survey Monkey piece to canvas the JHS faculty and see what shakes out on these questions. Data helps. However, the MET Life survey is amazingly complete. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account.

Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. You must be logged in to post a comment.

Homework As a Tool for Learning, courtesy of IStockphoto These two questions have been debated many times, often with little resolution.