Our grades are based on summative marks

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Borgia's new gradebook policy states that our grades shall be composed of summative marks. Today, I would like to address what that means and why we have chosen to comprise our grades this way.

In education, we have two different types of assignments: "formative" and "summative." In his book "Fair Isn't Always Equal," educational researcher Rick Wormeli best defines these terms with a medical metaphor. He writes that a formative assignment is an assignment "for learning," while a summative assignment is an assessment "of learning"...so a formative assignment is like going to the doctor for a physical, and a summative assignment is like an autopsy. Meaning, all of the formative assignments we give are meant to be opportunities to realize our current state of understanding (just as a physical allows us to know our current state of health), but the summative mark in the gradebook is the final mark: the learning is finished and it's time to note the state it finished in (the autopsy).

I am a strong believer in NOT allowing a grade to represent all of the "physcials" along the way. 

Many of you know, I am an avid swimmer. I swam in college, and I love to get in the water as often as possible to swim a few thousand yards. When I began at Borgia, it was mid-summer and I was in great shape. However, as the school year progressed, I had a lot to do at school! Swimming was an activity I was doing less and less. By Thanksgiving, I had gained 25 pounds. While I attribute this to my lack of swimming, I also attribute it to the delicious Borgia lunches and Borgia cookies! However, by the end of the school year, I had lost 35 pounds. My decline in weight began with a physical. I went to the doctor, they weighed me, and I was the heaviest I had ever been. However, I recommitted to swimming. I made time to do it. By the end of the year, I was in better shape than I had been in years!

What if my "grade" for the year was based on my weight? I might have had the following weight scores:

July: 210
August: 215
September: 220
October: 225
November: 235
December: 230
January: 225
February: 220
March: 215
April: 210
May: 200

These marks are pretty close to real! However, if averaged together, my weight is 218. That is far from the truth! I ended the year at 200! My physicals along the way may have indicated that I wasn't in the pristine shape that I wanted to be in. But, while it wasn't an autopsy (thank goodness!), my summative result was outstanding!

At Borgia, we want grades to work this way. We don't want to punish students for not being "in shape"  during the learning stage. We want our final grades to indicate where they were in the end. After all, what is a grade supposed to do? We like to think it communicates to students, parents, and others (like colleges) how well the student understood the material. And if in the end, he or she understood it, we want that grade to say so!

The result of this philosophy may mean fewer grades in the gradebook; there will potentially be one summative grade for each piece of knowledge or skill learned in the class. However, we hope our grades serve as more accurate representations of what our students truly know and can do!


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