Grading

I know as a new teacher I like to see how other teachers grade and break down their grades, so I thought I would share what is currently working for me.

Grading Policy:
40% Tests
20% Quizzes
20% Classwork/Notebook
20% Homework\

Tests
I grade tests using Standards Based Grading, read about it here. I'm loving it for many reasons, but one I haven't mentioned yet is that I'm much less likely to put off grading. I don't know about you, but I spend a ridiculous amount of time deliberating over how many points to count off for this and SBG has really helped that.

Policies: Students can study and prove they have practiced using my resource website and then I will give them new problems. I am still working on the mechanics of this and would love suggestions on what you do!

Quizzes
Every regular schedule day with no tests we do a daily quiz. I get all my quizzes from Math-Aids. This makes it fast for me and I can also link to the quizzes for my students to practice at home since the problems are randomly generated and they provide answer keys. This is when I can focus on remedial skills like operations with fractions, changing percents to decimals, and operations with decimals that are assumed to be known by our kids but are often forgotten. They are usually 10 questions, 10 points each out of a 100. Sometimes I'll do half credit, but usually it is all or nothing.

These, like test, can be studied and retested. I also will requiz as a class certain quizzes that everyone did poorly.

Once I am in the second half of the course, these quizzes will shift to being review from the previous quarter.

Classwork/Notebook
I have a place on the back of their TOC to record classwork. It is my first time trying this and I am still ironing out the kinks. The last two units I have ended up going around and stamping the classwork the day before a test. I would really like to be more consistent in doing it every day.

Notebooks I am grading at unit tests using a quick rubric of 1 to 4 on 5 items:
- TOC is updated
- Page numbers present
- Pages are titled
- Homework has been corrected
- Everything is attached

I only spend a couple minutes on each notebook. I am already seeing a big change with only the second notebook check with students keeping up with it. My goal is for this to become and awesome resource for them, and I know for some of them it just isn't going to happen unless there is a grade attached. My principal says we "incent what we value". So I am incentivizing keeping the notebook in order.

So far I only have a couple students who aren't keeping up with it well. And now the others are pretty much on autopilot and that can just be a nice grade to help their classwork average.

Homework 
I've decided to not accept any late homework this semester and it is making things so much easier. I wrote a post about my homework process here.

I'm also trying to incorporate one project per unit this year. Projects will be worth two homework grades. Mostly they are going to be on matching multiple representations of the functions we are studying, since that is a huge emphasis in CCSS.


Do you have any grading policies or tips that have really paid off? Share in the comments!