I have always felt that educational assessment, needed to reflect skills and abilities not simply just facts and figures that could be memorized and regurgitated back. This isn’t deep and meaningful learning, it is simply recalling memorized information that students can memorize and then forget once the test is done. However when students are learning applicative skills for various subject their engagement changes which results in deeper learning. It is this deeper learning that will allow for students to develop transferable skills that they can use even when situations change, allowing them to become more adaptable to the ever changing work environment.

Definition & Philosophy of SBG

Standards Based Grading (SBG) is an assessment method used to shift student focus away from meeting requirements to  the journey/progression of learning. Often students are so focused simply on getting a good grade to make their parents or college transcript happy that they don’t focus on actually learning the materials. In standards based grading, students are given a skill or task description with varying levels of achievement that students can meet. In many cases these various levels are achievement are accompanied by descriptions that clarify what is expected at each of the achievement levels. These descriptors serve two purposes, the first being that students have a clear understand of what is expected at each achievement level and secondly helps graders to normalized the grading practices over the course of student groupings.  This method of grading has the addition of greater feedback to students. Students are given feedback remarks for each area of assessment. It this assessment that is one of the critical components of the SBG model as students learn specifically what needs to be improved upon to advance towards mastery of skills or tasks.

How SBG Changed my Grading Practices

When I moved to standards based grading, a couple of things changed for my students, but mostly it changed how I treated the grades in general and how I gave feedback to my students. One of the major changes I made to my grading process was giving the students the ability to fix/correct their mistakes then be able to resubmit assignments for a higher grade. The purpose of this was to teach students that fixing and building knowledge and skills was more important than the grade received. While many students took to this new model easily and found to it be much more beneficial, I still had some students struggle to complete assignments and lessons on time. So I decided to change my late work policy, I gave students a three-day “grace period” with assignments to allow students who might be struggling or are sick to get caught up without penalty. When an assignment is turned after this grace period, it is considered late and 15% is taken off. Students can earn the 15% penalty back with the assignment still noted as late. In order to get the 15% late penalty back students must email their parent/s and myself (the instructor) and explain three things; 1) what the assignment was, 2) why the assignment was late, 3) how they are going to prevent this from happening for future assignments. This make students responsible for the outcome of their assignments and teaches them to follow-up on feedback given to the them.