Education, Math, and More with Mr. Allison

 I saw a Facebook post this week where a parent stated, "Grades are not a measure of knowledge, but a measure of compliance." Unfortunately, I think there is a lot of truth to that in our culture today. My goal with grades is the opposite, though. Grades should be representative of what a kid knows. Years ago, the math department where I work established test scores as 75% of a student's grade. I cannot speak for other teachers, but this has worked well to help kids LEARN the material, instead of counting on lots of completion-graded homework and classwork points to keep their grades high, even when their knowledge is lacking.  Take a class with 1000 points possible in a grading period, where students take three 100-point tests. If a teacher grades everything but tests for completion, a student could turn in every paper with every answer wrong and "earn" 70% of all the possible points. In most schools today, 70/100 is a C. Even if this student scored a zero on e...

Next month, I'll start my 18th year as a teacher. One thing I've learned over the years is there's always more to learn. Most of the time when you turn a good idea into reality, it works for a little while before some kids figure out a way to circumvent it. But one idea a friend of mine and I came up with many years ago still works well for me today. It's a curve for grading tests that actually works!  Here is a link to a spreadsheet calculator you can make a copy of and use! What does that mean, that it works? Everyone's heard of the bell curve of old, but that's been widely denounced as unfair. A certain percentage of students make A's and a certain percentage make F's, even if only a few points separate the highest and lowest grades. If the highest grade was 100 and the lowest a 90, you would still have students making F's. My friend and I agreed that was ludicrous.  Another common method of curving grades is to simply add a certain amount of poin...