Last school year, a new grading system was implemented in a handful of high school and middle school classes and received positive feedback. However, now that the policy is being administered district-wide, it has faced many mixed reactions from the Manheim Township School District community.

This system was implemented in order to “identify a common set of tools that can be used by teachers across the district to gain an understanding of student learning, progress, and needs,” according to Sharon Schaefer, the Director of Curriculum and Instruction for Manheim Township School District. Before the implementation of this policy, students could be taking the same course and have drastically different grades simply due to how their teacher chose to weigh their assignments. The current system was designed to reduce these inequalities between courses and to create set expectations for students.

Since the start of this school year, the district has divided grading into three categories: summative, formative, and homework. Summative assessments make up seventy-percent of a student’s overall grade, while formative assessments count for twenty-five-percent, and homework holds the remaining five-percent.

The Glossary of Education defines a summative assessment as a way to evaluate student learning at the conclusion of a chapter or unit. In many classes, this would be in the form of a test. On the other hand, formative assessments are assignments completed while learning is still in-progress. Formative assessments allow the teacher to get a sense for how students are doing before a test. This set-up allows instructors to modify their lesson plans to better suit the students’ needs. The current grading system heavily relies on the summative category. The school district states that “summative measures should be designed to allow and invite students to portray their knowledge visually, linguistically, and even verbally” in order to assess their understanding.

However, some students feel that the summative assessment category makes their overall grade overly reliant on tests.

“When the test category is weighted so heavily, you’re only focused [on the] test, and you’re not really concerned about the learning process,” explained senior Jane Farrell. Other Township students, such as sophomore Maddie Balestier, agree. “I don’t think that this new grading system is entirely fair to students who are not good test takers because it puts an enormous amount of weight on one single test when it may not be a fair measurement of your capabilities,” Balestier said.

On the contrary, some members of the MTSD community, such as AP Government teacher Thomas Rutledge, believe that the summative category is broader and includes more than just finals and midterms. “If it’s just tests and quizzes, and we [teachers] had no control over anything aside from tests and quizzes going into [the summative category], I think that would be a source of significant frustration for students and for teachers,” Rutledge said. Rutledge considers summative assessments as a way for teachers to accurately measure how much a student has learned by the end of a unit, whether that be in the form of a test, quiz, project, essay, or even a discussion board post. In the end, it is up to the teachers to determine what exactly falls in the summative category.

For some students, the issue isn’t the weighting itself but the broadness of the categories. “My problem with the grading system is actually the implementation of it,” Farrell explained. She agrees with the percentage held by the formative category but is convinced that many teachers believe summative assessments and test scores are synonymous. It is this confusion about what belongs where that leads to the majority of complaints and misconceptions about the grading system.

According to Schaefer, the district is listening to opinions regarding the new policy as well as holding monthly department meetings where teachers are able to voice any concerns. Moving forward, they plan to continually reevaluate the system as needed but as of now, there are no plans to change it.