Patel What's in a Grade

Grading for mastery is always the goal.  However with tight schedules it is not always the case.  Especially in classes like mine where students are not equal in ability or motivation.  Like most teachers they are students that always finish early and some that never do.  It is very hard to keep the pace of a class.  Most often I go with the majority--the ones that finish by the due date.  In my classes especially the computer classes most of the work isn't assessed by tests.  I give projects and class time to work on it with open forum to ask questions and get help.  Not all students take advantage of this and never finish.   In these instances I am guilty of moving on.  In my Personal Finance class, there are few projects and mostly tests.  I like to use Google Forms because I get to see which questions were most missed so that I can reteach that particular question.  Since the students are at different levels I try to provide as much assistance as possible.  On the last test, the median was an 88.  Which is great but I still had several students that made below 50.  The dilemma becomes that most of the class did really well and have mastered the material and are ready to move on, but the 3 students that failed are not. I found "Three Tips for Effective Grading" to be very helpful. I do believe that the projects I give are higher order thinking and meaningful to the objectives, especially since they don't get more than 3 a quarter.  The 2nd tip is the one that I do struggle with. Grading for completion on projects.  I am trying to see if they can do the work--that means in coding class can they do the code for the different objectives--can they add an image, or hyperlinks, or do programming that makes something turn.  Often with rubrics, I have been frustrated that students that do the bare minimum still get good grades because they had everything even though it wasn't very good.