In their seminal work Understanding by Design, McTighe & Wiggins remind us to keep our eyes on the guidelight when designing a course. Let’s take this a step further and talk about instructional design, specifically backward design. When it comes to staying consistent with your syllabus in times of change, percentage-category makes it a bit easier. Even outside of the pandemic we might need to omit an assignment or two. However, in a world where course plans can change, percentage-weighted categories have an administrative advantage.
Moodle gradebook is able to accommodate either of these strategies. Otherwise the overall grade calculation would have been incorrect. I think one teacher had assignments worth 28.57 points after omitting work from a category. Teachers that followed the sum-of-points strategy needed to make some awkward changes to their gradebooks to accommodate omitted assignments.
Teachers with percentage-category grading were able to flexibly add and remove assignments in an emergency without adjusting their syllabus. Whereas teachers in the sum-of-points camp had something like this in their syllabus: There’s nothing inherently wrong with either of these strategies, but percentage-category teachers typically had only categories and percentages in their syllabus, like this: The main difference is the way the teacher has conceptualized weight distribution.
Have a look at the two imaginary gradebooks below:Īt first glance, they appear to be using different strategies, but in reality they are mathematically very similar. We’ll call them Sum-of-Points and Percentage-Category. There are two broad grading strategies in most US-based schools.
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