For those that give grades (letter or percentile)...

[riada]

what work do you give grades on? Daily work? Quizzes and Tests? Only Tests? Some other combination?

If you grade on daily work do you first give them an opportunity to correct it and then grade it, or grade it first then have them correct it?

[ThelmaLou]

I check homework, but I grade tests and quizzes. I usually just compile quiz and test grades and come up with an average for a final grade. My kids are in a co-op this year, and they way they do grading makes me think I'm being too tough. Homework is 20%, but it's not graded. If you complete it, you get 100% for that portion. Participation and preparation makes up another 20%. Final tests/quizzes/papers make up the final 60%. I haven't been figuring in anything but tests, but maybe I should consider daily assignments to count for something. I'm interested to hear other responses.

[dhudson]

I grade math, english and spelling. I only give grades on spelling tests and then on gradeable english (like grammar) with my 6th grader. Everyone gets grades on math and I grade before I give to them to correct. Unless it is a total failure and then I allow them to re-do the entire lesson and re-grade.

I want to be able to see patterns on their work so that's why I grade at all.

[KAR120C]

Basically I group our work into either "learning" or "showing". If it's "learning" work, then his grade would almost always be 100% just for hard work. If it's "showing" work, then his grade reflects the product, no matter how much enthusiasm and effort went into it (although I try my best to give him assignments where a high "C" or low "B" is about where he'll land with minimal effort and an "A" requires some significant stretching...)

So for instance for Latin we do Lingua Latina. The first week of a chapter is reading the text and doing the exercises. This is the part I count as "learning" work. We discuss, we read together, I read to him, he reads to me, and if he has trouble with the exercises we go through the text again together and discuss more. He does some copywork, adds to his list of new words, etc. His grades that week are all 100% provided he does all the work and corrects all the errors in his exercises. The second week is the "showing" week. That's when he does the "Pensa" -- based on the same ideas, but more open-ended. That work he needs to do on his own. I check it, he gets a grade and THEN we discuss it and rework or re-read anything that was a problem. The original grade stands, though. If his average for that week were to fall below 80% overall, we would be re-doing the whole chapter. (The original grade would still stand.... I would just be concerned enough about his comprehension that I wouldn't want him to move on yet.)

Math is another example: we have three days of working together (learning) and one day of review questions he does on his own (showing), and Friday is a co-op class with group work (learning) and written homework (showing). Sometimes I throw in another independent project for him to show me something he wants to pursue... like he's writing a little program for his calculator to perform and store the results of simulated 2-dice-rolls and then to make calculations based on them. It's similar to what we're learning about, but a bit of an extension beyond the regular assignments..... but it comes after the "learning" part that it's based on.

Basically all his work is graded in a similar way. If he's "learning" then he can do all the work it takes to get 100%, but if he's "showing" then I want to see what he can do on his own, before I correct it.

[mom31257]

I use Homeschool Tracker and you can assign everything a point value. I give daily work a small value and grade it based upon completion of the assignment. I do work on correcting anything they missed, but don't count off if they tried. To me, that is what daily work is for...practice. I grade quizzes, tests, writing assignments, and projects.


Daily work might receive a 5 or 10 point value. Quizzes usually receive about a 25 point value. Tests get a 100, along with final writing assignments and projects.