Ensuring Gradable Personalized Activities Fairly Impact Student Grades

While grading activities, Trina (the Teacher) notices that Carlos ( the student) is consistently performing poorly on activities in the “Gobsmacked: The Solar System and You” unit.

It seems that Carlos failed to learn the unit foundations, so Trina creates a gradable, personalized activity intended to help him catch up. Carlos completes the activity, and it seems to improve his performance; he also starts reporting greater interest in the material.

Upon calculating grades at the end of the unit, Trina realizes that this additional activity is given significantly more weight than the regular activities in the unit and is giving Carlos an advantage that the other students didn’t get. At this juncture, simply decreasing the weight isn’t an option because Carlos has been monitoring his grades.

To maintain fair and manageable grading practices and to avoid situations like this, plan the integration of gradable, personalized activities with the regular-graded curriculum at the beginning of a grading cycle.

When adding gradable personalized activities, consider the following:

• How does the weight attributed to the activity compare to the weight given to other activities in the category or course? If a personalized activity carries more weight than other activities, it might impact a student’s final grade more than desired.
• How many opportunities are provided to each student to earn points with gradable personalized activities? If the distribution of gradable personalized activities is skewed too much, Teachers may be giving some students significantly more opportunities to earn or lose points.
• How does counting gradable personalized activities as extra credit impact final grades? If extra credit opportunities outweigh regular curriculum grades or are unevenly offered, they can skew final grades.