Dear Virginia,

I'm School Loop's CEO. I normally don't do this, but since you are just starting out, I'd thought I'd make a suggestion that you consider whether weighting your grades is really the right idea.

Many teachers use weighting because it seems like a fair way to allocate scores proportionately based an the value/importance of the category. This can be accomplished with straight points as well, though weighting is cleaner and more exact.

The downside, though, of weighting can be significant, and since with School Loop we address questions from thousands of teachers and hundreds of thousands of students, we've seen it all.

There are two primary problems. One is the empty category problem. If there are two categories, one worth 60% and the other 40%, and one is empty, the other will be scaled to 100% until the empty one has a scored assignment. What happens is that a teacher will have one category with 1000 total points in it, and 0 in the other, and then add one assignment worth 5 points in the empty category, and give a number of students a 0. If that category is worth 40%, even if those students have 100% in the 60% category, they now are showing nearly a failing grade.

This is a dramatic example, and it happens with disturbing regularity. It also highlights the other problem, confusion among students and parents. This example is so dramatic, it raises big red flags. But normally, kids and parents get confused because they see no connection between their point scores and the effect on their grade. This is particularly acute if a student consistently does well in low value categories.

This would be difficult but possibly comprehendable, but then multiply this by the six or seven classes taken by a student, each with its own grading scale and weighting scheme. Most students just give up

When I was a student teacher, I started with weighting as well, but one day I added scores and a student's average went down despite the score on the assignment being higher than his average. The culprit: Weighting. Shocked, I abandonned weighting. I'm hoping that sharing my experience and perspective you might consider the same.

Mark