What is with the school system down here? I spent three hours this morning putting my final grades for the first quarter together in nice neat Excel spreadsheets, only to discover that there is some special “official” spreadsheet that I have to use! This one is for the Department of Olancho (a Honduran department is the rough equivalent of a US state, in case you’d forgotten.)
Now, one would think that all I would have to do is copy and paste all the grades into the appropriate cells and be done with it. Any REASONABLE person would expect to have to report their student’s final PERCENTAGE grade. But no, in Olancho the powers that be think that it’s best for grades to be submitted with their point value. Oh, and the total number of point MUST be out of 100. This means scaling all of my World History grades down to the appropriate levels, as the final point count in that class was out of 114.
And of course, because that was just not simple enough, the final exam grade had to be included in the point count…and EVERY class is required to have an exam grade, including my Art and Activities classes which, guess what, didn’t have an exam.
And so it was with a malicious glee and resounding resentment that I spent the afternoon re-calculating my grade book to fit the Honduran system of measurement. Oh the final grades came out the same for both our school (which, sensibly, uses percentages) and the Department forms in the end, but I did have to make up imaginary test grades for over 60 children.
But if you had already worked out the percentage grade, wouldn't that be the same as points out of one hundred??
ReplyDeleteMum.
true story momma
ReplyDeleteoh the final outcome was fine, it was the exam that threw the monkeywrench in the works. You see the exam and class grades had to be in "points" which had to add up to 100. But my exam was worth 44 points, and the class grades 70, so I had to scale them down so that their "point value" equaled 100 exactly. I tried to use a conversion value, but it ended up putting the final percentages off by a few percentage points...which was the difference between a pass and a fail for some kids. In the end, I didn't so much as "make up" the grades as I "re-graded" the students. This time though, I used the deparments standards instead of mine. The end result was the same (the final percentage or "points"), but I had to re-grade the exams and the classwork on a different scale!
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