Have you ever been stressed at the end of the year trying to keep your grades or bring your grade up? With the new cumulative grading policy implemented at the beginning of this year, end of the year grades will be worth exactly the same as the rest of the year, instead of having a final grade comprised of the averages of quarter grades. This makes keeping your grades up at the end of the year easier, but some are worried it will make it more difficult to improve grades.

The new grading policy has caused lots of confusion to students and parents alike so far this year. Many are not only wondering whether or not this will affect their yearly grade, positively or negatively, but also confused as to why the administration would go through the trouble of changing a system that already worked well. Parents and students worrying about these problems have nothing to fear, as the changes in the system seem large but are actually very small and create a “more fair system,” according to the longtime head of the C.H.S. Math Department Mrs. Burke. Quarters that do not have equivalent grades will no longer be averaged, this means that each grade is truly equal. Burke reasons that this is because “a test is a test and it doesn’t matter how many you have in a quarter.”

“In some ways I think it’s more fair, mathematically speaking,” says Burke. “First quarter, say your teacher had 10 assignments, and let’s just say they only had one category. In the second quarter maybe they only had 5 [assignments]. It’s the same category but now all of a sudden these grades are worth double than the first quarter, because there are fewer of them.” This new system takes away the variability of the old where it could be possible to have a higher or lower grade than one deserved because of this flaw.

The new system is also very helpful for teachers who use standards-based grading, who previously had to use two different systems, Canvas and JumpRope, a free online program dedicated to standards based grading, to calculate grades before putting it in Powerschool. Because quizzes can be made up throughout the year in standards-based grading, this created issues with the old quarter system. “The issue with Powerschool [is], everything has to have a date and in standards based grading we use the whole year. So if I put a date in for September it would push it into Quarter One, and it wouldn’t count it,” says Burke. Searching for a solution for this problem Mrs. Burke and Mr. Durrer, affectionately known as the “Powerschool Expert,” realized that quarters were truly arbitrary and used for no apparent reason other than that is how it had always been. This solution came after years of complaints from teachers attempting to reconcile Powerschool and standards-based grading.

While the policy still may confusing, students and parents alike can be assured that it was put in place for good reason and will have no apparent effect on students’ grades.