Grading Policy

This year I will continue to use a grading policy that research is showing is a better way for students to achieve.

The main difference in this system is that students are graded on how well they understand certain aspects of Japanese that are being studied in class, rather than how many assignments they do. The hope is that this actually assesses what they know, not what they do. For example, let’s look at the assessment of the song-of-the-week activity:

Students are assessed on the vocabulary and structures from our song of the week. In the song there are some really high-frequency vocabulary terms and sentence structures that we would have focused on in class. (The song would’ve been repetitive and catchy enough to help make those items stick, too.) Now, on the assessment, I would expect students to know what most of these high-frequency vocabulary items and sentence structures mean. Their grade then would fall on the chart below: