A Cumulative Points-Based Grading System (And Writing a Brightspace Grade Formula)

I decided yesterday to change the grading formula across my classes. Instead of calculating the average of, say, five assignments, students will accumulate points across any assignments they attempt. For an A, for instance, they will need 90-100 points. For a B, 80-89. And so on. There will be a total of 130 points possible spread out across various assignments. 

My rationale for doing this is twofold. 1) It places less emphasis on any one assignment. If a student fails a quiz, for example, then they still get points for it. They will just have to take one extra quiz at the end to make up for the failure. 2) It gives students greater control of their grade. No more hoping for a good grade. The only advantage to a good grade on any given assignment is that it means fewer assignments must be done.

 

Of course, there are downsides to each of these upsides. But I’m always looking for creative methods of reducing grade-related conflicts between student and teacher. Plus this gamifies the course (students are motivated to Earn Points rather than Be Perfect).

 

For my first class, it was easy to set up the gradebook to calculate the final grade automatically. That was because each assignment belonged to the same category. I just had to program the grade book to add up the grades across however many assignments they students submitted. Final Grade = Sum{Assignment 1, Assignment 2…} and cap the points possible at 100.

 

But for my second class I wanted to put a cap on how many points students could earn in each of three categories, because each category tested a different learning objective. The breakdown looked like this:

 

Category (points possible)	Cap on Points Earned Towards Grade
Quizzes (150)	100
Exams (150)	100
Written Reports (150)	100

 

I spent one hour pulling my hair out reading about how to write Boolean statements in code but couldn’t figure out how to do it for this scenario. I was about to call brother-in-law who is a computer programmer when I realized that I could just manually add the numbers together (capping each category at 100 points). After all, it will only take me about five minutes to calculate all the grades. There are only 16 students in this class.