Grading and Assessment

BHHS teachers who use Standards-Based Grading believe that:

• all scored tasks will correlate to one or more of the assessment criteria rubrics;
• students will be well-informed (i.e. feedback, knowing the standard, self assessing their learning, etc.) prior to receiving a summative grade;
• they will stay true to the appropriate rubric descriptors to honestly assess students' command of objectives;
• grading will represent student performance on standards, not compliance, completion, or conduct; and
• grades are fluid and adapt to new learning, culminating in a final grade that represents the students' achievement over the duration of the semester.

In practice, BHHS teachers who use Standards-Based Grading will:

• take their individual classes through range-finding activities of sample student work early in the course to help students see how the rubrics are applied and clarify teacher expectations;
• regularly communicate with students about their individual progress;
• regularly document formative assessments in MiStar either with numerical scores or specific anecdotal comments;
• use patterns in data rather than averages to determine overall criterion scores;
• display overall criterion scores in MiStar, adjusted after summative assessments; and
• provide additional rationale in MiStar if overall criterion scores do not seem to adhere to patterns.
• Administration will address inconsistencies in how a teacher is determining overall criterion scores as personnel issues, not Standards-Based Grading issues.

To help students and parents understand an Honors course designation, the following guidelines have been established:

• An Honors course will cover required content standards in greater depth and may cover additional content standards when appropriate.
• An Honors course materials may be differentiated from the standard course materials to challenge students' thinking (supplemental materials when appropriate).
• An Honors courses will have differentiated assessments where students are expected to engage in tasks that display a greater depth of knowledge than a standard course.
• An Honors course should assess students on a rubric differentiated from the standard course rubric with expectations aligned toward a greater depth of knowledge (ie. DOK 3 and 4).

Please consult your counselor if you have any questions regarding Honors courses.

For more course-specific information, please view the teachers' syllabi.