Standards Reporting
My school has been looking at the possibility of doing some standards based reporting in the future. We paid for online powerschool training for Implementing Standards. The first thing that we learned was PowerTeacher Web Gradebook doesn't support tying standards to individual standards. I we were to implement standards our teachers would have to use the gradebook to record all of their assignments and use the Backpack on PowerTeacher to record all of their standards. The only other option was to downgrade to the non-web gradebook. The trainer, and PS tech support people I have talked to since, say that the ability to tie standards to individual assessments might be available in the next version. Needless to say, I wasn't very happy from that point. Grrr!
Standards Based Grading
Probably the most important teacher at school (my wife) has been bugging me about how when she was at Seoul Foreign School she could create her own grade scale to use in Grade Quick. She graded all assignments, both formative and summative assessments, using a 4,3,2,1 grade scale according to the standards and benchmarks. It worked in Seoul because they reported strictly in percentages on their final report cards. She was able to create a scale that said a "3.5" was an 91% or whatever. On the report card it would show the percentage only.
In PowerTeacher Web Gradebook teachers don't have it ability to do that. All Grade scales are created at the district level and individual schools assign the grade scale to courses or sections. I created a new grade scale called "Standards Based Marking". Our gradescale is as follows:
| Name | Description | CutoffPercentage | Grade_Points | CountsInGPA |
| 4 | Exceeds Standard | 97 | 4.3 | Yes |
| 3.7 | Proficient | 93 | 4 | Yes |
| 3.5 | Proficient | 90 | 3.7 | Yes |
| 3.2 | Proficient | 87 | 3.3 | Yes |
| 3 | Proficient | 83 | 3 | Yes |
| 2.7 | Approaching | 80 | 2.7 | Yes |
| 2.5 | Approaching | 77 | 2.3 | Yes |
| 2.2 | Approaching | 73 | 2 | Yes |
| 2 | Approaching | 70 | 1.7 | Yes |
| 1.7 | Concern | 67 | 1.3 | Yes |
| 1.5 | Concern | 63 | 1 | Yes |
| 1.2 | Concern | 60 | 0.7 | Yes |
| 1 | Concern | 1 | 0.3 | Yes |
| T | Turned In | 100 | 0 | No |
| M | Missing | 0 | 0 | No |
| L | Late | 0 | 0 | No |
| I | Incomplete | 0 | 0 | No |
It seems to be working, but there were a few problems:
- Because we were changing the grade scale mid semester we had to have the percentages match up to the old gradescale. Otherwise grades for students would have changed. If you have a grade scale that has pluses and minuses then you will need to have at least as many as the old gradescale.
- We are reporting strictly in Letter grades. We have to write a specialized report card for these teachers that are using to the standards grading. We will have to create a decode statement that will look up the final grade percentage and decode to the standard grade scale. Tech support recommend doing it this way because otherwise it will take forever for the reporting engine the run the report job.
- Assignments in the PowerTeacher Gradebook cannot be sorted by category or by anything else. The teachers that are piloting this would like to keep assessments that belong to a specific standard together. Still working on this one...
- When you switch to a new gradescale in the middle of a term, you have to go into a grade on an assignment change it and save and the new gradescale will be applied. You can then go back and change the grade back.
- The gradescale will automatically convert any and all assignments to the new gradescale if the assignment grades were entered by points or or percentage. I am not sure what will happen if you try to convert to a new gradescale and you have assignments that were entered by letter grade.
