Joseph Admasie-Breslin

While students and teachers deal with the impact of Fairfax County Public School’s (FCPS) new grading system, FCPS intends to create more accurate evaluations. “All high school credit-bearing classes will use the new [100 points] scale next school year,” FCPS stated as one of their newest changes.

This year has brought into effect a few key grading policy changes, including making summative assessments worth 70 percent and formative assignments 30 percent of a student’s total grade. In addition, the policy allows students to retake all summatives up to 100 percent. The required minimum number of assignments per quarter in a class was reduced to seven and the maximum percentage that a single assignment could count for was increased to 35 percent.

“I think if [we had] this year’s grading system last year, my junior year would have been horrendous,” senior Daniel Yeum said.
Though the new policies aim to show students’ knowledge of the curriculum, the policies don’t seem to be having the desired effect.

“There used to be worksheets and things that we could provide the students with, [so they’d have] other ways to illustrate their understanding of the material which have now been relegated to only 30 percent of the grade,” math teacher Jonathan Osborne said. “I think [there] was a much better overall understanding of the content material with the policies we used to use.”
While summatives and formatives are not new, they are emphasized differently in this newest policy.

“They force us to make 70 percent of the grade summative, but then these so-called ‘summative assessments’ are not summative because they are taking place in the middle of the semester,” Osborne said. “If it is a summative assessment, it is ‘What did you understand.’ You’re not supposed to retake summative things. Retaking is a formative thing. So, it’s just very strange that the county opted to make this mandate.”

Though the new grading policy seems to be giving students more opportunities to show their knowledge through retakes, a further and unintended consequence is that the policy seems to be adding to the workload of both teachers and students.
“I think that the way [the grading system] is now with all the retakes is an immense workload for the teachers and the students, where they feel obligated to retake every single summative assessment that they take in all seven of their classes. It just keeps going and [soon will] start impacting future tests,” Osborne said.

The current system of retakes places an excessive burden on both teachers and students, creating a cycle of stress that negatively impacts academic performance. This exposes the urgent need for a thorough reconsideration of how assessments are managed.

“[The new system] really rubs me the wrong way,” Osborne said. “I’ve never had grades as low in any of my classes as they are in some of my classes this year. It’s not because of the students, but rather because of the outsized impact tests have on the grades.”