Weighting of Formative vs. Summative activities

In this chapter:

Intent
Problem
Solution
Applicability
How to Implement
See Also
Source
References
Community Discussion

Intent

If graded activities are to be weighted to maintain grades in the 0-100% continuum, formative and summative assessments need to be weighted properly to reflect growth from different starting points.

When weighted grades are used, there are advantages in setting weights so that formative assessments determine passing and summative assessments determine the grade within the passing range.

Problem

A traditional grading system based on a 100-point scale provides 60 ways to fail and 41 ways to pass (based on the assumption that a student needs 60% or better to pass a course). Unfortunately, when students come from different backgrounds, abilities, and resources, this system can hurt those who start further back. Additionally, it heavily penalizes students for early failures during the learning process, making it difficult to earn “good” grades. Overall, this discourages students from continuing to improve and master topics over time if they do not succeed the first time.

Solution

When a clear differentiation is made between formative assessments (activities designed to promote learning) and summative assessments (activities designed to assess a student’s skills and knowledge at a particular point in time), then a proper weighting scheme between the two types of assessment is beneficial.

If formative assessments are considered learning activities, and thus are repeatable and have flexible deadlines, then students have ample opportunities to earn 100% of the points on these activities. Weighting formative assessments as 60% of the final grade allows all students the opportunity to earn a “passing” grade through hard work and perseverance.

Similarly, if summative assignments are the opportunity for students to demonstrate competency and measure skill level in the subject, by making this 40% of the final grade the summative assignments set a student’s level of mastery within the passing grade category.

Applicability

Many adopters of EGP switch their grading away from the 100-point scale when assigning final letter grades.

This technique is particularly applicable in environments where instructors wish to employ additional EGP practices, but are expected to report grades using a 100 point scale for institutional consistency. By modifying how activity grades are weighted/combined a more equitable environment can be created.

How to Implement

Create an overall grading scheme where at least 60% of the final grade comes from formative assessments (which should have flexible deadlines and opportunities for multiple submissions) [See Formative Assessments are for Learning].

Allocate the remaining 40% among summative assessments.

Source

Source: Albert Lionelle, Sudipto Ghosh, Marcia Moraes, Tran Winick, and Lindsey Nielsen. 2023. A Flexible Formative/Summative Grading System for Large Courses. In Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1 (SIGCSE 2023). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 624–630. https://doi.org/10.1145/3545945.3569810

Described by: Ben Schafer (ben.schafer@uni.edu)

References

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Community Discussion

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