A grade is a symbol used by teachers to impart information to students, to parents, and to other individuals and institutions with a legitimate need for that information. Grades are the teacher's best assessment of a student's performance in reaching the goals and objectives of a particular course, including mastery of content and demonstration of skills.
Grades are reported cumulatively three times each semester. Individual marking periods rarely receive equal weight because they do not contain equal numbers of assignments. Later assignments may be weighted more heavily because students continue to develop and sharpen skills throughout the semester and so later assignments are often more reflective of a student's progress.
The McCallie faculty does not endorse manipulation of grades to produce a predetermined distribution. While it may be natural for grades in a particular class to emerge in a representative scattering of A's, B's, C's, and F's, classes at McCallie are actually too small to produce such a statistical regularity most of the time. We believe some element of competitiveness is both inevitable and healthy, but grades at McCallie are intended to compare students' achievement with academic benchmarks rather than with other students' achievements.
Teachers use a rich variety of evaluation methods, from essays and tests to demonstrations and projects, not all of which lend themselves to numerical evaluations on a 100-point scale. How a numerical scale, if used, translates into letter grades is left up to the discretion of the individual teacher. The following descriptions of letter grades, however, are embraced school-wide:
A grade of "A" in a course indicates exceptional mastery of the course's objectives in both knowledge and skills. While a grade of "A" may not symbolize perfection, it does indicate that the student has demonstrated consistently high standards of commitment, clarity, and application. Typically, the "A" grade further signifies a student's creativity, insight, and breadth of comprehension. Because we all bring to our academic work a variety of developed skills and abilities, as well as interests and talents, students should not expect to earn an "A" in every course they take.
A grade of "B" in a course indicates solid mastery of the course's objectives in both knowledge and skills. Further, the "B" grade indicates a student's facility with analyzing course material and his clarity in expressing that facility although he may not demonstrate the depth and breadth of comprehension that merits the "A" grade, regardless of the amount of time spent on a specific assignment.
A grade of "C" in a course indicates competent mastery of the course's objectives in both knowledge and skills. A student who earns a "C" should feel reasonably confident about his ability to move on to the next course in a sequence within a discipline or about his facility with the course's objectives. For some students, a grade of "C" may represent significant intellectual growth; for others, only modest growth.
A grade of "F" in a course indicates insufficient mastery of the course's objectives in knowledge and skills. The grade of "F" is not meant to discourage students about their academic work, but rather to afford them an accurate appraisal of their performance. Students would not be well served to receive a "passing" grade only to discover later that they lack the information and/or skills necessary to proceed to the next level of a discipline either at McCallie, another secondary school, or in college.
Because the four grades described above still include a range of performance levels and because grades need to be seen, in part, as gauges to future achievement, teachers use the plus (+) and minus (-) to further refine their grades, indicating how close a student's performance comes to the adjacent levels.
All grades need to be understood in the context of the individual student's developed abilities, which obviously vary from student to student, from course to course, and even from assignment to assignment. Just as students' capabilities for academic achievement vary, so, too, do their levels of commitment to the academic enterprise. Sometimes an otherwise exceptional student's attention and engagement may come and go, or perhaps a student may focus more on finishing work than on understanding ideas. The grade a student earns for an assignment or for a course will no doubt be influenced by these factors.
Grades are useful in helping students plan their overall academic programs. Many of the choices students make about the courses they take should be influenced by performance in previous courses since that performance is a legitimate assessment of the student's readiness for subsequent courses.
