Understanding Grading Categories

News flash: every grade you have is not the same. Big surprise, we know. But, seriously, every score you recieve or point value you earn is all contributing to your quarter and semester grade a different way. So, it’s good to understand what’s actually happening when an ‘100’ brings your grade up by 1% but an ‘80’ drops it by 5%.

What are the categories?

Traditionally, there are three grading categories for each class—homework/classwork, quizzes, and tests/projects. But, they aren’t all 33.33% of your grade. Each one weighs a different amount, and they can vary from class to class.

How are categories weighted?

Normally, classwork and homework has the lowest weighting. Following that, quizzes are in the middle, and tests and projects weigh the most. These ranges can be somewhere between 10-20%, 20-45% , and 45-60%. In harder classes (like APs), tests will be weighed more, possibly up to 60%.

What does this mean?

Basically, this means that you can’t only survive based off of good classwork grades. If you are doing really well on homework but badly on tests and quizzes, then your grade is going to reflect that more. Or, vice versa, if you are a great test taker but don’t turn your homework in on time, your grade might not suffer as much.

How should I work with this?

This is done to make sure that you’re checking all of the boxes for a class, so to get a good grade, you should try to do that (duh). But, less obviously, you should try to keep each of the categories at a reasonable level that allows for variation. Classwork/homework is the easiest, so keeping that between a 95-100 will ensure your grade isn’t dropping because of silly things. For quizzes, staying between an 85-100 will give you wiggle room for a bad grade without completely wrecking your class grade. And, for tests, try to keep them as high as possible, but maintain that goal. Consistency is key, so if you can keep the same general range of scores for each category, your grade in the class will be great!

While this isn’t the most mind-boggling concept, it’s important to know why your grade can play tricks on you. Understanding grading categories helps you figure out your strengths and weaknesses in a class. And, if you liked this, be sure to check out our other posts below or in the Blog page.