Mark:  What level?  High school?  College?  And how has this "percentage grading" been explained to you?  No letter grades at all, or must you establish a chart of letter grade equivalents?  And exactly what did you mean by "rubrics"? 

 

I'm at the college level, and I can grade any way I want to.  (It's called Academic Freedom!).  I used to set up point systems, until my daughter, the Math Education major, showed me how to use percentages AND, most importantly, how to WEIGHT those percentages.  That way I can grade every assignment on a 0-100% basis, but assign different weights to different assignments in the final grade calculation.  (Which Excel does for me, thank goodness!)

 

But your question are very good ones.  When I was in a supervisory position and had to submit evaluations of my secretary the university forms and standards usually read something like:  Contact With the Public:  Directs incoming calls with 90% accuracy at least 85% of the time  YES  NO.  Which is basically a stupid system!  But you might be able to figure out a system something like that for your administration's needs.  (I won't say for YOUR needs since it sounds as if this has been imposed on you from above!)

 

All the best,

John

I worked out a system for objective grading within the 4/3/2/1/0 grading scale, but now our high school is going to percentage grading.  I see the merits of knowing whether your son or daughter has a 98% or an 89.5%  which could be the same 4/3/2/1 grade.  My problem is how to be that specifc and objective in a choral setting.  I would love to use SmartMusic for evaulation - something objective that can actually judge, but sadly that is lacking for choral music.  (I know - I can input all the passages myself through finale for grading - that's just not my forte right now). I can come up with an attendance grades, participation grades, written tests, etc that are fairly easy translate to percentages.  I'm just not sure how to do singing evaulations using that specifc a percentage grading system.

Hi again, Mark.  Thanks for that additional information.

 

My personal opinion is that it would be a big mistake to grade on ABILITY, rather than LEARNING.  Therefore it depends on what you mean by "singing evaluations."  Or to put it another way, you can only objectively grade on objective progress that is the result of your own teaching, not on whether someone has a pretty voice! 

 

And a corollary of that seems to be that if you teach sightreading and pitch accuracy and other things that can be broken out and evaluated objectively, then you should be able to grade on improvement in those things, but not on bare-bones ability, just on improvement.

 

And nobody says (or at least they should not!) that you actually have to differentiate between scores that differ by less than, say, 5 percentage points (or whatever you decide on).  There is ALWAYS a degree of subjectivity involved in grading music classes, no matter how hard you try to avoid it, but it isn't really necessary to micro-manage the scoring even if it's expressed in percentages.  A system designed for math classes won't necessarily translate exactly to a system that makes sense for music classes.  But you have to start by defining what YOUR goals are.

 

Is objective testing and evaluation good?  Of course!  It's what allows us to maintain that what we teach is in fact academic learning (which I am thoroughly conviced that it is!).  Or at least it is if we try to teach musicianship and not just notes.

 

All the best,

John