"Assessment That Blesses": Keeping Track of High School Credits and Grades

It's two weeks away from the start of the school year. It's been hitting me this summer. Luke is doing Geometry. Geometry is a high school credit. I need to have a plan to keep track of actual grades and credits and such, at least for this one class....

Years ago, I purchased OLLY for both my desktop and the iPad. I quickly realized it was more than I needed, and I couldn't figure out how to make it work for me at the time. So I abandoned it. But thankfully, I didn't delete it!

I resurrected that dinosaur of an app this month and began tinkering around with it. It's going to work GREAT for me to keep up with grading assignments that really need to be graded, assigning credits and keeping track of what we need to get to graduation.

I've set it up to give me accountability with grading. I don't have all the kids assignments in there. I just have plotted out the assignments and exams that will receive a grade. This year will be a trial run to see if I've set it up well. Geometry is the only thing on our schedule this year that we NEED to keep track of for high school credit, but I'm going to grade things in every subject they're doing, for the first time. Once I wrapped my head around how OLLY is designed to work, thanks to their helpful videos and flow charts on the website, I think I've got a handle on things.

First, you create a Course:

These are the courses I have created for last year and this coming school year. I think it's going to work better for me to name the courses each year based on what they're actually taking, because the Course Title is what shows up on the transcript, from what I can tell. I started off with a generic "Humanities, Math, Science, Language Arts", but it didn't have any detail as to what was actually done on the transcript. So I've given more specific Course Titles. 

Next, you make Lesson Plans: 

Each of these assignments are what I will actually grade and what their grade will be based upon. 

Once you have your Lessons Plans done, you assign each lesson plan to a course by dragging and dropping them. This is what our course load looks like. Some of our courses have more than one lesson plan, like science: it includes physical science and geography. 

Next, you assign the Lesson Plans to specific days on the calendar: 

This is as simple as dragging and dropping each lesson onto the date you want it to be completed (or, the date that I want to grade it). I wasn't too precise about this though, because I can grade it anytime. 

Next, you go into Records and enter the grades for the actual assignments.

 At the end of the semester, I'll be able to quickly run a report (provided all my grading is done!) that will calculate their grade by percentage and letter, assign a GPA, and how many credits they've received for each class.  I'm really hopeful that the moderate amount of time it took to set all this up will pay off well through the year when I have something telling me: Catch up on grading!!!

On a related by completely different topic...

At the Great Homeschool Convention this year, Andrea Lipinski shared that in her Lost Tools classes, there are two "grades" possible:

A: Accepted. You did what was asked. Well done.
I: Incomplete. You've not yet done what was asked. Keep trying.

That's it.  I LOVE the simplicity and encouragement in those two responses.  The I will come with feedback, as will the A.  I wanted to adopt this for my assessment going forward with my kids as we are right in the throes of middle school and accountability is really needed.  But I also knew my kids needed just a bit more.

I want to keep it simple, but two other factors that I really want to assess them on are:

-Punctual vs. Late assignments
-Excellence vs. Mediocrity

I have one child for whom it is possible to do what was asked and yet turn in mediocre work. I can't very well give that an A. :)

So I've arranged these in several ways to have a three-letter score on each assignment I give them:

APE: Accepted, Punctual, Excellent. Two points for each top mark. This is 6 points.
ALE: Accepted, Late, Excellent. Top marks two points each, bottom mark 1. This is 5 points.
IPM: Incomplete, Punctual, Mediocre. 4 points.

Et cetera. Scores of 5-6 don't have to be re-worked.  3's and 4's will be given back with feedback on how to get a 5 as a final score.

We'll see how this works. :) I'm only using this for those not-so-objective subjects: writing assignments, history narrations, literature discussions and Bible-As-Literature written work.  Latin, Science, Math will all be given number and letter grades based on objectively correct or incorrect answers.

I'm not really looking forward to all this record keeping, but it was inevitable that it would need to be done. I'm hoping I've made it as easy on myself as possible.