Formatives & Final Exams: Help or Hinder

As you all know, the semester exams account for 20% of your grade in any class, and summative and formative assessments counts for the remaining 80% of your semester grade. Approximately 64% of your grade is formed by summative assessments and 16% are formative assessments. Even though 16% might not seem like a lot, it can basically move your grade up or down. Currently, in maths classes, your formative assessments don’t affect your final grade, the 80% comes from summative assessments and  20% comes from your exam grade. Additionally, if you score higher on the exam than you did for the summative, your summative grade changes to become your highest attainment. So, my question is: why just maths? Why can’t we have this policy for most if not all classes?

For formatives, I would think that if they are used as a way of helping you to prepare for a summative, they shouldn’t be considered in your final grade. I asked Ms. Barga, an English teacher, what she thinks about this. She first mentioned that she is “really torn on this issue,” and that many teachers have differing views on the issue. She contributes that “for students that work hard and do all their homework, but still struggle a little bit with the summatives, it’s nice for that formative to be something that can take them maybe from a B to a B+ or a B+ to an A-.” However, she also maintains that “[she doesn’t] really like for [formatives] to take an A- to an A just because an A represents complete mastery and really strong work.” She decided that for her “older and more mature [students],” the 20% formative rate would be “reduced to 10 percent and [she] probably would’ve liked to go to 0%, but others in the department weren’t interested in that.” She clarifies that she sees “pros and cons to the 0% formative. The more mature the student, and the more motivated, the more sense it makes because those students know that they have to do practice and study.” She contrasts these students to “much younger and less mature students [who] don’t do any of the formative work if it’s not valuable to their grade.” She also comments on how requiring formatives forces students to work harder so that they aren’t “unprepared when it comes to the summative, [and don’t] have this cluster of redo’s, […] and just this big mess [while they] are learning less.” In the end, Ms. Barga says that “at the ideal school,” she “would always advocate for 0% formative and 100% summative, but [she hasn’t] yet worked in that school.”

I also asked some students the same question and Sophie M, Candy L, Leyla S, Peter P, Richard A, Cathy Z, and Mulayne L all stated that “[they] think formatives shouldn’t count,” while Sam J was the only person who thought that formatives “definitely should.” He says that “[he’s] literally getting ‘carried’ by formatives in English [class],” and this brings up an important issue which is, how much can formatives really affect your grade? Based on the percentage, it could essentially move your grade up or down up to “a third of a grade” (i.e. B- to B or A to A-), but probably not more, because realistically, 16% can’t affect your grade that much. Ms. Barga also commented on this idea saying  “[she thinks] it’s reasonable […] to use really strong formative work to boost a borderline summative grade to the next highest range.” So, formative work should be capable of improving your grade, however minimally. At the same time, she still believes that “if you do no formative work and don’t take any time outside of class, [she doesn’t] think that should lower your grade. If you’re getting B’s on the summatives, you should be at a B or maybe a little higher if you’re doing all that extra work.” And so, it seems that, from the interviews I conducted, there is a generally strong consensus that formatives should not count towards your grade.

As for exams, it makes sense that having exams override summative assessments will not work for some classes like English in which, your exam might only cover one type of summative assessment that you may have done. But for example, if your exam is a written commentary, and you have done a summative written commentary, shouldn’t you be able to improve that grade? Ms. Barga comments on this issue as well saying that” [she thinks] this varies between English teachers, but for instance, [her] students in IB year 1 have done a summative paper 1 type essay and their final exam is the exact same format. So, it’s a newish skill for them as they’ve only done that one summative and a formative.” She continues to say, “if they do better on the final exam than on the summative, then I am going to raise the grade from the summative. That seems natural to me.” However, she acknowledges that it is different in math than it is in English: “with English, some teachers view the assessments as kind of like a luck of the draw. Sometimes it seems as though students, if they’re doing the same type of assessment 6 times in a year, it’ll be like an inconsistent up and down in their grades instead of like a smooth improvement for every assessment. But in my  experience, it usually is more like [the latter], only maybe there’s a bit of more wavering.” It is possible that “there are a few people that did awesome work on the summative and get a worse text, because it’s an unseen text, on the final and they go down, but usually they’re building more skills, they’re learning from their mistakes and they’re practicing, improving, and [she] always thinks that the later assessment, within a given term, should be the one that determines the grade.” She concludes by saying, “it just makes sense, it seems obvious.” As a follow-up to her statement, I asked Ms. Barga that if she thinks that the later assessment should be the one to determine the grade, should a bad final grade lower your grade? Ms. Barga explains that “if the student bombs the final, [she’s] not going to go in and lower the grade. [She’s] probably going to leave both grades rather than overwriting the more successful grade because obviously [the student] proved that they can get there,” even if they might not have been able to perform on the exam.

All the students I asked also agreed that exam grades “should always” improve your grade, and Leyla S comments that “it gives people a second chance, and it shows that you now know the content so the past doesn’t matter.”

This trend of all work being able to improve a student’s grade, but never being able to worsen a grade has surfaced, and with good reason. We all want to do our best, and teachers only want to help us succeed. Overall, the percentage weight put on formatives and the final exam’s possibility of “fixing” or at least helping your grade, seems to be in the hands of the individual departments, and sometimes individual teachers. Good luck studying for final exams!