Grading policies

A grading policy is four decisions, and every one of them has a defensible alternative. That is exactly why the product asks a school to state them instead of choosing for it.

Categories and weights

A subject's result is built from assessments grouped into categories: assignments, class tests, examinations, or whatever the school calls them. Each category carries a weight, and the weights of a subject's categories total one hundred per cent.

A school that wants a different scheme for a subject states it for that subject. Nothing about a year group's scheme forces another year group's scheme.

Precision and rounding

Two decisions that look like details and are not:

• Precision is how many decimal places a mark is reported at.
• Rounding is what happens to the digits that do not fit.

A result at one decimal place and the same result at two are different numbers, and a ranking can change between them. The choice is recorded once, applied everywhere a result appears, and changed only with a date, so a past term keeps its own answer.

Why the policy is written down

A parent asking why a child's result is 73.2 rather than 74 is asking a policy question. When the policy is stated, the answer is a sentence about the school's own decisions rather than a claim about the software. Results and publication describes what happens once the arithmetic is settled.