We face the difficult problem of attempting to assess individuals while most of the work and assignments are collaborative. We have a strong preference for collaborative work, as described earlier, yet we do need to arrive at meaningful individual grades. How can we tie our students’ grades to their individual levels of understanding and functioning when most of the work is the result of group effort? One means would be to weigh so heavily the test scores that tests would be frightening experiences indeed. However, we believe that scholarly work is best done in a low pressure atmosphere, and that fear is a poor source of motivation in education, perhaps only as a last resort. Thus we seek to reduce pressure from testing while maintaining our accountability for measuring individual student understanding. The most stressful situation of all would be one in which the student has not developed the skills needed to be successful in the course, thus we have struggled seriously with the problem of maintaining accountability within a relaxed atmosphere.

We reduce stress of testing by heavily weighing other types of assignments, giving many re-tests, and establishing a forgiving system of late assignments (L-assignments turned in after the papers are returned to any class) so that you can simply concentrate on learning the material. We have developed the 150% rule (which restricts the grade on all assignments to no greater than 150% of the grade on the test covering that material) in an attempt to insure that students understand the main concepts within this relaxed classroom atmosphere. We have developed the 100% rule (which restricts L grades to 100% of the test grade on the same material) in order to get students credit for work done very late, but only to the extent that students can demonstrate an understanding of the subject matter. These rules would be severe indeed if students were not free to take re-tests, so we have recently instituted a policy that students may take or retake any and all major tests and most quizzes of the quarter on any Tuesday afternoon after school. We believe that students have as much opportunity as they need to demonstrate their grasp of the subject matter. We also believe that students can do poorly on a few assignments and still obtain a very high grade.

Stress reduction may also be accomplished by informing the student in great detail of the teacher’s expectations. Early in the course, we give the students very detailed evaluation sheets which accompany major projects. As the year progresses, these papers become less detailed.

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