Frequently Asked Questions

Proficiency scoring clearly communicates what a student should know and be able to do in each content area. This provides meaningful feedback to students, parents, and teachers regarding each student's academic progress. Below is the Proficiency Criteria for each grade band.

• Proficiency Criteria: K-8
  • Meets Grade Level (3): Student has demonstrated complete knowledge and skills aligned with the essential standards.
  • Approaches Grade Level (2): Student has demonstrated partial knowledge and skills aligned with the essential standards.
  • Does Not Meet Grade Level (1): Student has demonstrated beginning knowledge and skills aligned with the essential standards.
• Proficiency Criteria: 9-12
  • Advanced (3): Student demonstrates a thorough understanding and application of the skills aligned with the essential standards.
  • Proficient (2): Student demonstrates adequate knowledge and skills aligned with the essential standards.
  • Emerging (1): Student demonstrated partial knowledge of skills aligned with the essential standards.

• All student work that is not at the proficient level can (and should) be improved to show mastery. This practice ensures that students will not have gaps in their understanding of critical concepts and essential skills.

• A student’s grade accurately represents their level of understanding as opposed to a percentage of points earned on class activities. The conversation between student and teacher shifts from, “How many more points do I need to get a certain grade?” to demonstrating that they have mastered the concepts. It is exciting to hear a student talking about the learning, as opposed to “how many points is the assignment worth?”

• The focus is shifted from the quantity of work completed to the quality of the work completed.

• It encourages looking at students as individuals and honoring a range of learning styles and ways of demonstrating what students know so that teachers can provide specific supports or acceleration as needed.

A student may demonstrate an advanced understanding of a standard at any time it is assessed, which is a 3. Most standards have multiple skills taught, so a student demonstrates proficiency in a standard over time. It is likely to score 1’s and 2’s at the start of the school year because the depth of understanding is not yet taught.

Reality is that post-secondary institutions still require GPAs. Because of this, we must convert a proficiency score to a letter grade and GPA. The scale below represents the correlation between our standards-based proficiency scoring and a traditional 12-point scale. Each standard uses an algorithm to calculate a scale score average, which is then converted to a percentage and letter grade in Infinite Campus.

• Scale Score Average: 2.67-3.00
  • Letter Grade: A
  • GPA: 4.0
• Scale Score Average: 2.48-2.66
  • Letter Grade: AB
  • GPA: 3.5
• Scale Score Average: 2.28-2.47
  • Letter Grade: B
  • GPA: 3.0
• Scale Score Average: 2.00-2.27
  • Letter Grade: BC
  • GPA: 2.5
• Scale Score Average: 1.82-1.99
  
  • Letter Grade: C
  • GPA: 2.0
• Scale Score Average: 1.62-1.81
  • Letter Grade: CD
  • GPA: 1.5
• Scale Score Average: 1.42-1.61
  • Letter Grade: D
  • GPA: 1.0
• Scale Score Average: 1.41-Below
  • Letter Grade: F
  • GPA: 0

Our number one goal for our students is to ensure they learn. Standards-based grading measures a student’s understanding in relation to specific skills, which provides opportunities to clearly understand what they know and what their struggles may be. By ensuring kids learn, we are confident that will lead to fewer gaps in their learning as they move onto college or career after high school.

Yes. A student may reassess on standard(s) after they have demonstrated new evidence of learning on that standard. Each teacher has a process followed and may include completing missing work and completing alternative reviews. This process will be communicated by the teacher.

Homework is a tool that helps learning (practice). We do not want to penalize students when going through the learning process. Homework completion is assessed in the student’s behavioral/life skills grade

In order to ensure that student’s grades accurately reflect what they know from their course work, factors such as attendance, effort, and work habits have been removed from their academic grade and will be reported to parents as a Life and Career Skills score. This ensures that student grades reflect their mastery of academic content and not factors such as attendance, effort, and work habits that resulted in a student’s grade for a course to either be over or under inflated.