Sometimes, students can be slow to grasp specific concepts and may not be able to show their learning by the time they take a quiz over the material, resulting in a poor grade. For this reason, the math department uses a system unlike any other department on campus that allows students’ quiz grades to be changed based on the student’s learning.

“The main reason we decided to do it was because we really want the learning to be important,” AP Calculus teacher Keith Christian said. “Because our quizzes always cover the same material as our tests, we felt like that if a student didn’t do well on a quiz, but was willing to continue to put in the work and show their learning by the time that the test is taken, we wanted them to be able to get credit for that.”

Some classes, such as statistics, pre-calculus, and calculus, allow the grade students make on a test to replace the grade that they originally made on the quiz if the original grade was lower.

“For statistics students, if you do better on the test than you do on the quiz over the same material, I allow that test grade to replace the lower quiz grade,” AP Statistics teacher Darla Emerson said.

However, other classes like geometry, take a different approach to replacing a student’s grade.

“In the geometry department, we give quiz grades that count as 35 percent of the overall grade. A student takes a quiz, we grade it, give it back the next day, and they are allowed to do quiz corrections,” geometry teacher Crystal Smith said. “These corrections help them learn from their mistakes. When they correct them and turn them back in, they get half of the points back that they missed.”

Although this process is beneficial to the students’ grades and grade point averages, the main reason for using this system is to improve the students’ learning and allow them to receive grades based on their learning rather than their ability to perform on a quiz.

“The idea is that sometimes students take a little longer to catch on to concepts. If they haven’t caught on to the concept by the time they get the quiz, ideally, they will have more time to grasp the concept before we take the test,” Emerson said. “If they can show that they know the material by test time, they deserve to get credit for their learning.”