Assignment 01: Assessments

My high school uses assessments in various different ways. The fundamental use of them, the most obvious in my opinion, is to assign a grade to each student that illustrates their understanding of the material. Teachers do this by giving tests and quizzes. In addition to assigning grades, my high school uses assessments as a basis to decide whether a student can move up to a higher level course or if they should stay in the base level one. For example, a student’s grade on a final math exam their junior year is used to determine if that student will take calculus their senior year or honors calculus. To me, these uses of assessments are completely valid, especially since the teachers would not just give the assessments a letter grade and move on. They would take a closer look at them. Meaning, most of the time the teacher would go over each student’s test and determine what the class struggled most with, and then focus on that topic. Generally, the assessments at my school were fair. Although, there are a handful of teachers that gave assessments, such as tests, that many students felt were unfair. For instance, a certain teacher would give us a study guide prior to every test and inform us that there would be no material on the test that was not discussed on the study guide. However, this was not the case. The majority of the tests had topics that were not covered whatsoever in the study guide. Assessments like these were not helpful at all in helping me learn the material. Consequently, I felt like I was wasting my time in these classes because I was not performing well on the assessments and also felt like I was learning useless information. Aside from this, most assessments helped me learn a great deal. For me, it is hard to motivate myself to do well if there are no consequences. A consequence, for example, is doing poorly on a