At Sherwood High School, every aspect of our teaching and learning experience is designed to support our Portrait of a Student. This extends to our grading system. The goal of which is to promote each student’s individual ability to grow their own learning and navigate the world.
The Purpose of Our Grading System
The Sherwood Grading system is designed to ensure a student’s grade accurately reflects their current knowledge and skills. This allows teachers to focus on enduring skills—core concepts and abilities that prepare students to confidently navigate life as independent, self-reliant adults after high school. Teachers will use common rubrics to provide clear, meaningful feedback on how students can improve specific skills. This shifts the focus to learning rather than simply accumulating points.
Learn more about Sherwood High School’s grading system in a short video from Principal Mitchell and Associate Principals Leitch, McCusker, and Pratt.
Communicating Student Learning
To communicate our feedback and report scores/levels to students and their families, we use three platforms. Each plays a different role for the teacher and the student.
Canvas is our learning mangagement system. Teachers use this to both push out collect assessments from students. The SpeedGrader feature allows them to communicate student performance for assessments on a rubric.
Synergy is the platform teachers use to take attendance, enter assessment scores, and post daily/weekly progress as well as trimester grades. But, students and families won’t spend much time interacting with Synergy. Instead, this program communicates with the Sherwood Gradebook, and interactive reporting system, that communicates student learning.
The Sherwood Gradebook is our homegrown online gradebook. Here, students and families can see assessment scores with brief comments, daily/weekly grade reporting, and trimester grades. Watch this video to learn more.
Grade Determination
The final course letter grade is determined by a student’s overall proficiency across all course domains with consideration of recency. This means, if a student’s scores are trending down toward the end of the grading period, they may earn a grade that reflects that trend. More information about how domain proficiency levels are used to calculate the final course letter grade can be found here: Letter Grade Calculation. Note: If a student has missing assessments, their teacher may not have enough evidence to determine proficiency in a domain, which could result in a failing or lowered grade.