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Using My HELP System: A Grading Practice That Works

Anthony Stetzenmeyer | Sat, 09/06/2025 - 08:28

Grading can feel tricky when school policies and student expectations don’t quite match—especially when students assume turning in all their classwork should equal an A. To bridge that gap, I created the HELP system, which lets students earn extra “HELP points” through things like going beyond the required work or scoring above the benchmark on tests. These points act as a kind of currency that students can redeem to recover from a low quiz score or a missed assignment. The system keeps students motivated, gives them ownership of their progress, and turns grading into more of a growth experience than just a final judgment.

What informs the grade a student earns in your class? w/ Erica Posthuma

Deanna Cullen | Sun, 05/16/2021 - 08:11

Grades should provide feedback to students, parents, and teachers as to the progress students are making toward learning targets. Meaningful grades require good assessment practices. Erica Posthuma presented a ChemEd X Talk on May 11th, 2021, providing an overview of effective assessment design. She discussed writing and communicating learning goals, developing targeted questions and prompts, and scoring using a standards-based approach. You can watch the edited recording of Erica's Talk here.

Ungrading: What is it and why should we use it?

Clarissa Sorens... | Tue, 01/14/2020 - 16:00

Ungrading has long been associated with the idea of purposefully eliminating or minimizing the use of points or letters to assess student work. The focus of ungrading is to provide extensive feedback to students and then jointly (students and instructors) come to a consensus as to what the grade should be. This post addresses what ungrading is and why do it.

Shorten Grading Time with this Stoichiometry Tool

Ben Meacham | Thu, 04/13/2017 - 11:22

As many chemistry teachers know, grading lab reports can be a very time-consuming task. For me, the lab report that has required the most time to grade is a stoichiometry lab that I have been doing the past couple years. Though we do at least four “formal” lab reports each year, what makes this one different is that it involves a lot more calculations and subsequent results than any of our other labs. Regardless of how well they organized their report or wrote their conclusions, their results need to be checked for accuracy. This takes time. Even after eventually being able to generally eyeball their work, it still takes more time than I would like. So, this year I finally decided to sit down and generate a tool for me to expedite this process—the stoichiometry calculator.

Standards-Based Grading in the Chemistry Classroom

Lauren Stewart | Fri, 01/22/2016 - 11:12

An educational reform that has been gaining a large amount of popularity in the last decade is standards-based grading (SBG). The heart of the SBG movement is truly rooted in one very important question, “what do you want your grades mean?”