Cumulative Marks vs. Term Marks

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Another education-related post to inform or bore you, whichever that may be.

An ongoing debate in schools is whether for teachers to do cumulative marks, or run separate marks every term. Cumulative marks mean that the student's mark carries through from the beginning of assessments right up until the end. Separate marks mean that each term is assessed in part, and the terms are averaged at the end of the year.

For semester schools that run an entire course in half a year, the cumulative marks are the preferred option. For "linear" schools than run for an entire year, term marks are a better option. Since we're a linear school that's basically what I do -- marks up until the Jaunary break, then run a new cycle of marks up until June, and then put the two together.

The general rule of thumb is that the longer the course lasts for, the more advantageous it is to do term marks. That breaks it down into a series of shorter terms, and gives more motivation to the students. This allows them to see improvement if, for example, they bombed Term 1 and then start getting better marks in Term 2.

That being said, the "mark" that students always want to track is their running total. Statistically, this changes less and less as more and more assessments are added in. So if teachers are doing cumulative marks for an entire year, it can be demotivating because the student essentially gets "stuck" with their mark, which is based on whatever influenced it from before.

On the other hand, doing term-by-term marks can be deceptive, especially if there are multiple terms added together at the very end. Suppose a student bombs Term 1, he then forgets about it as his Term 2 mark becomes really good. He's thinking he made some good improvement, and he did, but only for that snapshot. Once the marks are then averaged together, that crappy mark in Term 1 then comes back to haunt him.

The difference here is that he knew it all along with cumulative marks, even though he felt stuck with it. With term-by-term marks, the lousy first term then comes back to bite him at the end by "surprise".

Some teachers would say to drop the first term if it was the lowest one, or weight the first term less. I think both of those responses are a load of BS because you're changing the goalposts on students after the fact. What about those who busted their ass off in Term 1? Totally not fair if one studnet gets his term weighted less or dropped, and also not fair if the whole term gets weighted less for someone who worked really hard at the beginning.

Because if term 1 gets weighted less, then it only means that the other terms get weighted more.

In this sense, I'd lean more towards cumulative marks and would prefer to run them myself because cumulative marks focus on the end result -- not a particular snapshot. However, cumulative mars are controversial in most schools so I've opted for a two-term compromise which I'm happy with.

Perhaps a third alternative here would be to keep running cumulative marks in the background but only show or report marks that are based on a snapshot in time. How to actually do that would need more research on my part.