Teachers grade homework to benefit students

Alyson Gad, Reporter

Homework has been one of the most hated things among students for generations. Its effect on grades can be devastating and rather irritating, if a teacher chooses the accuracy grading route. However, grading for completion has skyrocketed in popularity recently, to the delight of students schoolwide.

Marc Gibbens, English teacher, grades mainly for accuracy, with a few reasonable exceptions. “If the constituous parts of the assignment were present, then it is pretty much graded on completion,” Gibbens said regarding an essay outline he assigned to his Honors English students, “doing an outline for a paper is part of the process, the completion of the process is the important part, that’s building towards a final draft that obviously won’t be graded on completion.”

Gibbens has a thoughtful attitude towards student’s overall learning, and how homework will benefit them. “From a mercenary perspective, grading by accuracy doesn’t necessarily benefit the students grade, but presumably they will become invested in learning more from the process,” said Gibbens.

Dennis Burkett, chemistry teacher, grades homework entirely on completion. “I still grade for accuracy but it just doesn’t count as part of your grade,” said Burkett. “Accuracy is good because it allows students to know whether they’ve understood something or not, however I don’t include it in the gradebook.”

Both agree that homework matters in a sense of helping students on bigger, more important things. “Homework is like if you’re on a sports team, you may like the game time but you hate going to practice, yet practice is valuable to your performance at game time,” said Burkett.