ABSTRACT
Management systems are options that teachers have for arriving at cumulative grades-grades for a nine-week grading period or for a year. This chapter discusses four management systems: traditional grade averaging and three lesstraditional methods-checklists, contracts, and portfolios. Management systems are not grading approaches, nor are they response strategies, so both a grading approach and a response strategy will have to be superimposed upon a management system. For example, grades arrived at by some holistic measure can still be averaged in a traditional way or they can be grouped into a portfolio. They can be reported to students in conferences, on tapes, in notes, and so forth. Some grading approaches work better with some management systems than others, and some response strategies seem to “fit” better, but there are no hard-and-fast rules for matching a management system with grading approaches and response strategies-always there are choices, options. The context of the individual classroom is what drives the decisions. (This issue is discussed in depth in Part III.)
This traditional system assigns a mathematical value to a particular grade and computes an average mathematical score. The mathematical value is then reconverted to the appropriate grade. The process is often referred to as a common value system. Grade averaging works well with approaches that yield numerical grades to begin with. Problems arise, however, when a grading approach yields something other than a number (a letter or a, for example).
