Internal Assessments
Our internal assessment methods rely on both formative and summative assessments.
Formative assessments involve the assessing of ongoing work completed during each high school semester in each class - the grades for this will come from a mixture of projects, class tests, participation in class discussions, debates and simulations and any other assignments that subject teachers may deem necessary to be a part of formative assessment
Summative assessments involve the assessment of subjects using a end of semester test/exam. These may not be present within all subjects but will often be a part of most classes. They test synthesis and understanding of class material over the entire semester.
Students may receive the following grades for their formative assessment based coursework: “could be improved”, “good”, “excellent”, “outstanding”. Research indicates that positive, reinforcing ability based grades are able to help students understand their strengths and weaknesses and perform better as opposed to pure letter grades. For the purpose of reconciling this with more traditional grading systems, parents of students can contact the school for specific letter/percentage based grades. Generally, our grading scale translates to the traditional grading scale through the following:
“Outstanding” = 90-100
“Excellent” = 80 - 90
“Good” = 70 - 80
“Could be improved” = 50 - 70
Grading points may be “curved” or adjusted to these scales based on raw score or average performance of students in the class. Generally, for the average semester: 75% of assessment is based on formative assessments, 25% of assessment is based on summative assessments.
Objective: To develop a fair and equitable way of assessing students at Wald Academy.
A charter school at its core, Wald Academy’s curriculum sees students develop a broad understanding of Language and Writing, STEM, Arts and Music and Individuals and Societies (Ethics) within their first two years, while the latter two years are spent specializing in 1-2 specific subject areas.
Our external assessments include the IB Diploma examinations, a stream which allows for broad based subjects and requires students to take exams across STEM, Arts, Languages etc.This requires taking exams that are 80% examination based and 20% coursework based (however, these are only in the latter two years of the high school - when students are allowed to choose their subjects).
IB Diploma involves taking 6 subjects from these subject areas, including the completion of the Theory of Knowledge module, and writing a 4000 word extended essay.