Tracking student progress

JeffreyB593 

I"m going to keep following this thread for the sake of curiosity, but leave it to Riny_van_Eekelen to be making suggestions on how the spreadsheet could work most effectively.

I will offer this one observation on the whole grading structure: it is (to me) reminiscent of the way tennis players can be rated. I don't know, Jeffrey, if you've ever played tennis to the extent that you've been assigned a number meant to reflect your "skill level" but it IS a useful way to get yourself into matches that are competitive, neither too easy (boring), nor too hard (utterly frustrating).

Here's an image of the numerical ratings and their descriptions of the most popular system.

I was a decent tennis player; I had at one time a solid 3.5-4.0 rating, played with my fellow club members in inter-club matches.  The thing that is worth realizing about ratings like these--and I would submit, like yours as well (and you're probably well aware of this)--is that there's a LOT of overlap between adjacent ratings. A 3.5 player can sporadically do some of what a 4.5 player does regularly. The other thing that really is true is that from a learning perspective, the truly meaningful differences are found between 3.0 and 5.0. Below that range, one is needing to learn everything, the ratings are somewhat meaningful, but not worth spending a lot of time on. Above that range, it's really the smallest differences--more a matter of consistency in playing, shot after shot, game after game, match after match--that differentiates a Roger Federer from the person ranked 100th in the world, or even a state champion. That is to say, above 5.0, it's not skills or competencies that need to be learned; it's practice, practice, practice, play, play, play.

The reason I bring all this up--and I will certainly defer to your expertise in your field--is that to my layman's eyes, your fine-tuning of the differences at each competency level do bring up specific competencies that are worth addressing, for sure, but by not only assigning a numeric rating to each point on the scale scale and then seeking to further refine those with differentiating "Emerging" from "Developing" from "Proficient" and "Extending" you're making overly complicated the act of giving what could be--delivered in the form of speech--useful feedback to the student. 

For example, I can imagine a student puzzling (uselessly) over "Why was I only 'Proficient' in competency 'RLV.6'?"

Now, maybe I've totally misunderstood the system. However, having been through multiple years of graduate school, having had a career in helping managers in the corporate world recognize their blind spots when it comes to prejudices, I'd rather see a less structured grading system (not un-structured, just less-structured) with more emphasis on one-on-one coaching feedback on the very same competencies but delivered face-to-face.   And I do realize, that may be happening away from the spreadsheet; it's just that I'd tame down the spreadsheet.

'nuff said. Feel free to totally ignore.