what worked for me teaching an undergrad course last year was to have
- in-class exams weigh 90% of the total grade, but let them drop their lowest score
- take-home work weigh 10% and be graded on completion (which i announced to the class, of course)
- i was also diligent about posting solutions (sometimes before the due date
it's a completion grade after all) and i let students know that if they wanted direct feedback they could bring their solutions to office hours
it ended up working pretty well. an added benefit was that my TAs didn't have to deal with the nightmare of grading 120 very poorly written homeworks every four weeks. my students also stopped obsessing about the grades they would receive on their homeworks and instead focused on ~~learning~~ the grades they would receive on their exams
however, at the k-12 level, it feels like a much harder problem to tackle. parental involvement is the only solution i can think of, and that's already kind of a nightmare (at least here in the us)
this is going to take up the rest of my evening, now i'm reading about the Pólya conjecture for the first time
this rules 💗