The beginning of the 2018-2019 Harford County Public Schools introduced a new grading system. This new system is based around three categories, Practice, Process, and Product, which are weighted. Practice, which is 20% of the overall grade accounts for drills, warmups, homework, etc. Process is worth 30% and accounts for quizzes, classwork, etc. Product is 50% and accounts for tests and large projects. The system seems fair though, right? Not at all. This new grading system short-changes students and takes the focus away from the core values of learning the material. First of all, there is no set list to determine what goes in each category, which can impact the overall grade as I will explain. This new grading system takes away from the core value of learning the material because it focuses on test grades and not on the drills, classwork, homework, which are where the learning comes from. For example, if you have 100/100 points between the Process and Practice categories, but a 50/100 on the product category (from a bad test) this will take your grade from at 100% to a 75%. Now add another 50-100 points outside of the product category and your grade may only go up around 5-10%. This takes away from learning because the value isn’t placed on learning, it’s placed on getting a good grade on the test to pass, not the effort and studying to get to that point. This becomes a serious problem because for myself and other AP students, you may only have one test a quarter, and one bad grade will ruin your grade for the entire quarter. Please HCPS, please change the grading system back to how it was before. This way, the core value can be placed back on the inclass and at home studying of the material, and a bad test grade won’t kill your grade because all the quarterly work matters, not just the tests.