Page 1 of 10 · Introduction

Why we changed the way we grade

Calvary Preparatory Academy has made some important changes to how students are graded. This page explains why — and why it matters for you.

Something important changed in the world

For a long time, schools measured student learning using quizzes, tests, worksheets, and written assignments. That worked well when the only way to complete an assignment was to actually do the work yourself.

But today, AI tools like ChatGPT are free and easy for anyone to use. A student can type a question into one of these tools and get back a finished essay, a completed worksheet, or even quiz answers — in seconds. The problem is that a teacher looking at that work often cannot tell whether the student wrote it or an AI did.

This means grades based only on submitted work can no longer be trusted to tell the full story of what a student actually knows.

"The real question is no longer whether the work got done. It is whether the student actually learned anything."

CPA chose a better path

Instead of trying to catch students using AI — which is a battle no school can win — CPA asked a bigger question: what does it really mean to learn something? And how do we give students credit for the things that matter most?

The answer goes back to who CPA has always been. Our school has always believed that education is about shaping the whole person — not just filling in test answers. Our mission, our core values, and our statement of faith all describe students who are faithful, honest, thoughtful, and growing. Our grading system should match those beliefs.

This is who CPA has always been

This is not a reaction to a trend. It is a return to our founding beliefs. CPA's core learning goals describe students who are faith-filled, self-directed, thoughtful, tech-savvy, strong communicators, and academically prepared — in that order. Our new grading model is built to recognize all six of those qualities, not just the last one.

Page 2 of 10 · Benefits

What this means for you

The new grading model was built with every person in the CPA community in mind — students, teachers, and parents. Here is what it means for each of you.

For students

Your grade will finally show all of who you are

Under the old system, a student who showed up every week, worked hard, asked great questions, and lived out their faith could still get a low grade if they did badly on tests. That was unfair — and it missed what CPA is really trying to build in you.

The new model fixes that. Your grade now reflects how you show up, how prepared you are, how you grow over time, and how you explain what you learned in your weekly meeting with your teacher. If you struggle on multiple-choice tests but can explain ideas clearly and defend your work in a real conversation, your grade will show that.

"You cannot fake a real conversation with your teacher. And you should never have to."

For teachers

Teaching the way it was always meant to be

Teaching was never supposed to be about collecting stacks of papers and running them through a grading system. It was supposed to be about relationships — a mentor and a student, thinking together and growing together.

For the past few years, many teachers found themselves spending more and more time wondering if the work students turned in was real. That is not why anyone became a teacher. And it is not what CPA students deserve.

The new model gives teachers back what made them want to teach in the first place — real conversations with real students, where professional judgment and personal mentorship are the most important tools in the room.

Under the new model, a teacher's professional opinion is not just allowed — it is formally part of the grade. The Teacher Conviction component exists because no computer can replace the judgment of a trained educator who has met with a student every week all semester. CPA teachers are credentialed professionals and Christian mentors. The new model treats them as both.

For parents

A grade you can trust — and a student you can actually see growing

You chose CPA because you wanted something different — a school that cares about your whole child, that weaves faith into learning, and that keeps you in the loop. The new model makes good on that promise.

When your student earns a grade under this model, that grade reflects their attendance, their preparation, their verified understanding, their faith in action, and their growth over time — not just a score from a computer-graded test.

Page 3 of 10 · Model overview

The holistic grading model

Your grade is no longer based on one thing. It is built from six different categories that together give a complete picture of who you are as a student. Here is how it all fits together.

Two tiers that work together

The model is organized into two tiers. The first tier covers things that apply to every class you take. The second tier covers what happens inside each specific class. Together they make up 100% of your grade.

Tier 1 — Holistic (applies to all your classes equally)

Tier 2 — Class-specific (graded separately for each course)

What your overall grade looks like

Here is a simple way to see how all six categories add up to 100%.

Understanding the weights

The Curriculum Grade carries the most weight at 40%. This includes your digital textbook quiz and test scores. It is the largest single category because academic performance in your coursework is still central to your education.

The Meeting Content — Learning Verification category is the second largest at 30%. Even though it is smaller than the curriculum grade on paper, it is arguably the most meaningful category. It is the one place in the model where your genuine understanding is proven live, in real time, directly to your teacher. An AI tool cannot sit in that meeting for you.

Together, the curriculum grade and learning verification account for 70% of your overall grade — rewarding both consistent academic performance and the ability to demonstrate that you actually learned what the coursework was teaching.

The remaining 30% recognizes the whole student: how you show up, how consistently you engage, whether you do your assigned work, and how you live out your values every week.

Page 4 of 10 · Category 1

Class-specific tier · 40% of overall grade

Curriculum grade

Your curriculum grade is the largest single category in your overall grade. It is based entirely on your performance in the digital textbook — quizzes, tests, and graded activities — and counts for 40% of your final grade.

What this grade measures

This is the grade shown in your Edmentum digital textbook. It is taken directly from what the system displays — the total of your quiz scores, test scores, and graded activity scores. No adjustments are made to this number.

Missing or late work is reflected here naturally. If an assignment is not submitted, the zero entered in the textbook reduces this grade. There is no separate completion tracking — the textbook grade tells the full curriculum story.

How this connects to learning verification

The curriculum grade (40%) and the meeting content — learning verification category (30%) are designed to work together. Your curriculum grade reflects how you performed on assessments in the textbook. Your learning verification score reflects whether you can actually explain and defend what you learned when you sit down with your teacher.

A student with a strong curriculum grade who can also defend their learning in meetings will earn the highest overall grades. A student with a high curriculum grade who cannot explain the material will see that reflected in their learning verification score — which is where genuine understanding is measured.

Page 5 of 10 · Category 2

Holistic tier · 10% of overall grade

Meeting attendance

Every week you meet one-on-one with your teacher. That meeting is one of the most important parts of your education at CPA. This category grades how well you show up for it.

Three things are graded in every meeting

Your meeting attendance score is made up of three parts that add up to 10 points per week. Your average across all 18 sections becomes your meeting attendance grade for the semester.

Attendance scoring

Punctuality scoring

Preparation scoring

Being fully prepared means all of the following are true at the start of the meeting:

• All assigned work for the section is completed
• All courses are open to the assigned section in the digital textbook
• The end-of-section self-reflection is open in a separate tab for each course
• Assignments are organized and ready to walk your teacher through
• You can speak to what you learned and what you plan to present

Key policies

Page 6 of 10 · Categories 3 and 4

Regular engagement and community values

Two categories that together account for 10% of your grade — both measuring something deeper than test scores. They recognize that being a CPA student means showing up consistently and living out your values every day.

Holistic tier · 5% of overall grade

Regular engagement

This category measures how consistently you engage with your schoolwork throughout the week. The goal is not just whether work gets done — it is whether you are showing up regularly and distributing your effort across multiple days rather than cramming everything into one session.

What counts as engagement

Full-time students: Your teacher assesses engagement using both your digital textbook login frequency and your Daily Discussion Forum (DDF) participation. The DDF is a required daily activity for full-time students. Missing DDF posts may reduce your engagement score at your teacher's discretion, even if your textbook login frequency is strong. Both venues matter.

Part-time students: Your engagement is measured primarily through digital textbook login frequency. The DDF is not required for part-time students. If you do participate in the DDF voluntarily and your textbook engagement was weak in a given week, your teacher may use that as a recovery signal — raising your score by up to 1 point. This is a recovery mechanism, not a bonus pathway.

Scoring — 5 points per section

Holistic tier · 5% of overall grade

Faith-based community values in practice

Every week, as part of your weekly reflection, you identify one of ten faith-in-action standards and describe a specific way you put it into practice that week — in school, at home, or in your community.

This is not graded on how spiritual you sound. It is graded on whether you made a genuine effort to reflect and act. All students — including non-Christian students — can earn full credit by demonstrating real character and community values in action.

The ten faith-in-action standards

How it is scored each week

Page 7 of 10 · Category 5

Class-specific tier · 30% of overall grade · The signature assessment

Meeting content — learning verification

This is the heart of the new model. Once a week you sit down with your teacher and show what you actually learned. No AI tool can do this for you. No script can replace real understanding. This is where genuine learning proves itself.

"Think of it like a thesis defense — but at a middle school or high school level. Your teacher is asking: do you actually know this? Can you prove it?"

What this looks like in practice

Before your meeting, you choose a selection of completed work — assignments, notes, projects, or your own independent research — and bring it to the meeting to walk your teacher through. Your teacher may ask you to explain concepts, solve problems in real time, translate a sentence, discuss a theme in a book, or defend an argument you made in a paper.

Scored out of 20 points per section — four components

Your learning verification is scored across four components that together add up to 20 points. That score maps directly to letter grades: 18/20 = 90% (A-), 17/20 = 85% (B), 14/20 = 70% (C). Your average across all 18 sections becomes your learning verification grade for the semester.

Component 1 — Depth of understanding · 10 points (50%)

Can you explain concepts accurately in your own words? Can you connect ideas across lessons? Can you go beyond simply repeating what the textbook said?

Component 2 — Responsiveness to questioning · 4 points (20%)

How well do you handle questions you did not prepare for? Can you think on your feet?

Component 3 — Growth awareness and ownership · 4 points (20%)

Do you know where you stand? Can you identify your gaps and describe what you will do about them?

Component 4 — Teacher conviction · 2 points (10%)

After the meeting, does the teacher believe the student genuinely learned the material? This is the AI-integrity check built into every single meeting.

The portfolio approach

You are not limited to presenting only the current week's work. You can bring a portfolio of work from any section — including older sections — to demonstrate your learning and show growth over time. Students who are behind can still earn meeting content points by defending whatever work they have completed at the time of the meeting.

Page 8 of 10 · Student examples

Three students — three very different stories

The holistic model rewards real learning, genuine effort, and strong character — and it catches students who let AI do their work for them. Here are three real-number examples showing exactly how the model works.

Page 9 of 10 · Category 6 and model review

Class-specific tier · 10% of overall grade

Assigned work completion

This category measures one simple thing: did you complete and turn in the work that was assigned to you for each section? It is worth 10% of your grade — and that is intentional.

"Completing an assignment matters. But proving you understood it matters a whole lot more."

Under the old model, the quality of submitted work was one of the biggest factors in a grade. Under the new model, completing the work still matters — but this category is based on completion status, not quality. Quality and genuine understanding are measured separately in your weekly meeting.

This design is intentional. If a student turns in AI-generated work, they earn completion points — but they earn very few learning verification points because they cannot explain it. A student who does their own imperfect work and can talk about it intelligently will almost always outperform a student who submitted polished AI output.

How it is scored — simple 10-point scale

Teachers enter a single score of 0–10 each section based on the completion status of assigned work. The scale below provides consistent anchors.

Model review — how all the pieces connect

Here is a complete summary of all six categories and how they fit together.

Page 10 of 10 · Grade summary

The full picture — grading scale and multi-course view

This final page shows the complete grading scale, how grades work across multiple courses, and a summary of everything you need to know to succeed under the new model.

The grading scale

CPA uses a standard letter grade scale. The holistic model does not change what the grades mean — it changes how they are earned.

How grades work across multiple courses

• The holistic tier (meeting attendance, regular engagement, community values — 20% combined) uses the same score for every course you are taking. If you earn 90% on meeting attendance, that 90% applies to all your courses equally.
• The class-specific tier (curriculum, assigned work, learning verification — 80% combined) is graded separately for each course. Your History grade and your Math grade are calculated independently.

Sample: student enrolled in 3 courses

* Holistic tier scores (teal) are identical across all three courses because they measure the whole student, not subject-specific performance.

What you need to remember