The one thing that annoys me the most about modern grading is the fact that so many courses heavily weight homework and projects. You can do exceptionally well on tests and quizzes and objectively understand the material in the course but still get a terrible grade not based on knowledge but based on how much busy work you did. Grades are supposed to be just that, grading someone's understanding of the knowledge of the course. That should be the guiding principle for any kind of grading policy and yet it's so rarely the case when courses have 40% of the grade made up of tests and quizzes and then 60% based on homework, reading assignments, group projects, even attendance. I've had courses where a student could get a failing grade on every single test and quiz and still walk out with a B. Effort !== Knowledge and GPA should not just boil down to a measure of participation.
One of my favorite classes back in university had a pretty good take on this: your grade would include two exams, then the higher of your homework scores or another exam.
It rewarded hard work, but not at the expense of demonstrating that you'd actually learned things. If you were confident that you understood things, you could skip all the homework and get a perfect score.
Likewise, if you'd demonstrated good understanding in the first two exams and were repeating that trend for the third, you could skip that third exam altogether.
The grades people got in that class were some of the most reflective of actual understanding within my cohort (admittedly, through my lens as a fellow student)
