Nothing on this page is a secret and none of it is decided at the end. Every task tells you what it is looking for before you start; this page tells you how the pieces add up.
The seventy and the thirty
Every Grade 9 credit in Ontario is built the same way. Seventy per cent of your mark comes from work spread across the whole semester — and it is not an average of September against January. It leans towards your most recent work, and towards the level you reach most consistently, because what you can do in January is the better answer to the question the report card is actually asking.
Thirty per cent comes from a final evaluation at the very end: the Final Examination, your Culminating Reflection, and your Final Portfolio. Three different rooms and three different kinds of thinking, deliberately, so that one difficult afternoon does not decide this on its own.
pie title Where your mark comes from "The semester's work" : 70 "The final evaluation" : 30
The seventy is the seven marked Lab Reports; your three Science in the News submissions; Coding a Scientific Model; Climate Change Action Plan; Product Life Cycle Analysis; Design Challenge; Space Mission Proposal; and the Unit 2 Test. They are not equally weighted — the four big tasks are each worth several of the smaller pieces, because they run for a week or more and ask for everything at once. Ask me for the exact split whenever you want it. It is not a secret; it is just not the useful thing to memorise.
The lab reports matter more than their size suggests. Seven pieces arriving steadily from September to January are what let a mark describe your most recent and most consistent work rather than four busy weeks.
Four kinds of thinking, not one
Every task asks for more than one of these, and the balance shifts with the task.
| What is being judged | What that means in science |
|---|---|
| What you know | Terminology, the models, what the periodic table tells you |
| How you think | Designing a fair test, reading data, spotting the result that cannot be right |
| How you communicate | Reports, graphs, circuit diagrams, and what you say about them |
| Where you apply it | Using all of it on a situation nobody walked you through |
Why does a lab count as thinking rather than recall?
Because following a procedure is not the skill. Deciding what to measure, noticing when a result is suspicious, and judging what your data can actually support — that is thinking, and that is where the marks in a report are.
The last row is why the tasks get harder to predict as the course goes on. Anyone can repeat an investigation they were shown. The course is asking whether you can take the method to a product nobody has traced, a device nobody has built, or a mission nobody has flown.
Three kinds of evidence, and two of them are not paper
What you make is the obvious one: reports, plans, a working program, a working device, an examination paper. What I watch you do is the second: how you set up a circuit, whether you change one thing at a time, whether the goggles are on before the bottle is opened. What you tell me is the third — the conference partway through each of the big tasks is not a progress check, it is evidence in its own right, and some of what you understand will only ever show up there.
If your report is unfinished but your bench work was careful and you can explain what your numbers mean, the watching and the conversation are where the strongest evidence of that day comes from. That is not a consolation prize. It is how the mark is meant to work.
Feedback, and where it lands
Each of the four big tasks — Climate Change Action Plan, Product Life Cycle Analysis, Design Challenge and Space Mission Proposal — gets a conference with me partway through, and at least one full working period afterwards that begins from what we said. That is the point of the conference. Feedback you have no time to use is just a mark arriving early.
The unit checkpoints are different: you mark those yourself, they count for nothing, and the class after each one starts with the revision list you wrote.
What is not in your mark
How you work is reported separately on the same report card, as E, G, S or N, across six habits: responsibility, organization, independent work, collaboration, initiative, and self-regulation. They matter, we will talk about them, and they do not move your percentage. Your mark is about the work; that column is about the worker, and mixing the two tells you less about both.
The one exception is where the curriculum itself names the habit. Working safely at a bench is an expectation of this course — written into it as something you must be able to do — so it is marked like anything else in the curriculum. Lab Reports says exactly what that looks like. That is the only place a habit touches your percentage.
The mark you would give yourself is not part of your percentage, and neither is a mark a classmate would give you. Judging your work well is a different thing, and that does count: your Final Portfolio asks you to do it in writing, and the writing is marked as writing. The private version — see Judging Your Own Work — costs you nothing at all, which is exactly what makes it worth doing honestly. When the class trades drafts, challenges each other’s numbers, or votes on which mission it would fund, that is for learning. The mark is mine to determine, from evidence.
Practice between classes is practice. The checklist at the bottom of every class page is how you get ready for the next period, and none of it is marked — though it will sometimes remind you that something we spent class time on is due.
Every marked piece in this course gets real working periods with me in the room, because that is where the work is meant to happen. The seven lab reports and the three news submissions are written here from start to finish, and each of the big tasks gets three or four periods. What is left for home is finishing and tidying — plus finding your Science in the News article, which is the one job that is genuinely yours. Nobody should be building any of this from scratch at a kitchen table; if that is what is happening, tell me.
Group work
Some tasks are built in pairs or threes, because that is how the work is really done. In every one of them there is a named piece that is yours alone, and it is that piece I mark: your own design log, your own section of a proposal, your own analysis of shared data. Nobody in this course receives a mark for standing next to somebody who did the work.
Late work
Talk to me before the due date and we will make a plan. After the fact is much harder for both of us.