Erica, Here are a couple of key ideas. We want the grades to be fair, to be accurate, and aligned with the curriculum taught (vs what students's should know). Teaching to and testing to the course objectives is a good way to ensure that. In the end, we want to be sure our grading system measures the degree of learning that has occurred. There may many ways to segment the weights of components, but's less effective if measurement of learning has not been accurately evaluated. Barry Westling