Additional Focus Areas (AFAs) are a set of extension Focus Areas designed to allow students to dive deeper into key content knowledge areas during the school year.
Additional Focus Areas could represent between 0 and 9% of a student’s overall grade. Schools are able to choose whether or not Additional Focus Areas will be weighted on a course. The default setting for Additional Focus Areas constitute 6% of a student's overall grade*¹.
At the start of each school year, students will start with a 0% score for Additional Focus Areas. In order to gain the 6% constituted by Additional Focus Areas, students will have to master those focus areas as the pacing line meets each of them. Over the course of the year, if students do not complete Additional Focus Areas on pace, the points will be removed from the students’ overall grade.
To determine the grade value of each Additional Focus Area, divide the 6 percentage points available by the number of Additional Focus Areas that the pacing line has met on the year page.
- If the pacing line is on the first AFA, it will be worth 6% of the overall grade.
- If the pacing line is on the second AFA, each will be worth 3% of the overall grade.
- If the pacing line is on the third AFA, each will be worth 2% of the overall grade.
- If there are six AFAs, by the time the pacing line reaches the sixth one, each will be worth 1% of the overall grade.
Unlike Power Focus Areas, students aren’t required to master all Additional Focus Areas to pass a course; failure to complete one or more Additional Focus Areas will not generate an “off track” grade for a student.
- However, there is a grade penalty for each Additional Focus Area not completed.
- Parents, mentors and teachers may want to remind students that they will lose overall grade points if they do not complete all their Additional Focus Areas.
Important Grading Notes about Additional Focus Areas
- When the blue pacing line reaches the next AFA, if the student has not yet mastered it, their grade may drop according to how much that AFA is worth. As soon as they master that AFA, their grade will jump back up.
*¹ While schools can choose the weight of their AFAs, since most schools use the default setting of 6%, we will be using that throughout this help article. If your school has assigned a different weight grade to the AFAs, the % points will be different than how they appear here.