[Sohcahtoa82]

At my high school, teachers were given a lot of freedom to decide their own grading, but had the rule that the final could not be more than 20% of your grade. Typically, homework ended up being 50%.

I failed my Geometry class despite getting 110% on the final (She had some hard extra-credit questions that went beyond what we learned) because I didn't do a single homework assignment.

Meanwhile, this high school made all sorts of claims about preparing students for college, and my first math class in college, homework was only 3% of your grade.

[satvikpendem]

This is probably because you can fail catastrophically with the college way of doing things. I remember many people who failed one test out of three for the semester and essentially failed the class (given they did average on the other 2). No high school wants to deal with a system like that, it would be too much for kids to handle.