Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion School lowering the bar.

The superintendent has announced that students can not receive a grade lower than 50%. So if a student completely bombs a test, that student will still get 50%. Also if a student scores 75% or less on a test, the student can redo the test.

Can someone explain the logic behind this?

Sounds like an effort to jack up the school's "performance", likely due to poor performance during a prior rating period. I am sad to see that you also live in New Hampshire. Has this been blessed by the school board, or is this just the principal's bright idea?

It has the school boards approval. The school had failed the APY 2 years in row for math. So, it's on list of "schools that need improvement." This is how we improve our schools? By lowering the bar.

I feel that this is not a good move. What happens to the kids once they get out into the real world and college. I wonder how the kids feel about this.

Our school board is actually thinking about something similiar. No child will receive a grade less than a 50%. They are not allowing retest on grades below a 75 though. The reasoning behind this is for children who need encouragement. For example if there are only 5 grades in a marking period that would mean, one would need a total of 450 points to receive a 90%. If a child completely bombs test, etc. and receives a 0, now there other 4 grades even if they received a 100 on each of them would only allow them to get 400 points which would now average to an 80%, instead of if you had given them a 50% which would still allow them to average a 90%. Once an older child is able to figure out this averaging, they can quickly lose hope if they know an A, or whatever grade they are striving for is no longer within their reach.

The other reasoning is that a child who at least tries an assignment should not be penalized in receiving a 0 the same as a child who does not even attempt an assignment.

Not to justify it, just to explain the reasoning as it was explained to me.

I am not really sure why this would be upsetting. I feel that getting F's on report cards is an outdated custom and serves no purpose except to actually call a child a "FAILURE". I have never heard of any good coming from that. I am from a family of 5 children and the first three dropped out of high school (in part) due to the huge discouragement they got . All three i now think were 2E with amazing potential that never got recognized.. To me it is raising the bar for the education system if children are allowed to retake the test if they get less than 75%. They should not move on unless the material is mastered, and for a lot of kids that takes more effort and more time.

I think that watering down curricula and ideas like "no one gets less than 50%" all result from what I call Lockstep Theory. Basically, the philosophy doesn't really accept the idea that lots of kids learn faster or slower than the ones who cluster around the average.

We all know what this idea does to our kids. The material is superficial and the pace is too slow. And Lockstep Theory also has terrible effects on slower learners, because these kids are expected to keep a pace that they just can't keep. Yet there's a fantasy that they can, and no one seems willing to let it go. So our schools are forced to water down and water down and fail and fail in a quest for an age-grade level that everyone can attain. And of course, it's cruel to the kids who are told by authority figures that they can do something, when they know they can't.

The response of people I call edumacators is to pretend: Johnny gets 50 points just for putting his name on the test. Or the Board of Education requires everyone to take algebra in 8th grade, yet pulls all meaningful algebra questions out of the high school exit exam, and ensures that most of the math questions are below an 8th grade level. Teachers focus on algorithms for solving the problems on the standardized test, and everyone ignore the fact that some kids are performing via rote and wouldn't be able to solve the same problems if they were worded differently. To their credit, some teachers complain about this, but on the other hand, I don't see a movement for change coming out of this group.

And then everyone blames the problem on class size or funding or the length of the school year.

Everyone just pretends!

When the kids get into the real world and they get hit hard. The schools told them how well they were doing, but they can't find a decent job. Or they go to college and have to spend a year or more doing remedial courses. Or worse, they discover that they never should be there in the first place...because again, we have a crazy fantasy that everyone should go to college. What's wrong with being an electrician, anyway, if it makes you happy and you're good at it?

Val

Okay I can understand the view points here. But, how can a child get a 0 on a test in one particular subject? If there was a problem with the student understanding the material. The teacher should be able to recognize this in advance, before a test is ever administered. The probability of a child getting a 0 is extremely low.

If a child automatically receives 50% on a test the teacher will never know how much understanding the child has. I don't feel this raising the bar. I feel it's the public school system bending to mediocrity.

Val, I get the whole idea about college. I want my children to go to college, for nothing else but to round them out. A BS means practically nothing today. Too many people have them. If my children want to get into the trades, I'm happy with that. It's not up to me to make them happy, they need to follow their hearts and their heads. With a degree at least they will have something to fall back on.

What I wonder is, what will this do to those children's understanding of percentages?! Can you picture the questions on the percentage test?

Q: Johnny takes a maths test with 10 equally weighted questions. He gets 6 questions completely wrong, and the others completely right. What will Johnny's mark be as a percentage?

A: ???

I'm not sure I have a problem with the re-take actually. If the goal is for students to actually master content, why wouldn't you want them to retake it?

I'm a teacher and a school admin and we strongly encourage teachers to design their own tests based on what they actually taught, not the textbook test. Sometimes the whole class will miss a bunch of questions the teacher thought s/he had covered. They go back and cover it again and redo the test. That is a fault of the test and the teacher, not the student- so why wouldn't a redo be in order?

As for below 50%... well is there a difference between and F and an F-? My teachers would appreciate being able to stop at 50% and not have to keep grading down to a 39% or a 12% or whatever. If the line is "clearly you didn't understand this" there isn't much value in measuring how badly you didn't understand. So you need to go over the material again with that student and try a different way.

Also, my students only receive 0s when they have an unexcused absence and miss a test. Or if they just straight out refuse to do it. I work at a charter school that occasionally has students who do not want to go to this school and self-sabotage to get kicked out for academic reasons.