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 I feel that getting F's on report cards is an outdated custom and serves no purpose except to actually call a child a "FAILURE".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.

I see two different issues - NCLB and school district standards.

Whether the school cuts an F off at 50% or 2% shouldn't affect the NCLB standings. I believe those are based solely on student performance and participation rates of the annual standardized testing. My kids attend the best high school in one of the nation's largest school districts, and this school is actually on academic probation under the stringent guidelines of NCLB - despite the fact that over 90% of graduating students go on to college and over 85% of entering freshmen graduate within 4 years. Why are they on academic probation? Because a small subset of special education students failed to meet the ever-changing bar set by NCLB. (The percentage of students performing at a certain level on standardized tests is also raised every year under NCLB, meaning standards set five years ago have moved.)

As far as whether the school district should set such a policy, I can see both sides. My youngest currently attends a school that does not provide letter grades at all. Instead they are ranked as "emerging", "nearing proficient", "proficient" and "advanced". It is useless to me as a parent, the kids don't like it, and the teachers hate it as well. And the principal who signed the school up to be part of the pilot program is long gone. Kids understand reality a lot better than we give them credit for, and they know when they're being placated. I think there is a big difference between creating achievable goals and pretending goals are bigger and better than they really are.

On the other hand, my high school student dug a hole for himself last year in an advanced placement class by losing a folder of assignments. The teacher gave him all zero's so that his semester grade was a 12%. He earned all 100%'s for the rest of the year and still ended up with a D for his final grade. It was ridiculously punitive and the lesson my son learned is that he would have been better to have dropped out of the class and retaken it in summer school than to have worked so hard to pull up his grade - not a lesson I wanted him to learn.

So putting a cap on what teachers can do when it comes to punitive grading - I do see some benefits.

I don't necessarily have a problem with retaking, but it can have some downsides. For example, by providing a safety net it might discourage adequate preparation for kids that are already becoming lazy.

With regard to the 50% floor, I initially had objections based on wrecking the grading curve. But since I guess even a 50% would usually have to be balanced by a number of good grades (assuming that a 50% student isn't likely to turn in an immediately subsequent 100% performance on the next test), I can see the value in not discouraging students by feeling it's impossible to recover after one or two dismal performances. And especially if a 50% grade were averaged with a retake grade, it wouldn't represent a terribly unfair advantage for a student who just didn't get the material the first time.

I'd be most likely to be okay with the scheme if the implementation included some other safeguards, such as two retakes and/or 50% grades triggering mandatory extra work with a tutor. That would make sure that struggling students got more help and oversight, and discourage laziness.

I live in a country where retaking is commonplace, both at school and university.

I don't have an issue with retaking per se, but I do have an issue with the way it is implemented here. There is no penalty for failing several times because only the last retake scores are recorded in transcripts. There is no incentive not to fail several times for the same reason. This results in a culture of lazy high school and university students, who aren't penalized for not studying for tests the first or second time around, and a culture of teachers and university professors wasting their time preparing and grading multiple retakes.

Add this to a grading system in which scores outside 50-90% are rarely given (and so indeed 50% on an exam can mean 50% or 40% or 30%) and indeed the education system here has lowered the bar way too far.

As a university professor I am currently fighting to include not just the final retake score, but also previous scores, on transcripts so that diligent, hard working students are rewarded and graduate schools/employers have more information about whom they are hiring. I respect a student who retakes a hard course to get a better grade; I don't respect a lazy student who needs multiple retakes because they aren't studying and their transcript shouldn't conceal this behavior.

And what are they proposing to give out when students cheat? No more 0 for dishonesty? As a teacher, I have a huge problem giving the same grade to a student who tries but does not understand the material the same grade as a student who is caught cheating on the same assignment/test. So much for honesty, I guess...

What happens to the child who is struggling to get to 50% and then he/she sees another student not even take the test and receives 50%? I would be very worried about moral and the students giving up.

Yes, but ultimately, what matters most is how well a student has mastered the material.

One grading extreme is here in the States. For example, my two youngest kids take two spelling tests every week: a post-test on last week's material, and pre-test on next week's material. They have no idea what's on the pre-test, yet their pre- and post-test scores count equally toward their overall grades. It seems unfair to grade someone on material that hasn't been covered, but I can't change this. Some teachers at my eldest son's middle school use this approach, too.

Umm...you seem to have a bit of an axe to grind on some of your students. Do you have evidence that everyone needing multiple retakes is being lazy? What if they had pneumonia or a family member got cancer or whatever?

How do you distinguish between students who retake a hard course for a better grade due to laziness vs. those with, umm, noble motives? Plus, some less-arduous students become great employees; why do you seem to be trying to find a way to block them from even getting out of the starting gate? Let their employers worry about how they do on the job.

Just my two cents.

Val

When my umiveristy students cheat, they finally understand what my syllabus means when it says you cannot pass unless you complete all the assignments. I do not consider something plagiarized or cheated to be a submission. So a person who tries and fails legitimately gets a 0 but a person who cheats gets an X which obviously cannot be factored into any equation. My option then is to fail them for not completing all their assignments or allow them to redo it.

Thats's my approach because I agree, the whole point is to learn, not just what they are doing but also the integrity of the process.

Just my 2c

DeHe

It is not just me who wants to change the system, it is almost all university professors in the country where I live, plus the government. This surely indicates that there is a problem with the system. The new prestigious university programs ban retakes and make attendance of classes semi-obligatory, because this behavior is viewed as such a widespread problem here.

At the moment a student in the old style courses who takes 10 years to finish a 3 year degree, retaking every single course multiple times, not showing up for classes, not turning in assigments routinely, can end up the same grade transcript as a student who finishes in 3 years with no retakes and good attendance. The only clue to a prospective employer or graduate school is the number of years taken to finish the degree. However, this on its own is clearly not a fair indicator, as students may take longer to finish a degree for many reasons: family responsibilities, their need to work part-time etc.

The evidence accummulated by university committees is that it is mostly students who are not attending classes regularly, not submitting homework regularly, who demand multiple retakes of exams. Students who need to retake the occasional class because of illness, family problems, are in the minority. Under the proposed new rules, if they need to retake for such reasons most likely the earlier grade would not appear on the transcript. There is nothing but sympathy for such cases. From my experiences as a professor in American universities, the new rules would be in line with those in the US.

As to having an axe to grind: personally I teach graduate classes where this problem is not seen (not least because many of our students are American, and grew up with a different system). However, I do indeed think it's a waste of everybody's time that a student who attends only 1/3 of classes and does 1/3 of assignments for every course can demand 3 or 4 chances to pass final exams with only 40%, and then get passing grades on their transcript. Fortunately everybody else agrees with me and the system is going to change.

Clearly rules on retakes shouldn't be the same in schools as in universities.