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

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.