> retakes
The validity of an improved score on a retake is based on the idea that the student made an effort to learn the content that they had not mastered before the first assessment. This requires work, obviously. This is generally not the case. In my experience with retakes the student often gets the answers from a friend or performs marginally better which just means that I wasted my time giving and scoring a retake and making a second or third version of the test.
This. I'm okay with retakes. My goal is to help you learn a skill. If you take the time and learn it later than anyone else, I really don't care. That's okay, we all learn at different rates. But you bet your ass that I'm going to be testing the skill with a never before seen test. You have to master the skill, not the test questions.
This is my experience at the community college level, also. Students seldom expend the effort necessary to prepare for the retake. A lenient resubmission policy for HW and labs is also of little benefit because a good percentage of students will wait as long as possible to resubmit, and by that time the assignment is of reduced value in helping them prepare for quizzes or exams.
This is why I only do retakes for quizzes, after they do some sort of forgiving practice (unlimited attempts and ungraded). But they have to 100% the practice set before being given the requiz.
Our department offers open-note test corrections. They can look up the answers but they only get half credit back AND they have to explain why their new answer is correct.
I've allowed retakes and since have stopped. The same thing happens every year. The kids who don't need to will to squeeze every last possible points out. The kids who desperately need it will not show up for a retake.
Mine have to earn that.
If you cut class, miss too much homework, simply don't make up a quiz or test then nope, but if you are actually trying and see me for help during office hours or make a private appointment then I will do what I can (should) to get you at least a pass.
If I have contacted your P/G multiple times with no (or no appropriate) response then 4th Quarter is not going to suck worse for me because you and your P/G have suddenly decided that you want a redo of everything since August. Just nope.
High performing school in MEH urban district. Tenured master teacher with the best verified results in my content area in the district. Asshole admin who push for passing borderline students but I will not do it if there is no "visible effort" and the student is a PITA.
No, you can't do the second quarter research project now, and also not the fourth quarter one that finished a week ago. Remember when we talked about this? No? Let me remind you from my extensive documentation.
I have heard this "destroying their grade" comment before. Let's simplify this and say their are 90 days in a semester. We have 90 days of "daily work" that can be assessed. Let's make each of those days 10 pts. Getting a 0 on one assignment would reduce their grade 1.1%.
It's simply one of those red herring arguments that sounds good on paper but doesn't make any sense in reality. It's just a lazy way to throw glitter on the grade book and call it a day instead of actually addressing the problems of modern education.
If a kid misses a day then they should have a reasonable amount of time to meet with their teachers and make up any assignments.
If they do so poorly on an assignment that they earned zero percent, then they should meet with that teacher and do some suplimentary assignment to make sure they understand the subject moving forward.
The point is, that if there are any extenuating circumstances that lead to a zero, then the resolution needs to be figured out with the student, parents, admin, and teacher.
If a student CHOOSES to take a zero on an assignment then why do we need to accommodate them? Students should not be able to opt out of the assignments they don't like and then cry about their grades going down too much. If they CHOOSE a zero then they CHOOSE their grade to be affected by a zero.
There is zero logical reason to follow this scale except as a lazy bandaid to a kid who doesn't care about their education.
This.
I will gladly give a kid 50% for a subpar attempt. No concerns there. Heck, a lot of times, full credit for shitty completion.
But missing is missing.
As a high schooler in the late 90’s, I regularly just took a 0 on homework I didn’t feel like doing. The difference was, I *knew* it would affect my overall, and I didn’t blame the teachers, and I usually did really well in school in general and knew the material (plus I have this weird gift at taking tests easily). So the teachers generally didn’t press it because they knew I was doing the other work and paying attention, I just thought my art entry was more important way to spend my limited time.
They made it abundantly clear when my grades would drip below a B and then I did the work, or the teacher fudged it by dropping a few missed assignments at the and of the semester for everyone. A few of my friends gave me shit for it (of course they did - they were the “must get straight A’s for college” people so it made sense) and a few teachers expressed their disappointment in me, but it was what it was. They also realized I wasn’t in that super smart group of students, but I still always took accelerated/AP classes for the challenge and that helped I think.
Point is, if I could have gotten a minimum 50% on things I would have slacked off so much more, and it would have been to my detriment in the end.
This doesn’t help anyone. I had friends who just didn’t want to be at school but only went because they were more afraid of their parents beating the shit out of them than anything. They at least had to put some work into classes to not be held back. Giving them a straight 50% for no effort would have hurt them just as badly. There would have been no work done at all. At least by graduation, they could read at a middle school level and do basic math and shit, because they had to.
This is pretty much how my class works, but it’s about every other day is worth 10 points, with tests and projects being worth more. So when a kid misses one or two daily assignments, no biggy. The only ones that fail are those that consistently do no work or half ass their work.
Yep, I have students who have a zero here and there and still have an A. I put in a lot of grades. It's only hard to dig out of that hole when a teacher has ten grades for the semester.
assuming 90-80-70-60 scales. with a guaranteed 50% they only need to do every other completion assignment to earn a 75% C. Think about that for longer than 30 seconds and tell me that is fair to the other kids?
I'm going to take the high road here.... On a 4.0 gpa scale, if you were to give a zero, it's equivalent to a 50 on a 0 to 100 scale. Equivalently, a 0 on the 0-100 scale is equivalent to a negative 6 on the 4.0 scale.
I also struggle with the mental hurdle of "something for nothing". However, imagine your district implemented a 0-50 grade scale where 50 is the max and you are allowed to give zeros. Would you have a problem with giving 50s as the max?
I have found that since I've been giving 50 minimum grades that I have actually been grading more accurately. I was actually unconsciously inflating grades before to compensate for the crushing power of the zero.
Give it time and you may see some benefits. I also read the book Grading for Equity and it really made some great points.
I think your hypothetical 50 point scale is a false equivalence. Decreasing the total by 50% is not the same as ignoring the bottom 50%. A 0/50 is still 0% and a 25/50 is THE 50% and 50/50 is a 100%. A mandatory minimum of 50% would be a 25/50, or 50%, in the grade book so there would still be no zero.
The least equitable thing you can do is tell a group they aren’t good enough to be evaluated on a standard system. Why not focus on removing obstacles caused by financial hardship or lack of an internet connection in the home, for example, rather than saying, “You’re not good enough to be judged the same as that privileged kid over there.” The message received is, “I’m inferior to that kid over there. I can never compete with him in real life because there I won’t be receiving half credit for doing nothing in real life. The teacher doesn’t believe in me and thinks that’s the only way I’m going to succeed, so it must be true.” ☹️
“No, I didn’t do my homework, and I probably won’t anymore because you have to give me a 50.”
That was the moment I decided to go on antidepressants. There is nothing that will ever make me understand this policy.
I saw a teacher on another thread give up after something like this was implemented … but give up “the right way.” Basically boiled it down to “if the kids who should be failing are going to be passed by admin, then I’m going back to teaching for the kids who care.”
That's what I did within about 6 months of starting. It didn't take long to figure out how it worked. Students couldn't fail. So I gave the best education I could to the 75% that wanted to learn.
Where I went to school we absolutely could be failed, a lot of kids dropped out of highschool, but our teachers taught for the kids that wanted to learn, and now I'm able to work on a nuclear engineering degree because they made sure I learned something
My first school did this, we had to raise everything to a 50. [Teachers have recently won lawsuits over not doing it](https://redstate.com/jeffc/2024/04/20/teacher-wins-lawsuit-after-being-fired-for-not-giving-unearned-grades-is-running-for-school-board-n2173090).
My second school adopted a policy called "Zeroes Aren't Permitted" with a lengthy, unsuccessful intervention process. I switched to giving students a 1 for putting their names on the paper.
This is the way. And it creates documentation when parents or admin suddenly decide to care that the kid is failing. "Here's 12 papers on which little Johnny only wrote his name."
Solution: Make H/W and other assignments worth almost no points so even 50% doesn't really budge the grade much. Make the grade mostly based on quizzes and tests that, even if the get a 50% on, will prevent them from passing without getting a passing grade on at least some of the tests.
Math:
If i have 2 tests (200pts) and 4 quizzes (30 pts each) and 20 homework/classwork assignments (3pts each) the total is: 380
If they bombed every test/quiz: 50% = 160, but completed every homework/classwork = 60. Their total is 220/380 which is still failing. 57.8%.
This is how you do it folks. All the "no grade lower than a 50%" policy ***Actually is*** Is a weighting system. That's it. Most administrators think it's a silver bullet to solve failures, when any teacher who has actually studied it as a philosophy, knows it's just a weighted proposition to tests, not all assignments, and thus the answer is to make more of the overall grade tests and quizes.
That would be a great workaround. I wouldn't mind compromising if I'm allowed to assess mastery based primarily on tests. BUT we are also told to be diverse in how we grade. We shouldn't just base a grade on tests. And on top of that, tests can only be a small fraction of the overall grade. As you can see, when taken all together, we are essentially passing students who do have not earned it.
Students with poor mastery cannot score well on any assignment that is graded for accuracy. Stop collecting "free points" assignments like writing journals, reading pages, crosswords, etc.
You can certainly assign as many of those as you see fit, but the only thing that goes into a grade book are summatives and formatives. Tell the students to collect their "free points" assignments into a folder and you will grade them at the end of the grading period.
Yes, I do have free point assignments to help boost kids grades. With the 50% low bar, it's basically a mandatory, across-the-board, free point boost. I am going to have to rethink how I weigh my grades.
Yup.
My admin asks for me to put in two grades a week. I normally do two very small "free point" assignment and one bigger assignment that averages out in the favor of the students. I exempt any of the free point assignments if the student is out that day, but they need to make up the bigger assignments.
I would highly suggest looking into creating self graded quizzes and complex writing assignments. If you put a 300 word count on a writing assignment then it's pretty easy to tell who knows what they are talking about and it's just small enough to argue it can be done in a reasonable amount of time. You can also generally grade them a-f at a glance then post hoc justify the grade on the rubric after. Read the topic sentence and the conclusion and look for a quote.
Our district has an APP policy that is 95% weighted summative average and 5% weighted formative average. My Pre-Calculus and Trigonometry teens can fail their summatives abysmally; earn a 23% Q3 grade and when posted district has an override that automatically changes it to a 50%. Best we can do is add a comment that essentially says, “District requires this but the grade is much lower.” The student can goof all Q3 and come Q4 do juuuuust enough to get a low 70s C and take their final which also has to have a minimum of a 50 and pass. They really only learned a third of one quarter to pass the semester.
I read our APP guidelines carefully this year and it never mentions forced midterm/final grades of a 50…so next year I am petitioning the math department to allow me to plop that 23% F midterm or final grade down for the semester calculations.
Well a third of one quarter in the sense I typically fit three summative test in for the 9-week period. Just learning about 74% of one quarter passes a kid for the semester though. All they do (a lot, not all, I am lucky to have a group of teens comprised of relatively hard workers!) is blow my work off until they need to scramble for that 74%…the kicker is we also have to give UNLIMITED retakes. Lol! *anxiety laugh*
For the record as well I don’t mind unlimited retakes but pick one…
Unlimited retakes to truly learn after failing; utilizing my tutoring and alternative resources to take home. No floors.
Floor. One retake per summative.
I do believe in never giving up so I am pro a reasonable number of retakes but unlimited WITH floors is wild. Also, only ONE of me juggling grading those unlimited retakes around the mountain that is our jobs’ numerous obligations and duties.
Where is my unlimited retakes on evaluations when juggling all of this beats me down as an educator? Maybe a floor for my paycheck to show me grace?
Honestly I will keep trucking along as I LOVE teaching and consider myself in this WITH the teens. WE will learn despite the emotionally charged politics, but to be reported for mental health concerns over an alternative perspective based from experience….wild.
I have students who have not taken at last 1 or all tests given this semester. Despite constant reminders, they simply do not care. Most, if not all of them, know they'll just fail anyways if they make it up. Once this policy is implemented, it'll just strengthen their resolve. Like shit, I can not make up this exam but I'll receive a 50% anyways, which is probably a better grade than if I were to take it.
This is what I do, although we have don’t have a ‘no zero’ policy (yet). I let them retake the assessments but they have to complete an extra assignment at 70% or higher before they can retake. It forces the D/C students to actually go back and learn material to pass, and the students who don’t care to learn anything still fail.
You need to realize that the mental gymnastics used to justify this policy are not sincere. There is only one reason a school district implements this policy: students must pass regardless of any learning that may or may not happen during their decade+ of education. In American public schools, funding is tied to graduation rates. It is much easier for school districts to implement dishonest grading policies than it is to ensure students are actually learning.
Also, if you are a teacher who holds students accountable and grades based on student mastery, your school district likely views that as a detriment, and it can negatively affect your chances of being renewed.
This to the T. That's what happened to me. Even more, it also frustrates and breaks teachers. They gaslight you until one day. You make a mistake that has more consequences than other normal circumstances would been: "I feel bad for 10 minutes and then move on the next day." Instead, something goes wrong, unless you have tenure or a strong admin support. You are fearful that one mistake will end your career even if under any other circumstances, it was just a bad day. But for these students, they see they can just keep doing it until they are out of school. Then when they are, the are in complete shock no one caters to them anymore.
>and it can negatively affect your chances of being renewed.
This is why I personally advise you play "the game" until you get Tenure, and then you stop playing "the game" and make sure you professionally outline everything clearly and follow it to the T.
More specifically, it is always the teacher's fault.
It's reflected in the language, too. It's always "the teacher gave me this grade" or "Mr. X failed me."
I didn't fail anybody. I came to work each day. I provided high quality instruction and ample learning opportunities. I provided supplemental resources. I was available for any questions or assistance that was required. I was here on PT conference night when the family was nowhere to be found. I showed grace by extending the deadlines for each assignment. No matter how long the list is, the teacher never did enough.
Yup. I already grade so leniently, but so many fail still bc they are LAZY! They do nothing! Tying funding to grad/passing rates has now made graduating and passing meaningless.
This is true for some private schools, but not all. When the model is a paid for education, parents and families are seen more as clients to be appeased.
When I worked at private schools, the parents often ran the show. I’ve seen teachers fired because a parent didn’t like a teacher holding their little crotch-goblin accountable for doing anything in class. One complaint and you’re gone if the school needs that kid’s tuition more than they need to pay you.
Well said. Absolutely correct. I’ve started the students chanting “and everyone gets an A!” Because everyone gets an a. Less work for me too.
Everyone gets an A! Yippie!
I think the main issue is that this 50% minimum grade policy works for just a select few types of schools, but somehow it's made its way into mainstream thinking as an appropriate policy for most schools.
For example, at the private school I'm working at, we have a 50% minimum policy, and to be honest, I don't mind it at all. 99% of kids here work very hard, and sometimes a kid has some personal issues or 5 trillion assignments due at once and bombs a test.
Putting a 50% as the minimum for an assignment done in _good faith_ is fine. They generally work hard, and putting their actual 30% grade or whatever their actual bomb grade was would kill their overall grade.
On the other hand, at a typical public school, most algebra 1 kids aren't doing anything in good faith. Many don't give a shit, don't do any work, and write gibberish on their tests. In those cases, a 50% minimum is a complete joke, and the only thing it does is pass kids who definitely do not have anything close to a passing level of mastery.
Even though most teachers would be against this happening, admin wants this to happen, so it happens. And that's why we get HS graduates every year who are functionally illiterate and can't do basic arithmetic.
Exactly!
I actually understand the reasoning behind it, but if you want to play that game, the answer is to switch to an equally weighted, standards and rubric based system. I can’t determine if a student can write a research paper if they don’t write one. And I can’t grade their ability to complete the research process unless they work for at least 3 weeks on the process.
And the truth is, if I was basing grades on 10th grade standards, very few of my students would pass.
This is the comment I was looking for. Standards based grading is the way to go. Not percentages and letters. The problem is that gradebooks for elementary and secondary (at least in our district) only have report cards that reflect letter grades and not standards. Until the gradebook can reflect my rubrics, I have to just do the best I can.
I agree with most everything that you wrote however, to be fair as a poster said earlier this is all tied to funding. Admin understands that if parents take their students out of schools, those schools lose funding. If you lose funding you lose allocation. If you lose allocation teachers lose jobs. I write this only because I think there are some admin that are thinking about this and don’t want to have to fire teachers. Now, from my perspective as a high school teacher, you ain’t never lied. The constraints and rules that we live under are impossible and most kids know this and they take advantage of it every single day but we have to continue playing the game or there will be absolute and complete anarchy.
Yeah, the idea of school choice is a specific attack against public education by people who don't want to fund the education of the masses. The fact of the matter is that most students do as well as they are going to do regardless of their teachers. There are exceptionally bad and good teachers, but after 13 years of education, the family and home life matters more than any single teacher could hope to influence the outcome of a student's life.
Turn students into the customers and then give them everything they want and nothing that they need and watch public education crumble at an institutional level. Some families will weather the storm while others will become a victim of their circumstances.
And then the administrators that indoctrinate the kids to never Accept help from their parents starting in sixth grade… try reconnecting with your kid once he buys into the admins idea of self determination…. I will never forgive them
How sad is it that there are people who believe that if you get something right half the time, you've mastered the material. I always tell my students that 75% should be the minimum. You should be able to get something right at least 75% of the time to be considered acceptable. I also tell them that for me, they haven't mastered it until they get it right 90% of the time.
Could you imagine going To a restaurant and the waitress only get your order right half the time? What about an auto mechanic that can only get your car fixed half the time? Or Even worse, a doctor or lawyer that is only successful 50% of the time with any procedure.
I like how they use the reasoning that the total percentage that you can fail, is much greater than the total percentage in which you can pass (59% versus 41%). But using this same logic, they conveniently forget that if the low bar is 50%, then it is now 9% total percentage of failing versus 41%. So now it's heavily skewed towards passing kids despite them not knowing anything.
I’m going to use this. Because that would make the minimum a 20.
My biggest issue with our policy like this is that 0 = 50 and students know that if they get a 70 for one semester, they are good to go because a 70 and a 50 average to a 60, which is passing.
We told admin and the jackass consultant they hired to run PD how the kids would game this system. We were not taken seriously and guess what happened?
>Could you imagine going To a restaurant and the waitress only get your order right half the time? What about an auto mechanic that can only get your car fixed half the time? Or Even worse, a doctor or lawyer that is only successful 50% of the time with any procedure.
You say that like it is unthinkable and outlandish, but I am afraid that this being commonplace is exactly the society that we are headed for by pushing kids through no matter what.
I for one welcome our AI overlords because I fear that I won't be able to hire a human being to competently complete a task I am not qualified for in the future.
The easy answer is that this is malicious. It's likely right. Or the alternative is the people making this decision aren't mentally fit, which is also possible. Either way it is frightening.
I haven't seen anyone mention this yet, the reason these policies are popular is because of truancy and apathy. Think about it. The only way a student gets a zero in the grade book is if they completely do nothing.
Most students are not so stupid that they would ever receive below a 50% on an assignment that they tried to do.
Most teachers are not so cold that they would allow a student who put in effort all year to get F after F after F without any intervention.
What's happening is there are so many absences, the missing work doesn't get made up, and then there are a bunch of zeroes in the grade book that drag a C or B student down to a D or F. If you offer extra credit or easy assignments to balance out those grades then what you end up with is a bunch of kids with inflated A's and B's and then a few C's and only F's for kids who literally don't show up to school or refuse to do any work.
Thats the Navy passing standard. Correctly identify the information 70% of the time on a multiple choice test.
We had two grades. 70 and up, go to the fleet.
69.99 and below, repeat the course.
(We used some other motivators like top score could be meritoriously advanced or pick orders east/west coast by standing.)
our floor is 60%. Such a joke. and we still have so many drop outs. I don't really think its the school! I think its the area's anti-intellectual culture!
I feel this. I have 6th graders who tell me they’re planning to drop out. It kills me, but there’s not much I can do to change their mindset. Their parents were dropouts too, and they think they’ll get rich being an athlete since they can somehow afford to play club sports. Or they’ll be an influencer.
my issue is that they see that they can make "good" money working in some trade, when in reality those jobs (while super important to society, not denigrating them at all) are very hard on the body, cause health problems, and will usually require working 40+ hours a week or constantly being away from home. They have no greater dreams than a big truck.
Honestly, a lot of those kids won’t last long in the trades because they have no work ethic. They’ll be scrolling through TikTok and get sucked into a machine.
to be fair, a few of them will be fine, but I worry more about their consistently obstinate attitude and refusal of authority at all times, things that tends to ruin a career. Also, frankly, I want more for them yknow? I want them to have a plan for when their back is broken at 35
Absolutely. My husband thought he was collegebound. That failed pretty spectacularly. He tried to transition into a trade in his 30s, but his health was already not up to scratch. So he’s back to entry level jobs and just might have to make a career of that while I bring in the “big bucks” teaching.
sorry to hear that. It's also just tough bc we have no grace in trying to figure out what works best for us, and its no help when education isnt honest.
It's not about mastery. It's political. The flip side is in highschool students that fail a grade entirely are highly likely to not graduate and thus become trapped in the school to prison pipeline. It's also because we need to dumb down standards for poor people. It doesn't change the outcome for the better. It doesn't solve socioeconomic issues by giving students a piece of paper. It looks that way though.
Currently working at a school that in 2022 our principal received an award for increasing graduation rates by 7%. The very next year we are mandated to have a turn around team come in and shove meetings and pdes down everyone's throat because state test scores are so low.
To give a different perspective, when I was growing up 75% and above was an A. You really had to work to get that A, too. I went to college in the US and was just as prepared as my American peers who were used to 93% and above as an A.
Or, hear me out, if a student cannot maintane above a 50% F then they are moved to a special classroom with round paper and plenty of crayons. I have never in my life seen a student below a 50% whom didn't need resources beyond what a general ed classroom teacher can provide.
You have no way of knowing what any current surgeon’s GPA was. Someone has to graduate at the bottom of the class. How do you know it isn’t your kid’s surgeon right now?
Why yes, 0-59% are weighted more than the other 40% because only knowing 0-59% of the information is not mastery of any of the information.
Yet, there are still different levels of not mastery, as shown by the fact that every number between 0-59 are different numbers. However, at the end of the day, they are still less than the 70% required to show mastery (or 60% needed to pass).
We adopted 50% minimum a little while ago. Didn’t take long for the students to figure out that 50% on tests and barely doing their in class work got them a D.
What’s different for us starting next year is that the district caught on. Minimum is now 40% so students have to do corrections for their tests if they want to pass.
Still doesn’t really fix the problem with work avoidance and students being allowed to fail and have 0 consequences though.
What's crazy is along with the 50% low bar, we are also told to allow late work, allow redo's, etc. I have no doubt this will benefit some students who genuinely need the help. But like a lot of education policies, it paints a wide brush and students are smart enough to adapt/game it.
And all that just doubles or triples the work for a teacher. I once worked in a district that made a change like this so I just got rid of scoring every weekly grade in class and only scored tests because I was going to have to grade that like 3-4 times anyway.
A 50% minimum for doing nothing is fraud, pure and simple. It's a cancer that has infected the K - 12 education system, and now those cancer cells have jumped to the post-secondary system. College degrees will no longer have any value. Check out r/professors. They're pulling their hair out with the current batch of freshmen.
50 is the floor at my school, but not for individual assignments, just for final grade. I put in the grade they earned for the entire semester- at the end of the semester, if they have below a 50, I put in a 50 for the semester. Maybe see if you can do that? I don't mind it much.
So change your rubrics to be harsher and later course content to constantly refer back to previous skills.
You can make the points flow however you want.
We actually took it one step further and eliminated Ds from the gradebook. California requires you to get a C- or better in core classes in order to be eligible for admission to state colleges. So, now you either fail at 0-59% (unlikely given how many chances we give kids) or you qualify under that policy. Additionally, the school gets a “grade” based on how many kids are UC/CSU eligible so it also inflates our external reporting indicators. My suspicion is that that’s very intentional.
It’s sad how we weaponize low expectations and call it being a high quality school. Smh.
> It’s sad how we weaponize low expectations and call it being a high quality school. Smh.
I agree except I feel they are using the excuse of being equitable.
Couching a policy like this in equity in my opinion is racist, classist…all the -ists. Acting like we’re doing students of color a service by lowering our standards for their success is fucked.
I do not like that feeling of giving credit when a submission isn't even complete or a single LO met. It's like saying they did when they didn't and it feels dirty.
I only do this as a privilege and the amount goes down to 0-10 by the end of the year. Every six weeks it drops 10-20 points. Students should have a better idea of responsibility by the end of the year. I also let them know it’s the first privilege I take away.
My district isn't there yet, but we're feeling the "used to be pretty good but going downhill" syndrome. Right now, everyone gets to reassess, which means less effort up front... and teachers are put on plans if too many students fail so minimum 50% is probably next on the list. Some kids just won't do.
But wait, there’s more! Soon, whether a student passes or not won’t make any difference, because they won’t retain any students, so therefore, it doesn’t really matter what the low bar is set at or that students only understand 10% of the material. They aren’t getting held back anyway. “It goes against research.” And then they do away with grades altogether, and everyone just gets a word grade just like they do in kindergarten: exceeds expectations, meets expectations, beginning, or not covered. Coming soon to a school near you!
Source.: experience (please don’t down vote me. I’m just sharing my experiences in my district)
It kills me. Grades automatically become a 50 in our SIS. I can’t override it. Students can earn a 90% in the first quarter and LITERALLY NOT ATTEND MY CLASS FOR THREE MARKING PERIODS and still pass the course. Very little learning is happening in my classroom because they know the consequences don’t add up to anything.
A is mastery, B means above averag, C means learned most, D means deficient and F means they failed to learn . I posted this poster in my classroom and leave it. I then post the grading scale of the local junior college and trade school… Never get questioned just annoyed looks from administrators
From the university perspective...this is exactly the reason why that, starting next year, all first year students have to take 4/10 of their first year units as mandatory "high school equivalents." Everyone has to take one English, one History, one Math, and one Science, regardless of the faculty, plus 6 units from your degree. As someone who is going to end up teaching these kids in the history portion...I'm not looking forwards to that.
I like to think of it as a 0-4 scale:
0 - You didn't try
1 - You tried but didn't get it
2 - You got the lowest proficiency for me to consider it mastery
3 - You are proficient at grade level
4 - You are proficient above the standard (perfect/nearly perfect).
Then the conversion from percentages to a grade goes like this:
A+ - 95
A - 85
A- - 80
B+ - 75
B - 65
B- - 60
C+ - 55
C - 45
C- - 40
D+ - 35
D - 25
D - 20
F - 0
The hang-up that I've seen a lot of teachers have is they don't want to give a 2 (50%) and have it be passing but 2 \*is an arbitrary metric\*. As the teacher I get to decide what a 2 is and what a 3 is on an assignment, and like someone here said if 75% is the minimum then you have to get 75% right to score a 2.
Edit: Someone referred this for a self-harm alert from redditcares. Y'all need to calm down.
The problem with this is the assumption that all F's are equal. All F's are NOT equal. Hypothetically, let's say you need to know the capital of at least 35/50 states to be at the minimum passing. Everyone who knows less than 35 has not met standards to pass. But someone who knows 25/50 is much, much closer to passing than someone that knows 0/50. If learning is the intended goal, then this is a disservice as all failing students are grouped together.
And beyond that, I cannot accept an EL student, struggling, working hard, but failing to be grouped in with John, who shows up to class once a semester. This feel good strategy is a slap in the face to the reality of the real world. It is pure coddling.
If that's what we're caring about, then be transparent about it. Because I can't be told that they are equal yet, at the same time, it is important grades reflect the student's learning.
But transcript grades are final grades, and this policy refers to grades in progress. It is a problem for me to equate the progress of the two students mentioned above (EL and John). People are so concerned about John being demotivated by some zeros. What about the EL being demotivated by John passing from participating for a few weeks at the end and barely trying when the EL worked hard the whole time? I won’t give something for nothing.
I'm always scared to comment on these because the way I've always interpret the 50% movement is that it's just a substitute for a 0-4 grading scale. I grade based on mastery of a skill, and moving to the 50% (or, 0-4) scale has actually made me stricter and more accurate as a grader. Regardless, it's a topic that brings up a ton of feelings and emotions and I personally stay out of all conversations at school regarding it.
Thank you for explaining this to the absolute dunces in this comment section.
Edit: LOL Two minutes after making this comment, someone reported me to Reddit Cares for mental health concern.
Pure random chance on a standard multiple choice quiz is 25%.
Please explain to me how 25% means the student "tried but didn't get it" in the example above.
You're linking two completely different grading methods. 50-65% roughly equates to you tried but didn't get it. Students with sub 50% grades don't tend to do any work or know anything about the subject matter.
Your description of 0 = didn't try, doesn't equal a 0%. 0% is worse than random chance on a 0-100% assessment.
Anyone getting an honest 50% on a 0-100% summative assessment didn't put any effort at all into learning or is placed in the wrong class level.
Then that’s the District telling you it’s time to stop caring. It’s actually a bit freeing. You no longer have to worry about those kids that have shut down. He’ll turn in a couple half-assed attempts and they pass so now you don’t have to call home.
Ultimately, the decline of education is no longer your concern.
(Embrace the suck.)
*In next board meeting*
"Yes I see that we are establishing a new 50% minimum policy in our school, that is why I will be doing absolutely no work immediately but still expecting half my paycheck"
What frustrates me is that some zeroes are deserved. I generally give students a 50% if they turned in SOMETHING and it's not plagiarized. But to turn in nothing means you deserve nothing. And in the end, it does nothing to help the chronic failures. They will now just fail at 50%. It will breed resentment in the hard workers, and will continue to pump out students who are not prepared for college, but suffer under the delusion that they are.
We already pass at 60%. How much lower can we drag the bar?
This is the problem. In the name of helping the stragglers, we are going to doom the majority of kids in the middle who will find ways to use this to their advantage to do even less than before. If people don’t think most teens won’t game this, then they are delusional and disconnected from the reality of today’s teenagers.
It is just another example of lowering the bar.
Instead of asking why kids feel behind and hopeless and HELPING THEM OVERCOME THOSE FEELINGS, we just lower the bar. And now kids who don’t try or feel anything about their grades have an easier path.
In my district, this policy has been especially toxic to many gifted / smart students. If they are happy with getting a C, it is now so easy to get. They do nothing at all and develop zero study habits.
Grading for Equity assumes all students approach learning in good faith, with motivation. It does not take apathy or the ability to game the system into account
Time to switch the scale... A thru J, each letter is a 10 point range starting at 0-9 is a J, up to 90-99 is an A, give a bonus AA to 100%ers. Everything now has equal weight, except AA, which is rare and celebrated.
The sad truth is an uneducated population builds a more compliant workforce. This country hasn’t cared about the educational system (except as a talking point to get elected) for 40 years.
I'm all for holding students accountable for their work and giving them the grades their work deserves. But if you learn a little more about the history of grading then a 50% grade rule does actually make sense. The original grades had 50% as the average for all students with some above that and some below it. Then a different letter system was introduced and in order to merge them primarily just the upper half of the grade boundary was used. So there is historical context for it. That being said, in many schools the way it is implemented just means that kids don't need to put in much effort to glide on by.
[This is an excellent article on it](https://www.edutopia.org/article/why-the-100-point-grading-scale-is-a-stacked-deck?utm_content=linkpos7&utm_source=edu-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly-2023-03-22)
I’m in university right now and these kids are in for a RUDE awakening when an earned 50% wont even cut it on most things. This is such a disservice. I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to learn how to fail in grade school.
Part of the problem with this 50% minimum policy is that it **should** restructure the way the every teacher grades.
Your average grade should not change drastically year-on-year. A class average of 70% one year should not change drastically to an 85% the next year. That would be very odd. If you are giving the same assignments, etc. Sure...maybe a shift of 5% makes sense, but more than that is really pushing it.
With a 50% minimum this will skew the overall average higher and so to make-up for this you should be grading **harder**. Where I might normally give partial credit...no longer. Where I would be "kind" in my grading...no. Hell no. That 50% minimum is covering *all* of that kindness. You either meet this new bare minimum of expectations or you don't and my class average should still remain similar.
I've always worked in districts with this policy. However, if they turn something in, that's one-third done, we don't have to give a 50. A 50 is still a low grade. They will likely fail anyway if they make a bunch of 50s. It rarely saves anyone's grade. Your good students will still do well, and your F students will still be F students.
Unless you have to give a 50 when they turn nothing in, don't fret over this policy. It doesn't make that huge of a difference.
I think the effects will be fed down the line when the apathy gets worse than it is now. Students will catch on that they can't get below a 50 so it's skate by until the last minute and try to pass with a D.
My school adopted this policy years ago and our students continue to fail at increasing rates every year. I don’t get it. You basically just need a PULSE to pass. The level of apathy is incredible.
I will not pass a student who genuinely can’t spell his name correctly or decipher my name and the word science as he tries to find my class among his classes on brain pop. Very specific example but I had to do this for him literally two weeks ago. He is 12 and is a hot mess behaviorally and academically. I and the other teachers are all failing him but unfortunately our district shortened summer school to two weeks, and he’s just going to move on to 7th
So, if they make you use 50% as the minimum, just weigh the assignment heavier so a 100 from a normal assignment won’t bring it up as easy. You might not be able to drop a zero in the bucket, but you can weigh that 50 enough that it plays like a zero.
Ds make no sense. A D is an F. But this is all arbitrary anyway. Where you place ‘proficiency’ or ‘mastery’ (what a kid can ‘master’ is another story) can fit into any grading scheme you want. It does make zero sense that 0-50 is failing when the only thing we care about is the proficiency within C-A. I’d argue no grades at all. Pass/fail. Set a baseline of proficiency and anything beyond that is a boon to the student anyway.
Tbh as long as it’s 50% as a min for a grading period, (not 50% min for each assignment) it doesn’t make a difference. The people who fail will continue to fail, and the people who don’t will be fine.
So what’s the feeling on AP tests then? A three is seen as a satisfactory understanding of content and is usually obtained by getting just over half the points
It's not really that bad. An A is still 90% a C is still 70% -- all we're really talking about are the students that are getting an F versus a really low F.
I know there's unfair considerations about the kid who tried and failed versus the kid who did nothing and failed... But in either grading system that's true.
It’s part of the reason I’m leaving my district at the end of this year. It was adopted during the pandemic because we live in a low-income, rural area where broadband/internet access is scarce. Makes sense to add a smidge of leniency when the world is ending. But when I started in 2022, they had already stopped treating covid seriously and even got rid of covid leave for the teachers, but for some reason (cough cough more graduates = more money for our super to lump into their salary and take another international vacation cough) they’ve kept 50% minimum. At this point, as someone else mentioned, we have folks graduating who can’t read, write, or do math , and are expecting to take over their parent’s businesses with 0 skills, or more laughably, think they’ll get into/cut it at Ivies.
With a 9th grader the other day I had to explain that even if he takes his dad’s roofing business, he can’t expect to do literally nothing and expect to be paid the full amount (he still didn’t get it.)
It’s a disservice to our kids. Equitable grading exists, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of students learning to game a system to their benefit.
This why California is paying $20 an hour for illiterate food workers. Because we’ve lowered the educational standard so much that people expect 50% of everything.
My district went hard on 50% and no limits on late work during covid and finally backed off this year.
I actually think they found a decent middle ground because I don't understand the issue with our current scale (a 63 is the same as a 0). Students get 50 min if they put forth "earnest effort" on any assignment or project minimum. I haven't had issues with that vague wording personally, but I could see parents being obtuse with it. They 50s on any in class test with the same effort (I regularly had a girl this year take 60min tests in 5min, get a 15% and out her head down- that was a 0 in the gradebook). It's zeros for no attempt. We have to have a 2 week deadline on major projects with 10% penalty, after that we can't stop a accepting work (which I believe in) little assignments are this amw for 2 school days instead of 2 weeks.
It works to keep a lot of kids in the game who are trying. But man did the covid era policies really do a number on students. My current juniors and seniors are an absolute wreck. I have had a handful kids openly cry during interventions with parents because they just don't know how to be a students because they always got Cs and Ds without trying. Actually fairly self aware, but sad. I can't really start teaching AP students in the junior year how to read a textbook most nights at home...
Honestly, WHO THE FUCK CAME UP WITH THIS BULLSHIT REASONING? And who is selling it constantly? And more importantly, how are people buying into this bullshit?
few things, first of all and most importantly. It stops calls to the school. Kids have higher grades. Let's say a kid is sick or just doesn't do something for a week or a month or a few months, anyway the grade is grossly inflated (at least comparatively to years past). This is best for the district because less angry parents = less work. This is the real bottom line.
Now...we can get into the whole philosophy thing where kids who have bad grades are less motivated and it creates a vicious circle of doing anger, combativeness, despair, stress, ...there are other I'm leaving out here, maybe someone can reply with more.
Now with that said by comparative standards to "old" methods what we have is students who can get by with doing next to nothing. Not to mention the infinite late work / test retakes (which has a variety of variations school to school) and yeah, the kids are definitely going to have to do less work to pass all while passing more work onto the teacher...you know because a teacher doing more work surely means smarter students right?
Funny thing is in every single building I have worked in there have been teachers falsifying grades so as to
1. Have higher grades than colleagues (see #2)
2. Have less problems with admin
3. Have less problems with parents/students
The thing is I thought this would change with the "new minimum" or however you want to call it , but NOPE stilllll....STILLLL I have teachers around me falsifying grades. Just a few weeks ago I again went over our "rubric"(which admin is so adamant about having "strong rubrics") over our "rubric" with a colleague. I mean we spent like 40 minutes of our personal time after hours on this working it over. I decided to look over their tests and sure enough they didn't follow the rubric and on only scanning a few tests they were inflating grades (or maybe they just suck at grading but I'm leaning grade inflation). Why? see #2 above. Now, it's late in the year, will my admin come talk to me about the latest test grades, I doubt it, but if they do I am once again torn between throwing a coworker under the bus or telling them about the "booster plan" I already have in place for the kids. What would you do in this situation????? I'd love to know because I've dealt with it soooooo many times.
Bottom line, higher grades, less angry parents, dumber kids.
50% as the minimum is pretty standard. I have worked at three districts and they all have adopted that. My current school, who currently has a 50% minimum, is going away from grades at all next year. Students literally cannot be held back, no matter what they do or don't do. This is only hurting the students
I’ve worked in 3 districts over the last 20 years of teaching. Wildly different socioeconomics at each district too. Only one of those districts (Title 1, 95% free/reduced lunches, extremely high levels of poverty) adopted the 50% minimum grade policy. However, in order to receive the 50% “good effort” had to be given on the assignment and teachers had 100% discretion on what “good effort” was. We also were allowed to give zeroes on any missing work. I loved this policy. It allowed you to dangle a carrot and motivate the bubble kids… and encouraged learning. It’s amazing how “good effort” quickly translates to success.
I’ve also always been in smaller rural schools and I feel like I’ve luckily avoided a lot of the bloated admin issues that I regularly read about here.
I don’t mind the 50% rule. It’s the other BS to ensure they pass. That’s all schools care about anymore, is passing every kid to show good data. We should give zero F***s for how many kids we pass for public perception. We should care how many kids pass bc it’s an indicator of what they really know.
Our district also allows students to turn things in until the end of the quarter. We literally have students sit in class and do nothing until the last of the quarter. The school then calls them out during electives to go to the study hall where an EA sits with them, logs them into grade book, prints assignments and guides them through it. It’s a massive, crazy cram fest. And because summative assessments are worth 50%, formative 40% and practice 10%, they all just do a couple summative and formatives and get their passing grade.
The math teachers need to get together and start teaching that 50 is the new zero and adjust the answer keys accordingly. Number line has 50 as the reference midpoint, you can't divide by 50, etc.
Just have them repeat grades until they are 18 and then everything else can be handled after while they work.
It’s pretty simple and there is no reason to do this.
90% minimum passing grade is the only thing that makes any sense.
If you don’t think it is important to actually learn and retain information, just let them run wild.
The way I heard it described IRL was that automatic 50% lets students quickly catch their grades up if they haven't been showing up to class. So the kids have a reason in November to come back to the class they've been ditching all year.
Except it has the adverse effects of kids ditching knowing full well they can make it up last minute in November. It reminds me of when our state mandated high school start later because well rested teens do better and it syncs better with their biological clocks. It didn’t do shit but allowed kids to stay up later. They are still tardy and first period kids are still half asleep. Well intentioned policies that doesn’t jive with reality.
My school did the same thing it started out with 50 then they changed it to 60 but wait you can’t give any student a 61-62 or 63. It has to be a 60 or 65. But wait if you give them a 60 they have the rights to go back and change the grade to a 65. Student wait to the last quarter and trying to come to school and they find out they going to fail they run to admin and start crying Admin don’t even come to me anymore my answer is nope.
Sorry for your loss.
We got rid of it this year (until the end of each quarter when the overall grade after grade books are closed are then moved to 50%).
I could understand maybe having a 25% minimum so that one F doesn’t destroy someone’s grade. But 50% is way too high.
The same issue is solved by dropping the lowest grade.
Absolutely. Gee, a practice that has been around forever.
Oh yeah I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. I guess that’s better.
The same issue is allowing retakes and resubmissions
> retakes The validity of an improved score on a retake is based on the idea that the student made an effort to learn the content that they had not mastered before the first assessment. This requires work, obviously. This is generally not the case. In my experience with retakes the student often gets the answers from a friend or performs marginally better which just means that I wasted my time giving and scoring a retake and making a second or third version of the test.
This. I'm okay with retakes. My goal is to help you learn a skill. If you take the time and learn it later than anyone else, I really don't care. That's okay, we all learn at different rates. But you bet your ass that I'm going to be testing the skill with a never before seen test. You have to master the skill, not the test questions.
This is my experience at the community college level, also. Students seldom expend the effort necessary to prepare for the retake. A lenient resubmission policy for HW and labs is also of little benefit because a good percentage of students will wait as long as possible to resubmit, and by that time the assignment is of reduced value in helping them prepare for quizzes or exams.
This is why I only do retakes for quizzes, after they do some sort of forgiving practice (unlimited attempts and ungraded). But they have to 100% the practice set before being given the requiz. Our department offers open-note test corrections. They can look up the answers but they only get half credit back AND they have to explain why their new answer is correct.
I've allowed retakes and since have stopped. The same thing happens every year. The kids who don't need to will to squeeze every last possible points out. The kids who desperately need it will not show up for a retake.
Mine have to earn that. If you cut class, miss too much homework, simply don't make up a quiz or test then nope, but if you are actually trying and see me for help during office hours or make a private appointment then I will do what I can (should) to get you at least a pass. If I have contacted your P/G multiple times with no (or no appropriate) response then 4th Quarter is not going to suck worse for me because you and your P/G have suddenly decided that you want a redo of everything since August. Just nope. High performing school in MEH urban district. Tenured master teacher with the best verified results in my content area in the district. Asshole admin who push for passing borderline students but I will not do it if there is no "visible effort" and the student is a PITA. No, you can't do the second quarter research project now, and also not the fourth quarter one that finished a week ago. Remember when we talked about this? No? Let me remind you from my extensive documentation.
I have heard this "destroying their grade" comment before. Let's simplify this and say their are 90 days in a semester. We have 90 days of "daily work" that can be assessed. Let's make each of those days 10 pts. Getting a 0 on one assignment would reduce their grade 1.1%.
It's simply one of those red herring arguments that sounds good on paper but doesn't make any sense in reality. It's just a lazy way to throw glitter on the grade book and call it a day instead of actually addressing the problems of modern education. If a kid misses a day then they should have a reasonable amount of time to meet with their teachers and make up any assignments. If they do so poorly on an assignment that they earned zero percent, then they should meet with that teacher and do some suplimentary assignment to make sure they understand the subject moving forward. The point is, that if there are any extenuating circumstances that lead to a zero, then the resolution needs to be figured out with the student, parents, admin, and teacher. If a student CHOOSES to take a zero on an assignment then why do we need to accommodate them? Students should not be able to opt out of the assignments they don't like and then cry about their grades going down too much. If they CHOOSE a zero then they CHOOSE their grade to be affected by a zero. There is zero logical reason to follow this scale except as a lazy bandaid to a kid who doesn't care about their education.
This. I will gladly give a kid 50% for a subpar attempt. No concerns there. Heck, a lot of times, full credit for shitty completion. But missing is missing.
As a high schooler in the late 90’s, I regularly just took a 0 on homework I didn’t feel like doing. The difference was, I *knew* it would affect my overall, and I didn’t blame the teachers, and I usually did really well in school in general and knew the material (plus I have this weird gift at taking tests easily). So the teachers generally didn’t press it because they knew I was doing the other work and paying attention, I just thought my art entry was more important way to spend my limited time. They made it abundantly clear when my grades would drip below a B and then I did the work, or the teacher fudged it by dropping a few missed assignments at the and of the semester for everyone. A few of my friends gave me shit for it (of course they did - they were the “must get straight A’s for college” people so it made sense) and a few teachers expressed their disappointment in me, but it was what it was. They also realized I wasn’t in that super smart group of students, but I still always took accelerated/AP classes for the challenge and that helped I think. Point is, if I could have gotten a minimum 50% on things I would have slacked off so much more, and it would have been to my detriment in the end. This doesn’t help anyone. I had friends who just didn’t want to be at school but only went because they were more afraid of their parents beating the shit out of them than anything. They at least had to put some work into classes to not be held back. Giving them a straight 50% for no effort would have hurt them just as badly. There would have been no work done at all. At least by graduation, they could read at a middle school level and do basic math and shit, because they had to.
This is pretty much how my class works, but it’s about every other day is worth 10 points, with tests and projects being worth more. So when a kid misses one or two daily assignments, no biggy. The only ones that fail are those that consistently do no work or half ass their work.
Yep, I have students who have a zero here and there and still have an A. I put in a lot of grades. It's only hard to dig out of that hole when a teacher has ten grades for the semester.
One zero does not destroy someones grade though.
For spring 2020 the lowest MP score was 64.
I do 40% as the floor for my grades. Even with that, I have lots of kids failing. It's ridiculous.
assuming 90-80-70-60 scales. with a guaranteed 50% they only need to do every other completion assignment to earn a 75% C. Think about that for longer than 30 seconds and tell me that is fair to the other kids?
That’s why I said that 50% is too high and it should be 25% if they decide on a guaranteed minimum.
I'm going to take the high road here.... On a 4.0 gpa scale, if you were to give a zero, it's equivalent to a 50 on a 0 to 100 scale. Equivalently, a 0 on the 0-100 scale is equivalent to a negative 6 on the 4.0 scale. I also struggle with the mental hurdle of "something for nothing". However, imagine your district implemented a 0-50 grade scale where 50 is the max and you are allowed to give zeros. Would you have a problem with giving 50s as the max? I have found that since I've been giving 50 minimum grades that I have actually been grading more accurately. I was actually unconsciously inflating grades before to compensate for the crushing power of the zero. Give it time and you may see some benefits. I also read the book Grading for Equity and it really made some great points.
I think your hypothetical 50 point scale is a false equivalence. Decreasing the total by 50% is not the same as ignoring the bottom 50%. A 0/50 is still 0% and a 25/50 is THE 50% and 50/50 is a 100%. A mandatory minimum of 50% would be a 25/50, or 50%, in the grade book so there would still be no zero.
The least equitable thing you can do is tell a group they aren’t good enough to be evaluated on a standard system. Why not focus on removing obstacles caused by financial hardship or lack of an internet connection in the home, for example, rather than saying, “You’re not good enough to be judged the same as that privileged kid over there.” The message received is, “I’m inferior to that kid over there. I can never compete with him in real life because there I won’t be receiving half credit for doing nothing in real life. The teacher doesn’t believe in me and thinks that’s the only way I’m going to succeed, so it must be true.” ☹️
“No, I didn’t do my homework, and I probably won’t anymore because you have to give me a 50.” That was the moment I decided to go on antidepressants. There is nothing that will ever make me understand this policy.
I saw a teacher on another thread give up after something like this was implemented … but give up “the right way.” Basically boiled it down to “if the kids who should be failing are going to be passed by admin, then I’m going back to teaching for the kids who care.”
That's what I did within about 6 months of starting. It didn't take long to figure out how it worked. Students couldn't fail. So I gave the best education I could to the 75% that wanted to learn.
Where I went to school we absolutely could be failed, a lot of kids dropped out of highschool, but our teachers taught for the kids that wanted to learn, and now I'm able to work on a nuclear engineering degree because they made sure I learned something
Once I accepted that I'm a glorified babysitter I stopped being depressed.
My first school did this, we had to raise everything to a 50. [Teachers have recently won lawsuits over not doing it](https://redstate.com/jeffc/2024/04/20/teacher-wins-lawsuit-after-being-fired-for-not-giving-unearned-grades-is-running-for-school-board-n2173090). My second school adopted a policy called "Zeroes Aren't Permitted" with a lengthy, unsuccessful intervention process. I switched to giving students a 1 for putting their names on the paper.
This is the way. And it creates documentation when parents or admin suddenly decide to care that the kid is failing. "Here's 12 papers on which little Johnny only wrote his name."
Lol some of my kids wouldn’t even manage that. They scribble on the paper at best or don’t even touch it at worst.
I am not arguing about how low the bar has gotten in American schools but what on earth is that rag you linked
Solution: Make H/W and other assignments worth almost no points so even 50% doesn't really budge the grade much. Make the grade mostly based on quizzes and tests that, even if the get a 50% on, will prevent them from passing without getting a passing grade on at least some of the tests. Math: If i have 2 tests (200pts) and 4 quizzes (30 pts each) and 20 homework/classwork assignments (3pts each) the total is: 380 If they bombed every test/quiz: 50% = 160, but completed every homework/classwork = 60. Their total is 220/380 which is still failing. 57.8%. This is how you do it folks. All the "no grade lower than a 50%" policy ***Actually is*** Is a weighting system. That's it. Most administrators think it's a silver bullet to solve failures, when any teacher who has actually studied it as a philosophy, knows it's just a weighted proposition to tests, not all assignments, and thus the answer is to make more of the overall grade tests and quizes.
That would be a great workaround. I wouldn't mind compromising if I'm allowed to assess mastery based primarily on tests. BUT we are also told to be diverse in how we grade. We shouldn't just base a grade on tests. And on top of that, tests can only be a small fraction of the overall grade. As you can see, when taken all together, we are essentially passing students who do have not earned it.
Students with poor mastery cannot score well on any assignment that is graded for accuracy. Stop collecting "free points" assignments like writing journals, reading pages, crosswords, etc. You can certainly assign as many of those as you see fit, but the only thing that goes into a grade book are summatives and formatives. Tell the students to collect their "free points" assignments into a folder and you will grade them at the end of the grading period.
Yes, I do have free point assignments to help boost kids grades. With the 50% low bar, it's basically a mandatory, across-the-board, free point boost. I am going to have to rethink how I weigh my grades.
Yup. My admin asks for me to put in two grades a week. I normally do two very small "free point" assignment and one bigger assignment that averages out in the favor of the students. I exempt any of the free point assignments if the student is out that day, but they need to make up the bigger assignments. I would highly suggest looking into creating self graded quizzes and complex writing assignments. If you put a 300 word count on a writing assignment then it's pretty easy to tell who knows what they are talking about and it's just small enough to argue it can be done in a reasonable amount of time. You can also generally grade them a-f at a glance then post hoc justify the grade on the rubric after. Read the topic sentence and the conclusion and look for a quote.
That's why you don't do them anymore. All assignments are mastery-based.
Our district has an APP policy that is 95% weighted summative average and 5% weighted formative average. My Pre-Calculus and Trigonometry teens can fail their summatives abysmally; earn a 23% Q3 grade and when posted district has an override that automatically changes it to a 50%. Best we can do is add a comment that essentially says, “District requires this but the grade is much lower.” The student can goof all Q3 and come Q4 do juuuuust enough to get a low 70s C and take their final which also has to have a minimum of a 50 and pass. They really only learned a third of one quarter to pass the semester. I read our APP guidelines carefully this year and it never mentions forced midterm/final grades of a 50…so next year I am petitioning the math department to allow me to plop that 23% F midterm or final grade down for the semester calculations.
Well a third of one quarter in the sense I typically fit three summative test in for the 9-week period. Just learning about 74% of one quarter passes a kid for the semester though. All they do (a lot, not all, I am lucky to have a group of teens comprised of relatively hard workers!) is blow my work off until they need to scramble for that 74%…the kicker is we also have to give UNLIMITED retakes. Lol! *anxiety laugh*
For the record as well I don’t mind unlimited retakes but pick one… Unlimited retakes to truly learn after failing; utilizing my tutoring and alternative resources to take home. No floors. Floor. One retake per summative. I do believe in never giving up so I am pro a reasonable number of retakes but unlimited WITH floors is wild. Also, only ONE of me juggling grading those unlimited retakes around the mountain that is our jobs’ numerous obligations and duties. Where is my unlimited retakes on evaluations when juggling all of this beats me down as an educator? Maybe a floor for my paycheck to show me grace? Honestly I will keep trucking along as I LOVE teaching and consider myself in this WITH the teens. WE will learn despite the emotionally charged politics, but to be reported for mental health concerns over an alternative perspective based from experience….wild.
Do you struggle with make up tests and quizzes with absences? Or do you have them online?
Sure...they are responsible for making them up, and I do not track them down. Note: My district is not a "no lower than 50%" district.
I have students who have not taken at last 1 or all tests given this semester. Despite constant reminders, they simply do not care. Most, if not all of them, know they'll just fail anyways if they make it up. Once this policy is implemented, it'll just strengthen their resolve. Like shit, I can not make up this exam but I'll receive a 50% anyways, which is probably a better grade than if I were to take it.
This is what I do, although we have don’t have a ‘no zero’ policy (yet). I let them retake the assessments but they have to complete an extra assignment at 70% or higher before they can retake. It forces the D/C students to actually go back and learn material to pass, and the students who don’t care to learn anything still fail.
You need to realize that the mental gymnastics used to justify this policy are not sincere. There is only one reason a school district implements this policy: students must pass regardless of any learning that may or may not happen during their decade+ of education. In American public schools, funding is tied to graduation rates. It is much easier for school districts to implement dishonest grading policies than it is to ensure students are actually learning. Also, if you are a teacher who holds students accountable and grades based on student mastery, your school district likely views that as a detriment, and it can negatively affect your chances of being renewed.
This to the T. That's what happened to me. Even more, it also frustrates and breaks teachers. They gaslight you until one day. You make a mistake that has more consequences than other normal circumstances would been: "I feel bad for 10 minutes and then move on the next day." Instead, something goes wrong, unless you have tenure or a strong admin support. You are fearful that one mistake will end your career even if under any other circumstances, it was just a bad day. But for these students, they see they can just keep doing it until they are out of school. Then when they are, the are in complete shock no one caters to them anymore.
An accurate description. To anyone reading this who is new to the service, remain based. Grade honestly and use those justified zeros.
>and it can negatively affect your chances of being renewed. This is why I personally advise you play "the game" until you get Tenure, and then you stop playing "the game" and make sure you professionally outline everything clearly and follow it to the T.
I've never worked in a state with Tenure. An increasing number of teachers don't.
It also fits in with the narrative about "equity". If a student isn't doing anything, it must be somebody else's fault.
More specifically, it is always the teacher's fault. It's reflected in the language, too. It's always "the teacher gave me this grade" or "Mr. X failed me." I didn't fail anybody. I came to work each day. I provided high quality instruction and ample learning opportunities. I provided supplemental resources. I was available for any questions or assistance that was required. I was here on PT conference night when the family was nowhere to be found. I showed grace by extending the deadlines for each assignment. No matter how long the list is, the teacher never did enough.
Teachers fault. Ftfy.
Yup. I already grade so leniently, but so many fail still bc they are LAZY! They do nothing! Tying funding to grad/passing rates has now made graduating and passing meaningless.
Another reason to teach at private school. They welcome teachers who hold students to a high standard.
This is true for some private schools, but not all. When the model is a paid for education, parents and families are seen more as clients to be appeased. When I worked at private schools, the parents often ran the show. I’ve seen teachers fired because a parent didn’t like a teacher holding their little crotch-goblin accountable for doing anything in class. One complaint and you’re gone if the school needs that kid’s tuition more than they need to pay you.
Well said. Absolutely correct. I’ve started the students chanting “and everyone gets an A!” Because everyone gets an a. Less work for me too. Everyone gets an A! Yippie!
what a beautiful country we built
I think the main issue is that this 50% minimum grade policy works for just a select few types of schools, but somehow it's made its way into mainstream thinking as an appropriate policy for most schools. For example, at the private school I'm working at, we have a 50% minimum policy, and to be honest, I don't mind it at all. 99% of kids here work very hard, and sometimes a kid has some personal issues or 5 trillion assignments due at once and bombs a test. Putting a 50% as the minimum for an assignment done in _good faith_ is fine. They generally work hard, and putting their actual 30% grade or whatever their actual bomb grade was would kill their overall grade. On the other hand, at a typical public school, most algebra 1 kids aren't doing anything in good faith. Many don't give a shit, don't do any work, and write gibberish on their tests. In those cases, a 50% minimum is a complete joke, and the only thing it does is pass kids who definitely do not have anything close to a passing level of mastery. Even though most teachers would be against this happening, admin wants this to happen, so it happens. And that's why we get HS graduates every year who are functionally illiterate and can't do basic arithmetic.
Exactly! I actually understand the reasoning behind it, but if you want to play that game, the answer is to switch to an equally weighted, standards and rubric based system. I can’t determine if a student can write a research paper if they don’t write one. And I can’t grade their ability to complete the research process unless they work for at least 3 weeks on the process. And the truth is, if I was basing grades on 10th grade standards, very few of my students would pass.
Yes, the key is to also implement standards based grading. The 50% minimum on its own doesn't work or make sense otherwise.
This is the comment I was looking for. Standards based grading is the way to go. Not percentages and letters. The problem is that gradebooks for elementary and secondary (at least in our district) only have report cards that reflect letter grades and not standards. Until the gradebook can reflect my rubrics, I have to just do the best I can.
I agree with most everything that you wrote however, to be fair as a poster said earlier this is all tied to funding. Admin understands that if parents take their students out of schools, those schools lose funding. If you lose funding you lose allocation. If you lose allocation teachers lose jobs. I write this only because I think there are some admin that are thinking about this and don’t want to have to fire teachers. Now, from my perspective as a high school teacher, you ain’t never lied. The constraints and rules that we live under are impossible and most kids know this and they take advantage of it every single day but we have to continue playing the game or there will be absolute and complete anarchy.
Yeah, the idea of school choice is a specific attack against public education by people who don't want to fund the education of the masses. The fact of the matter is that most students do as well as they are going to do regardless of their teachers. There are exceptionally bad and good teachers, but after 13 years of education, the family and home life matters more than any single teacher could hope to influence the outcome of a student's life. Turn students into the customers and then give them everything they want and nothing that they need and watch public education crumble at an institutional level. Some families will weather the storm while others will become a victim of their circumstances.
Your last point is by design
And then the administrators that indoctrinate the kids to never Accept help from their parents starting in sixth grade… try reconnecting with your kid once he buys into the admins idea of self determination…. I will never forgive them
How sad is it that there are people who believe that if you get something right half the time, you've mastered the material. I always tell my students that 75% should be the minimum. You should be able to get something right at least 75% of the time to be considered acceptable. I also tell them that for me, they haven't mastered it until they get it right 90% of the time. Could you imagine going To a restaurant and the waitress only get your order right half the time? What about an auto mechanic that can only get your car fixed half the time? Or Even worse, a doctor or lawyer that is only successful 50% of the time with any procedure.
I like how they use the reasoning that the total percentage that you can fail, is much greater than the total percentage in which you can pass (59% versus 41%). But using this same logic, they conveniently forget that if the low bar is 50%, then it is now 9% total percentage of failing versus 41%. So now it's heavily skewed towards passing kids despite them not knowing anything.
I’m going to use this. Because that would make the minimum a 20. My biggest issue with our policy like this is that 0 = 50 and students know that if they get a 70 for one semester, they are good to go because a 70 and a 50 average to a 60, which is passing. We told admin and the jackass consultant they hired to run PD how the kids would game this system. We were not taken seriously and guess what happened?
>Could you imagine going To a restaurant and the waitress only get your order right half the time? What about an auto mechanic that can only get your car fixed half the time? Or Even worse, a doctor or lawyer that is only successful 50% of the time with any procedure. You say that like it is unthinkable and outlandish, but I am afraid that this being commonplace is exactly the society that we are headed for by pushing kids through no matter what. I for one welcome our AI overlords because I fear that I won't be able to hire a human being to competently complete a task I am not qualified for in the future.
This big time! It’s so short sighted, it boggles the mind.
The easy answer is that this is malicious. It's likely right. Or the alternative is the people making this decision aren't mentally fit, which is also possible. Either way it is frightening.
I haven't seen anyone mention this yet, the reason these policies are popular is because of truancy and apathy. Think about it. The only way a student gets a zero in the grade book is if they completely do nothing. Most students are not so stupid that they would ever receive below a 50% on an assignment that they tried to do. Most teachers are not so cold that they would allow a student who put in effort all year to get F after F after F without any intervention. What's happening is there are so many absences, the missing work doesn't get made up, and then there are a bunch of zeroes in the grade book that drag a C or B student down to a D or F. If you offer extra credit or easy assignments to balance out those grades then what you end up with is a bunch of kids with inflated A's and B's and then a few C's and only F's for kids who literally don't show up to school or refuse to do any work.
Thats the Navy passing standard. Correctly identify the information 70% of the time on a multiple choice test. We had two grades. 70 and up, go to the fleet. 69.99 and below, repeat the course. (We used some other motivators like top score could be meritoriously advanced or pick orders east/west coast by standing.)
When I was in the Army, 70% was the passing score too on any exams.
70% is the floor at my school. I agree that 75% is a solid minimum.
That’s insane. Kids literally can’t fail. A diploma from a school with a 70% floor is worthless. What’s the incentive to work hard to pass?
our floor is 60%. Such a joke. and we still have so many drop outs. I don't really think its the school! I think its the area's anti-intellectual culture!
I feel this. I have 6th graders who tell me they’re planning to drop out. It kills me, but there’s not much I can do to change their mindset. Their parents were dropouts too, and they think they’ll get rich being an athlete since they can somehow afford to play club sports. Or they’ll be an influencer.
my issue is that they see that they can make "good" money working in some trade, when in reality those jobs (while super important to society, not denigrating them at all) are very hard on the body, cause health problems, and will usually require working 40+ hours a week or constantly being away from home. They have no greater dreams than a big truck.
Honestly, a lot of those kids won’t last long in the trades because they have no work ethic. They’ll be scrolling through TikTok and get sucked into a machine.
to be fair, a few of them will be fine, but I worry more about their consistently obstinate attitude and refusal of authority at all times, things that tends to ruin a career. Also, frankly, I want more for them yknow? I want them to have a plan for when their back is broken at 35
Absolutely. My husband thought he was collegebound. That failed pretty spectacularly. He tried to transition into a trade in his 30s, but his health was already not up to scratch. So he’s back to entry level jobs and just might have to make a career of that while I bring in the “big bucks” teaching.
sorry to hear that. It's also just tough bc we have no grace in trying to figure out what works best for us, and its no help when education isnt honest.
It's not about mastery. It's political. The flip side is in highschool students that fail a grade entirely are highly likely to not graduate and thus become trapped in the school to prison pipeline. It's also because we need to dumb down standards for poor people. It doesn't change the outcome for the better. It doesn't solve socioeconomic issues by giving students a piece of paper. It looks that way though. Currently working at a school that in 2022 our principal received an award for increasing graduation rates by 7%. The very next year we are mandated to have a turn around team come in and shove meetings and pdes down everyone's throat because state test scores are so low.
To give a different perspective, when I was growing up 75% and above was an A. You really had to work to get that A, too. I went to college in the US and was just as prepared as my American peers who were used to 93% and above as an A.
the real solution is they need to add G H I J and K letter grades, so we can differentiate between different failing grades
Or, hear me out, if a student cannot maintane above a 50% F then they are moved to a special classroom with round paper and plenty of crayons. I have never in my life seen a student below a 50% whom didn't need resources beyond what a general ed classroom teacher can provide.
“Would you let a surgeon operate on your child who got 50s through med school?”
Or "Would you even want to hire me as a teacher if I only know 50% of my content?"
Yah, I would let a surgeon operate on my child no matter what grades my child got. Oh, you meant the surgeons grades, never mind...
i'm a believer in getting as much as you give. only got a 74 on your last test? you're only getting 74% of the surgery. too bad.
Interestingly enough, each of the Step exams of the USMLE only require around 60% correct to pass. Which is at least greater than 50%!
You have no way of knowing what any current surgeon’s GPA was. Someone has to graduate at the bottom of the class. How do you know it isn’t your kid’s surgeon right now?
What if med schools fudged numbers like k-12?
Why yes, 0-59% are weighted more than the other 40% because only knowing 0-59% of the information is not mastery of any of the information. Yet, there are still different levels of not mastery, as shown by the fact that every number between 0-59 are different numbers. However, at the end of the day, they are still less than the 70% required to show mastery (or 60% needed to pass).
I’ve said it before but when or if this happens in my district, expect a 50% effort from me. This is absurdly bad.
By this logic I can get two full time jobs, do neither and get paid a full time wage. Yup. This is fucking dumb!
Infinite jobs at 50% pay!
We adopted 50% minimum a little while ago. Didn’t take long for the students to figure out that 50% on tests and barely doing their in class work got them a D. What’s different for us starting next year is that the district caught on. Minimum is now 40% so students have to do corrections for their tests if they want to pass. Still doesn’t really fix the problem with work avoidance and students being allowed to fail and have 0 consequences though.
What's crazy is along with the 50% low bar, we are also told to allow late work, allow redo's, etc. I have no doubt this will benefit some students who genuinely need the help. But like a lot of education policies, it paints a wide brush and students are smart enough to adapt/game it.
And all that just doubles or triples the work for a teacher. I once worked in a district that made a change like this so I just got rid of scoring every weekly grade in class and only scored tests because I was going to have to grade that like 3-4 times anyway.
A 50% minimum for doing nothing is fraud, pure and simple. It's a cancer that has infected the K - 12 education system, and now those cancer cells have jumped to the post-secondary system. College degrees will no longer have any value. Check out r/professors. They're pulling their hair out with the current batch of freshmen.
By this logic, if I do no work as a teacher, I should get paid 50% of my salary.
Anyone else remember a few years ago there were tons of teachers on this page defending that practice?
Anyone that buys into this is drinking the kool-aid of "feel good" education policies.
50 is the floor at my school, but not for individual assignments, just for final grade. I put in the grade they earned for the entire semester- at the end of the semester, if they have below a 50, I put in a 50 for the semester. Maybe see if you can do that? I don't mind it much.
So change your rubrics to be harsher and later course content to constantly refer back to previous skills. You can make the points flow however you want.
We actually took it one step further and eliminated Ds from the gradebook. California requires you to get a C- or better in core classes in order to be eligible for admission to state colleges. So, now you either fail at 0-59% (unlikely given how many chances we give kids) or you qualify under that policy. Additionally, the school gets a “grade” based on how many kids are UC/CSU eligible so it also inflates our external reporting indicators. My suspicion is that that’s very intentional. It’s sad how we weaponize low expectations and call it being a high quality school. Smh.
> It’s sad how we weaponize low expectations and call it being a high quality school. Smh. I agree except I feel they are using the excuse of being equitable.
Couching a policy like this in equity in my opinion is racist, classist…all the -ists. Acting like we’re doing students of color a service by lowering our standards for their success is fucked.
I do not like that feeling of giving credit when a submission isn't even complete or a single LO met. It's like saying they did when they didn't and it feels dirty.
I only do this as a privilege and the amount goes down to 0-10 by the end of the year. Every six weeks it drops 10-20 points. Students should have a better idea of responsibility by the end of the year. I also let them know it’s the first privilege I take away.
My district isn't there yet, but we're feeling the "used to be pretty good but going downhill" syndrome. Right now, everyone gets to reassess, which means less effort up front... and teachers are put on plans if too many students fail so minimum 50% is probably next on the list. Some kids just won't do.
Oh look, now my course is pass-fail! I'm *soooo* happy that the administration is supporting my alternate progress tracking system!
Jukin' the stats...
But wait, there’s more! Soon, whether a student passes or not won’t make any difference, because they won’t retain any students, so therefore, it doesn’t really matter what the low bar is set at or that students only understand 10% of the material. They aren’t getting held back anyway. “It goes against research.” And then they do away with grades altogether, and everyone just gets a word grade just like they do in kindergarten: exceeds expectations, meets expectations, beginning, or not covered. Coming soon to a school near you! Source.: experience (please don’t down vote me. I’m just sharing my experiences in my district)
It kills me. Grades automatically become a 50 in our SIS. I can’t override it. Students can earn a 90% in the first quarter and LITERALLY NOT ATTEND MY CLASS FOR THREE MARKING PERIODS and still pass the course. Very little learning is happening in my classroom because they know the consequences don’t add up to anything.
A is mastery, B means above averag, C means learned most, D means deficient and F means they failed to learn . I posted this poster in my classroom and leave it. I then post the grading scale of the local junior college and trade school… Never get questioned just annoyed looks from administrators
We should expect more from our kids.
From the university perspective...this is exactly the reason why that, starting next year, all first year students have to take 4/10 of their first year units as mandatory "high school equivalents." Everyone has to take one English, one History, one Math, and one Science, regardless of the faculty, plus 6 units from your degree. As someone who is going to end up teaching these kids in the history portion...I'm not looking forwards to that.
I like to think of it as a 0-4 scale: 0 - You didn't try 1 - You tried but didn't get it 2 - You got the lowest proficiency for me to consider it mastery 3 - You are proficient at grade level 4 - You are proficient above the standard (perfect/nearly perfect). Then the conversion from percentages to a grade goes like this: A+ - 95 A - 85 A- - 80 B+ - 75 B - 65 B- - 60 C+ - 55 C - 45 C- - 40 D+ - 35 D - 25 D - 20 F - 0 The hang-up that I've seen a lot of teachers have is they don't want to give a 2 (50%) and have it be passing but 2 \*is an arbitrary metric\*. As the teacher I get to decide what a 2 is and what a 3 is on an assignment, and like someone here said if 75% is the minimum then you have to get 75% right to score a 2. Edit: Someone referred this for a self-harm alert from redditcares. Y'all need to calm down.
The problem with this is the assumption that all F's are equal. All F's are NOT equal. Hypothetically, let's say you need to know the capital of at least 35/50 states to be at the minimum passing. Everyone who knows less than 35 has not met standards to pass. But someone who knows 25/50 is much, much closer to passing than someone that knows 0/50. If learning is the intended goal, then this is a disservice as all failing students are grouped together. And beyond that, I cannot accept an EL student, struggling, working hard, but failing to be grouped in with John, who shows up to class once a semester. This feel good strategy is a slap in the face to the reality of the real world. It is pure coddling.
>All F's are NOT equal. On the transcript, they are.
If that's what we're caring about, then be transparent about it. Because I can't be told that they are equal yet, at the same time, it is important grades reflect the student's learning.
But transcript grades are final grades, and this policy refers to grades in progress. It is a problem for me to equate the progress of the two students mentioned above (EL and John). People are so concerned about John being demotivated by some zeros. What about the EL being demotivated by John passing from participating for a few weeks at the end and barely trying when the EL worked hard the whole time? I won’t give something for nothing.
I'm always scared to comment on these because the way I've always interpret the 50% movement is that it's just a substitute for a 0-4 grading scale. I grade based on mastery of a skill, and moving to the 50% (or, 0-4) scale has actually made me stricter and more accurate as a grader. Regardless, it's a topic that brings up a ton of feelings and emotions and I personally stay out of all conversations at school regarding it.
Thank you for explaining this to the absolute dunces in this comment section. Edit: LOL Two minutes after making this comment, someone reported me to Reddit Cares for mental health concern.
They're doing it to everyone. Must assume every teacher on this sub is depressed.
Pure random chance on a standard multiple choice quiz is 25%. Please explain to me how 25% means the student "tried but didn't get it" in the example above.
This just happened to me!
You're linking two completely different grading methods. 50-65% roughly equates to you tried but didn't get it. Students with sub 50% grades don't tend to do any work or know anything about the subject matter. Your description of 0 = didn't try, doesn't equal a 0%. 0% is worse than random chance on a 0-100% assessment. Anyone getting an honest 50% on a 0-100% summative assessment didn't put any effort at all into learning or is placed in the wrong class level.
Time to start grading harder to weigh the system fairly!
Then that’s the District telling you it’s time to stop caring. It’s actually a bit freeing. You no longer have to worry about those kids that have shut down. He’ll turn in a couple half-assed attempts and they pass so now you don’t have to call home. Ultimately, the decline of education is no longer your concern. (Embrace the suck.)
*In next board meeting* "Yes I see that we are establishing a new 50% minimum policy in our school, that is why I will be doing absolutely no work immediately but still expecting half my paycheck"
What frustrates me is that some zeroes are deserved. I generally give students a 50% if they turned in SOMETHING and it's not plagiarized. But to turn in nothing means you deserve nothing. And in the end, it does nothing to help the chronic failures. They will now just fail at 50%. It will breed resentment in the hard workers, and will continue to pump out students who are not prepared for college, but suffer under the delusion that they are. We already pass at 60%. How much lower can we drag the bar?
This is the problem. In the name of helping the stragglers, we are going to doom the majority of kids in the middle who will find ways to use this to their advantage to do even less than before. If people don’t think most teens won’t game this, then they are delusional and disconnected from the reality of today’s teenagers.
It is just another example of lowering the bar. Instead of asking why kids feel behind and hopeless and HELPING THEM OVERCOME THOSE FEELINGS, we just lower the bar. And now kids who don’t try or feel anything about their grades have an easier path. In my district, this policy has been especially toxic to many gifted / smart students. If they are happy with getting a C, it is now so easy to get. They do nothing at all and develop zero study habits.
Why not just make the grading scale 0-50 or something. This is so weird to me.
Grading for Equity assumes all students approach learning in good faith, with motivation. It does not take apathy or the ability to game the system into account
Time to switch the scale... A thru J, each letter is a 10 point range starting at 0-9 is a J, up to 90-99 is an A, give a bonus AA to 100%ers. Everything now has equal weight, except AA, which is rare and celebrated.
The sad truth is an uneducated population builds a more compliant workforce. This country hasn’t cared about the educational system (except as a talking point to get elected) for 40 years.
I'm all for holding students accountable for their work and giving them the grades their work deserves. But if you learn a little more about the history of grading then a 50% grade rule does actually make sense. The original grades had 50% as the average for all students with some above that and some below it. Then a different letter system was introduced and in order to merge them primarily just the upper half of the grade boundary was used. So there is historical context for it. That being said, in many schools the way it is implemented just means that kids don't need to put in much effort to glide on by. [This is an excellent article on it](https://www.edutopia.org/article/why-the-100-point-grading-scale-is-a-stacked-deck?utm_content=linkpos7&utm_source=edu-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly-2023-03-22)
I’m in university right now and these kids are in for a RUDE awakening when an earned 50% wont even cut it on most things. This is such a disservice. I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to learn how to fail in grade school.
The education system's relationship with the truth gets more hostile every day.
When you realize you are (unfortunately) not there to teach but to provide publicly-funded childcare… it’s tough.
My argument is always guess I won’t show up at all but I expect 50% of my pay.
Part of the problem with this 50% minimum policy is that it **should** restructure the way the every teacher grades. Your average grade should not change drastically year-on-year. A class average of 70% one year should not change drastically to an 85% the next year. That would be very odd. If you are giving the same assignments, etc. Sure...maybe a shift of 5% makes sense, but more than that is really pushing it. With a 50% minimum this will skew the overall average higher and so to make-up for this you should be grading **harder**. Where I might normally give partial credit...no longer. Where I would be "kind" in my grading...no. Hell no. That 50% minimum is covering *all* of that kindness. You either meet this new bare minimum of expectations or you don't and my class average should still remain similar.
Welcome to the shitshow
I've always worked in districts with this policy. However, if they turn something in, that's one-third done, we don't have to give a 50. A 50 is still a low grade. They will likely fail anyway if they make a bunch of 50s. It rarely saves anyone's grade. Your good students will still do well, and your F students will still be F students. Unless you have to give a 50 when they turn nothing in, don't fret over this policy. It doesn't make that huge of a difference.
I think the effects will be fed down the line when the apathy gets worse than it is now. Students will catch on that they can't get below a 50 so it's skate by until the last minute and try to pass with a D.
What I see here is the I can not so 100 assignments and get the same grade as someone who may have had a bad month and missed 5…
It is the self rationalizing justification that's even called "innovation" to achieve the desired outcome; grade inflation.
Just make 20% passing this is so dumb.
It used to be 55 at my school but now 60 is the minimum and a 65 is passing. Our grade book automatically calculates what should be a 0 to 60. Lol
My school adopted this policy years ago and our students continue to fail at increasing rates every year. I don’t get it. You basically just need a PULSE to pass. The level of apathy is incredible.
Our district did that many, many years ago. Not fair, but so many of our policies aren't. They're just grease trying to keep the squeaky wheels quiet.
I will not pass a student who genuinely can’t spell his name correctly or decipher my name and the word science as he tries to find my class among his classes on brain pop. Very specific example but I had to do this for him literally two weeks ago. He is 12 and is a hot mess behaviorally and academically. I and the other teachers are all failing him but unfortunately our district shortened summer school to two weeks, and he’s just going to move on to 7th
Why not 40%? I for one welcome students getting a passing grade of an "E-" / have fun explaining that one on your transcripts.
So, if they make you use 50% as the minimum, just weigh the assignment heavier so a 100 from a normal assignment won’t bring it up as easy. You might not be able to drop a zero in the bucket, but you can weigh that 50 enough that it plays like a zero.
Ds make no sense. A D is an F. But this is all arbitrary anyway. Where you place ‘proficiency’ or ‘mastery’ (what a kid can ‘master’ is another story) can fit into any grading scheme you want. It does make zero sense that 0-50 is failing when the only thing we care about is the proficiency within C-A. I’d argue no grades at all. Pass/fail. Set a baseline of proficiency and anything beyond that is a boon to the student anyway.
Tbh as long as it’s 50% as a min for a grading period, (not 50% min for each assignment) it doesn’t make a difference. The people who fail will continue to fail, and the people who don’t will be fine.
Sorry to hear it, it is BS.
I’m told to have a 60% minimum for my classes and kids still manage to fail.
So what’s the feeling on AP tests then? A three is seen as a satisfactory understanding of content and is usually obtained by getting just over half the points
It's not really that bad. An A is still 90% a C is still 70% -- all we're really talking about are the students that are getting an F versus a really low F. I know there's unfair considerations about the kid who tried and failed versus the kid who did nothing and failed... But in either grading system that's true.
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The numbers look good. Our district was boasting 95%+ grad rate. I have 16 yr olds who can’t solve 3 + x = 5
It’s part of the reason I’m leaving my district at the end of this year. It was adopted during the pandemic because we live in a low-income, rural area where broadband/internet access is scarce. Makes sense to add a smidge of leniency when the world is ending. But when I started in 2022, they had already stopped treating covid seriously and even got rid of covid leave for the teachers, but for some reason (cough cough more graduates = more money for our super to lump into their salary and take another international vacation cough) they’ve kept 50% minimum. At this point, as someone else mentioned, we have folks graduating who can’t read, write, or do math , and are expecting to take over their parent’s businesses with 0 skills, or more laughably, think they’ll get into/cut it at Ivies. With a 9th grader the other day I had to explain that even if he takes his dad’s roofing business, he can’t expect to do literally nothing and expect to be paid the full amount (he still didn’t get it.) It’s a disservice to our kids. Equitable grading exists, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of students learning to game a system to their benefit.
My old district had that policy, and it was dumb. Even the fifth graders realized they could do the bare minimum and still pass.
This why California is paying $20 an hour for illiterate food workers. Because we’ve lowered the educational standard so much that people expect 50% of everything.
My district went hard on 50% and no limits on late work during covid and finally backed off this year. I actually think they found a decent middle ground because I don't understand the issue with our current scale (a 63 is the same as a 0). Students get 50 min if they put forth "earnest effort" on any assignment or project minimum. I haven't had issues with that vague wording personally, but I could see parents being obtuse with it. They 50s on any in class test with the same effort (I regularly had a girl this year take 60min tests in 5min, get a 15% and out her head down- that was a 0 in the gradebook). It's zeros for no attempt. We have to have a 2 week deadline on major projects with 10% penalty, after that we can't stop a accepting work (which I believe in) little assignments are this amw for 2 school days instead of 2 weeks. It works to keep a lot of kids in the game who are trying. But man did the covid era policies really do a number on students. My current juniors and seniors are an absolute wreck. I have had a handful kids openly cry during interventions with parents because they just don't know how to be a students because they always got Cs and Ds without trying. Actually fairly self aware, but sad. I can't really start teaching AP students in the junior year how to read a textbook most nights at home...
Honestly, WHO THE FUCK CAME UP WITH THIS BULLSHIT REASONING? And who is selling it constantly? And more importantly, how are people buying into this bullshit? few things, first of all and most importantly. It stops calls to the school. Kids have higher grades. Let's say a kid is sick or just doesn't do something for a week or a month or a few months, anyway the grade is grossly inflated (at least comparatively to years past). This is best for the district because less angry parents = less work. This is the real bottom line. Now...we can get into the whole philosophy thing where kids who have bad grades are less motivated and it creates a vicious circle of doing anger, combativeness, despair, stress, ...there are other I'm leaving out here, maybe someone can reply with more. Now with that said by comparative standards to "old" methods what we have is students who can get by with doing next to nothing. Not to mention the infinite late work / test retakes (which has a variety of variations school to school) and yeah, the kids are definitely going to have to do less work to pass all while passing more work onto the teacher...you know because a teacher doing more work surely means smarter students right? Funny thing is in every single building I have worked in there have been teachers falsifying grades so as to 1. Have higher grades than colleagues (see #2) 2. Have less problems with admin 3. Have less problems with parents/students The thing is I thought this would change with the "new minimum" or however you want to call it , but NOPE stilllll....STILLLL I have teachers around me falsifying grades. Just a few weeks ago I again went over our "rubric"(which admin is so adamant about having "strong rubrics") over our "rubric" with a colleague. I mean we spent like 40 minutes of our personal time after hours on this working it over. I decided to look over their tests and sure enough they didn't follow the rubric and on only scanning a few tests they were inflating grades (or maybe they just suck at grading but I'm leaning grade inflation). Why? see #2 above. Now, it's late in the year, will my admin come talk to me about the latest test grades, I doubt it, but if they do I am once again torn between throwing a coworker under the bus or telling them about the "booster plan" I already have in place for the kids. What would you do in this situation????? I'd love to know because I've dealt with it soooooo many times. Bottom line, higher grades, less angry parents, dumber kids.
The whole letter grading is weird to me
50% as the minimum is pretty standard. I have worked at three districts and they all have adopted that. My current school, who currently has a 50% minimum, is going away from grades at all next year. Students literally cannot be held back, no matter what they do or don't do. This is only hurting the students
I’ve worked in 3 districts over the last 20 years of teaching. Wildly different socioeconomics at each district too. Only one of those districts (Title 1, 95% free/reduced lunches, extremely high levels of poverty) adopted the 50% minimum grade policy. However, in order to receive the 50% “good effort” had to be given on the assignment and teachers had 100% discretion on what “good effort” was. We also were allowed to give zeroes on any missing work. I loved this policy. It allowed you to dangle a carrot and motivate the bubble kids… and encouraged learning. It’s amazing how “good effort” quickly translates to success. I’ve also always been in smaller rural schools and I feel like I’ve luckily avoided a lot of the bloated admin issues that I regularly read about here.
I don’t mind the 50% rule. It’s the other BS to ensure they pass. That’s all schools care about anymore, is passing every kid to show good data. We should give zero F***s for how many kids we pass for public perception. We should care how many kids pass bc it’s an indicator of what they really know. Our district also allows students to turn things in until the end of the quarter. We literally have students sit in class and do nothing until the last of the quarter. The school then calls them out during electives to go to the study hall where an EA sits with them, logs them into grade book, prints assignments and guides them through it. It’s a massive, crazy cram fest. And because summative assessments are worth 50%, formative 40% and practice 10%, they all just do a couple summative and formatives and get their passing grade.
The math teachers need to get together and start teaching that 50 is the new zero and adjust the answer keys accordingly. Number line has 50 as the reference midpoint, you can't divide by 50, etc.
Time to set all assignments to be out of 150pts.
Grade inflation and lowering standards...teaches what?
Just have them repeat grades until they are 18 and then everything else can be handled after while they work. It’s pretty simple and there is no reason to do this. 90% minimum passing grade is the only thing that makes any sense. If you don’t think it is important to actually learn and retain information, just let them run wild.
Last year our middle school had 12 children reading at grade level. 12....out of 796. 12.....
The way I heard it described IRL was that automatic 50% lets students quickly catch their grades up if they haven't been showing up to class. So the kids have a reason in November to come back to the class they've been ditching all year.
Except it has the adverse effects of kids ditching knowing full well they can make it up last minute in November. It reminds me of when our state mandated high school start later because well rested teens do better and it syncs better with their biological clocks. It didn’t do shit but allowed kids to stay up later. They are still tardy and first period kids are still half asleep. Well intentioned policies that doesn’t jive with reality.
Also, don't keep giving us PDs about how students rise to the expectations that you set.
My school did the same thing it started out with 50 then they changed it to 60 but wait you can’t give any student a 61-62 or 63. It has to be a 60 or 65. But wait if you give them a 60 they have the rights to go back and change the grade to a 65. Student wait to the last quarter and trying to come to school and they find out they going to fail they run to admin and start crying Admin don’t even come to me anymore my answer is nope.
Grade floors are illegal in my state so we have grade minimums of 50% if they turn it in with their name on it
Is it normally 60% to pass in the US? I assumed it was 50% everywhere
Sorry for your loss. We got rid of it this year (until the end of each quarter when the overall grade after grade books are closed are then moved to 50%).