In most math problems, zero would never be confused with 50, but a handful of schools nationwide have set off an emotional academic debate by giving minimum scores of 50 for students who fail.
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Their argument: Other letter grades — A, B, C and D — are broken down in increments of 10 from 60 to 100, but there is a 59-point spread between D and F, a gap that can often make it mathematically impossible for some failing students to ever catch up.
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“It’s a classic mathematical dilemma: that the students have a six times greater chance of getting an F,” says Douglas Reeves, founder of The Leadership and Learning Center, a Colorado-based educational think tank who has written on the topic
Basically, this continues with the increasingly common practice of artificially inflating the grades of students so that everything looks better on paper. There isn’t much of this at my school (at least, not as far as I know), but I’ve heard of it. My AP English teacher tells us of other schools where they just make every senior English class an AP class, without adding the additional depth and rigor that is supposed to go along with it, simply because it makes their school look better than it really is.
I can imagine this is motivated largely by complaints from parents. They’re all so upset that their little genius can’t pass English 12 because he or she blew off all the work in the first semester of the class. Well, if they have below a 20% they’re fucked, since even a perfect score on everything from then on isn’t going to get them above a 60% average. But, if it were set at 50% instead, a 70% the second semester would average out to a passing grade. By avoiding the immediate problem of the annoying parents, these schools are lowering standards and giving kids a sub-par education.
Also, note the “six times greater chance of getting an F” part — this statement is based on the obviously flawed assumption that students’ grades are evenly spread between 0 and 100. The grading system isn’t designed like that. Strange that someone from an education think tank would make such an obvious error.
But opponents say the larger gap between D and F exists because passing requires a minimum competency of understanding at least 60% of the material. Handing out more credit than a student has earned is grade inflation, says Ed Fields, founder of HotChalk.com, a site for teachers and parents: “I certainly don’t want to teach my children that no effort is going to get them half the way there.”
As far as I’m concerned, if you refuse to do any homework, sleep during class, and spend test time trying to spell words on the scantron sheet, you don’t deserve a 50. A 50 may still be a failing grade, but you shouldn’t get a 50 for doing nothing. There is a difference between a high and a low F, and the article discusses it: a high F on a test means the chance of passing the class as a whole is higher.
It’s absurd to say that because a student may be in a situation where it is difficult to raise his or her grade, that student’s grade should be arbitrarily raised to increase the chance of passing. We shouldn’t be trying to help kids pass classes by manipulating what their grade is on paper. It doesn’t get anyone anywhere. The focus of our education system should be to give out knowledge, not to give out diplomas and letter grades.
I think the 50% minimum grade might work. If someone can’t even pass the class no matter what they do, they’ll just give up. We should at least give them the chance to show that they can do it.
heh, doesn’t matter anymore. Some of the greatest minds of our world are dropouts or didn’t attend school to begin with. I’m referring to the self-directed and disciplined students, of course, not the gang members.
No, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong. Its not about people being this way or that, its about converting numbers from one scale to another. Tests, etc. are scored in percents, which is a one hundred point scale. Grades have traditionally been expressed on a four point scale. Converting across the scales seems easy, even unnecessary until you notice the fundamentally different structure they each have. i.e. there is no such thing as a negative score on a 4 pt. grade scale.
The 4 pt. grade scale was put together by building upon the former system of Pass/Fail. So, their wisdom said that you must pass a test, paper, etc. before the quality differences between the four letter grades are even relavent. Failing grades are given 0 points or ‘no credit’, right?
But, 0.0 grade points lines up with 50%, not zero percent. Zero thru 59% is failing and all of those raw scores should receive a grade of zero, no credit toward passiing the class.
But, now you have 50 points left over that seem like they mean something, but they all mean zero. Now that you know 50% is the same as zero, then anything below that is in negative grades territory. For example if we were to assign every 10% another letter grade, a 0% score (which can only be a raw score never converted to a grade) will be equal to an “L” grade or a negative six on a four point scale that is supposed to only have positive numbers.
Lets say that a 0% raw score for a missing assignment is averaged in with other letter grades expressed as percents (notice that none of the letter grades expressed as percents are less than 50% if the transformation was done correctly). That 0% will not only mean the assignment was given ‘F’ or zero points, it will also takes six full grades worth of points off of other assignments, such as the A from last week is now an F, and there is still enough negativity left (from the 0%) to make the kid’s next A into a C, even if its a perfect paper, (or whatever the mix of six letter grades removed actually is for that kid). So, the three grades together (A, F, A) now average 59.7%, an ‘F’. Yet, if they had been calculated properly, it would have been an 83.3%, B.
Its a matter of translating from one scale to another where 50% equals 0.0 just like 32º Fahrenheit equals 0º Celsius. No one begrudges Fahrenheit for “getting 32º for nothing”.
0% thru 59% means failure or zero. Dead is dead. Its alive or dead; Pass or Fail. Distinctions beyond that are meaningless, yet dangerous if raw scores are allowed to hang around and be averaged in with scores converted to grades. If the teacher doesn’t understand this, then a futile situation is created for the student.
For example, how many ‘A’ s (at 95%) does it take to balance out the effect of one ‘F’ kept at the raw score of 0% to get a C 75% overall grade ?
One, like it should be? No, without raw score conversion that’s equivalent to two ‘F’s (46.5%, 46.5%)
Two? No, that’s three ‘D’ s at 62%.
Three? No, that’s four ‘D’ s at 69.7%.
Answer: four actual ‘A’ grades balance one raw score of 0% to get a ‘C’ of 74.4%. That’s three more ‘A’s than should be necessary and the average is still 0.06 points lower than one ‘A’ would legitimately have done at 75%.
That’s with only one 0% which virtually guarantees the kid will not get better than a C out of the class no matter how hard they try. Two or three 0%s and its usually impossible to get better than a D or even an F in the class, even if all of their test grades are ‘A’s and ‘B’s, showing that they actually know the stuff.
Its not about people being jerks, or too whiney, its about a subtle yet potent mathematical difference between the scales, and the unrecognized wisdom of how the grade scales were put together in the beginning. If the difference goes unnoticed, lots of things go wrong. The quick fix is to never allow negative grading by making the minimum grade 50% rule. But then people who don’t think very long about it think that it is giving the store away to spoiled young kids. No, its keeping teachers honest and not allowing them to screw over the students with the (understandable) mathematical misconception that 0% is the same as 0.0.
I am researching the 50/0 debate as there is a meeting at the school at which I teach to determine what our practice should be. I appreciate your realistic view that if you do nothing, why should you be given half credit? Do nothing, get nothing. Isn’t that what life usually shows us? I think that giving artificially inflated grades gives kids the though that if they do nothing, they should expect to be given something. Where in real life does that happen? I wonder if I did half my job as a special educator and ignored my paperwork what the school would do to me… I don’t think I’d have a job.