Should Students Fail If They Don't Do Most of Their Work?

Grade inflation has to come at the expense of student learning.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately.

Lots of you left great comments to help me think about this.

And the 20-point kind of GPA-style scales do make it seem a little bit more fair.

When a student gets a zero, it doesn't have the same negative impact.

But it is undeniable that there's also a huge amount of grade inflation going on.

When we switched from a traditional scale where, you know, a 60 is a D, anything below that is an F, to a scale where a 20 or higher is a D, an 80 or higher is an A, that kind of scale, it's inevitable that there's going to be a huge amount of grade inflation and students are going to be able to pass despite not doing the majority of their work.

And that's the point where I have to say, wait a minute, this is not just about fairness.

This is not just about making the scale more rational.

At some point, we have to say the purpose of school is learning.

And if students can go through school and miss the majority of their learning, if we're setting up a system where students can succeed despite missing the majority of their learning, something's wrong there, right?

Like if we were to try to approach from an attendance perspective and say, well, as long as you come to school like once a week, you're fine.

No, if what we're doing the other four days a week matters, then it's not fine to miss those four days out of five in a week.

And I get that we wanna protect students from the consequences of their actions, but we have to be very careful about that, right?

Because we can't protect students from the consequences of their actions if what they're supposed to be doing is the whole point in the first place, right?

Like if...

if we've set up good things to happen at school, if we have good assignments for students to do and the purpose of school is to help them do the work and learn the stuff that they're supposed to learn, trying to get students off the hook for that undermines the very purpose that we're all here for.

So, you know, I think we can have grace for students by doing things like dropping, you know, the lowest three grades for the term, you know, and a lot of the motivation for these different grading scales or the policies like 50 is the minimum allowable grade The motivation comes from the sense that once a student is so far behind that they can't possibly pass, they just give up.

And of course, that's reasonable.

It's reasonable to give up when you know you can't succeed.

But one of the things we could do to solve that problem on a semester basis is just start issuing credit on a quarterly basis, right?

To say, okay, you know, the first nine weeks, there are 36 weeks in the school year roughly, the first nine weeks you get a quarter of a credit and if you bomb, you get no credit and you can start fresh the second quarter, not the second semester, but the second quarter.

And that would give students more of a fresh start and it would give them less to make up in summer school or credit recovery, which people say is maybe not super valuable.

But I think any approach that gets students out of doing the work and doing the learning that they're here to do, doesn't seem good enough to me.

It seems like we're cheating in order to get good statistics about our pass rates, our graduation rates, our dropout rates.

Like we want to make ourselves look good with statistics at the expense of student learning.

I think that's just not a good trade.

So again, I think we have to be very, very careful about grade inflation.

And I think I'm circling back around to defending the traditional grading scale, where if you miss a lot of assignments, you don't pass.

Let me know what you think.