Teachers Should Be Able to Give the Grades Students Deserve
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that administrators should not override teachers' grading decisions, which undermines teacher authority and grade integrity.
Key Takeaways
- Grade overrides are a red flag - When administrators change grades teachers have assigned, it destroys trust and accountability
- Teachers know their students - The person who taught the class and graded the work is the best judge of the grade
- This enables grade inflation - Administrative grade changes almost always go in one direction: up
Transcript
I think teachers should have the final say over grades in their classes.
I think it's reasonable to have school-level policies about grades, but I don't think a counselor or an administrator should be able to overrule the teacher on what's happening with the grades in a particular teacher's class.
So I saw this story recently over on X, and a student is failing, the teacher has contacted the parents repeatedly, The student has been sleeping in class, playing games on the Chromebook, has cheated on tests, has gotten zeros, has gotten discipline referrals.
And the counselor says, kid's going to get to retake these tests.
Kid is going to come after school so that you can teach them what they missed and get those grades up.
And of course, I feel like teachers should do what they can to support kids, but this seems way off, and it seems like a reversal of the relationship that it should exist between the counselor and the teacher.
The counselor's job should be to help the student meet the teacher's expectations, not to bend the teacher's expectations to fit the student's minimal level of effort.
Does this seem very backwards to you?
It does to me, and I think this is one of the primary weapons we have to combat grade inflation, right?
When there are other people who can just feel sorry for the kid and not really care about what they've done or not done and inflate grades, then of course we're going to have grade inflation.
When we have the teacher who actually knows what the student has done and has learned, that is our anchor against grade inflation, right?
Because when we say grades are inflated, they're inflated above what indicates what the student has learned, right?
They're inflated in a way that it misleads parents about what the kid has actually learned.
If this kid has not been doing anything in class and gets a passing grade, that is misleading.
So if we want to fight grade inflation, we've got to trust teachers to give the grades and not have them be overruled by other people.
Let me know what you think.