Letting non graduates walk????

[mjr]

This is true, but the point of school isn't to fail kids. It's to get them to learn.

Yes. And an accurate grade shows how much they've learned (or haven't learned).

So say you're a kid who's been messing around and fucked up. Several 0s in a row bad. You get the come to God lecture and decide to change things. Except...there's not enough time or grades to bring it up to passing anymore. Do you try?

Considering it's something you should have been doing (and the teacher should have made the parent aware of) in the first place?

But bring the grades to a 50 or 60, that's recoverable. That you can get a pass on. And more kids try and, therefore, learn.

But they still have the same amount of knowledge. A kid who scores a 30 on a test (and gets a 50) as opposed to a kid who scores a 40 on the same test, there's really not much difference in how much they learned. Giving them an artificially high score doesn't really change the fact that Kid A only got 30% of the questions correct, and Kid B only got 40% correct.

But if 50% is the "low end", why not just hand out assignments with half the questions with the correct answers already in place to begin with?

[TheHuckster]

For most kids, the answer is no, because if they aren't going to pass anyway, then what's the difference? But bring the grades to a 50 or 60, that's recoverable. That you can get a pass on. And more kids try and, therefore, learn.

If they got 0's on several tests, they clearly didn't learn anything from the content of those tests. Yes, if they improved, and learned other stuff later on, that's great, but they've lost the opportunity to retake the class and actually learn what they completely missed.

And a lot of classes build off of earlier topics. So, if I am taking trigonometry, and I get a 0 on tests involving the Pythagorean Theorem, but thanks to the 50 I got instead, I got to squeeze my way through and can proceed to the next level trigonometry class, even though I never learned one of the most basic concepts in the subject. That's doing me a disservice and sets me up for further failure and great frustration down the line.

I could understand being forgiving on a couple bad tests here and there, but there's a point when you've got to say you didn't learn the fundamental concepts in the class, and as a result, you have to retake it.

[Andara Bledin]

Trig? In high school?!? Yeah, that's so not part of this discussion.

Unless school has changed upward radically in the last couple of decades (it hasn't), nobody is taking any classes that require earlier classes as a prerequisite until they get to AP and college credit courses. It just doesn't happen.

Everything you need to know about any class is completely within that class because not all schools have the same curriculum, even within the same district. And everything you should have learned should be reflected on the final, so if you don't know your shit, you're going to fail regardless of what 'helper' scores you got on regular coursework.

And if a kid can ace the final, then what the ever-loving fuck does it matter that they didn't turn in a single scrap of homework? That's a disciplinary issue at best and should never be a matter that can prevent a minimal passing grade for the class, because it's obvious that the kid knows the subject and possibly should have been in a higher level in the first place. Ultimately, it's bureaucratic authoritarian dickshittery to hold kids back when they know the subject but won't do the busywork. Marking them down is totally deserved, but holding them back at that point does absolutely nobody any good at all.

But that's totally far afield of the OP and probably deserves its own thread.

[NecCat]

Trig? In high school?!? Yeah, that's so not part of this discussion.

Unless school has changed upward radically in the last couple of decades (it hasn't), nobody is taking any classes that require earlier classes as a prerequisite until they get to AP and college credit courses. It just doesn't happen....

But that's totally far afield of the OP and probably deserves its own thread.

I'm not sure how I feel about the situation in the OP, but I took trig in high school, also calculus and algebra. The trig and work with derivatives both helped enormously when it came to calculating instantaneous velocity vs speed, and tensile, shear and compression strength in physics class, which I also took in high school, as well as some of the volume density work in the chemistry classes I took, in high school. Lot's of work in high school is based on having the knowledge from previous classes and years in order to succeed at the current level.

I also use the trig combined with algebra daily in my job, in a field not known for it's overly intelligent work force.

High school - early 90's.

[Aragarthiel]

Trig? In high school?!? Yeah, that's so not part of this discussion.

Trig was a required class when I graduated four years ago. (Yes, I'm young, hush.) I was in the advanced class so I took it as a junior, but everyone else took it as a senior. Calculus was available for me to take my senior year but it wasn't required. I started algebra in middle school, took geometry freshman year of high school, and advanced algebra my sophomore year.

[Andara Bledin]

Damn. I couldn't even convince my high school that not only did I not need to take pre-algebra again, but I had to take a summer school session to even get geometry at all.

Nevermind that I was doing collegiate-level algebra before 8th grade... Yeah, couldn't convince them I didn't belong in pre-algebra, either. >_<

[TheHuckster]

Trig? In high school?!? Yeah, that's so not part of this discussion.

First, that was just an example. There are a ton of other subjects that work the same way, especially in math and science.

Second, just because your school didn't have trig doesn't mean all of the thousands of schools in this nation also didn't.

Everything you need to know about any class is completely within that class because not all schools have the same curriculum, even within the same district. And everything you should have learned should be reflected on the final, so if you don't know your shit, you're going to fail regardless of what 'helper' scores you got on regular coursework.

If you get a bunch of dismal grades on two quizzes which have fundamental stuff, earn a 50 for it, and then struggle your way with 75s for the remainder, you could still get a C- and pass the class.

And, yes, that kind of "learning" can bite you in the ass later on when you're under the impression you're at least "somewhat average" at math only to find later on that you're struggling with the subject again. Perhaps prior coursework in high school isn't a prerequisite to later coursework, but it is definitely a prerequisite for college level coursework. And if you are under the false impression that you earned a C- in your classes when you really should have failed, you're in for a very abrupt awakening when you get to college.

And if a kid can ace the final, then what the ever-loving fuck does it matter that they didn't turn in a single scrap of homework?

I'm not talking about homework, as much as quizzes.

[Kheldarson]

I'm not talking about homework, as much as quizzes.

Except there are some teachers that grade all things equal. A quiz is as much as homework as much as a test as much as your final project. That percentage is the be all and end all.

So if you have a student who aces the quizzes and tests but refuses to do the homework...pass or fail? In an all things equal setting with 0s, they'll fail, I guarantee it.

[TheHuckster]

That's an issue with the teacher's grading strategy, then. If their strategy is that flawed, we need to focus on correcting the strategy, not just giving students an "easy 50."

[wolfie]

There was a story here where I live a few years back about how some school district was going to implement a grade "floor". In other words, regardless of how you did on something, the lowest grade you could get was a 50 out of 100.

It's fair because you're still providing opportunity to succeed.

One 0 means that the next three 100s are scrap. And you still only walk away with a 75. Let that 0 become a 50 and now the next three 100s means your grade's an 82. It becomes an incentive to try harder because you're more likely to succeed. And if you're more likely to succeed, you're more likely to learn.

And if you're really dead set on failing by refusing to do work at all, your grade will reflect that.

And a lot of classes build off of earlier topics. So, if I am taking trigonometry, and I get a 0 on tests involving the Pythagorean Theorem, but thanks to the 50 I got instead, I got to squeeze my way through and can proceed to the next level trigonometry class, even though I never learned one of the most basic concepts in the subject. That's doing me a disservice and sets me up for further failure and great frustration down the line.

Why not take an alternative method of still providing the opportunity to succeed, namely have N "grading events" and disregard the lowest (N-2) when calculating the final grade? Of course, if different "events" have different weights, it means a bit more work in the calculation.

[Kuari]

Trig? In high school?!? Yeah, that's so not part of this discussion.

Yep, trig in high school. At least it was that way for me and I graduated from high school twenty-five years ago. I failed it horribly - not surprising with undiagnosed dyscalculia at the time - but I still had to take it and then make it up in summer school.

And when I had to do remedial math in order to get into pre-requisite math classes (6 credit hours of finite math, or 3 credit hours of calculus) for a teaching program I had to do trig all over again - and it was considered to be a current grade 11-12 math subject. I did much better this time because 1) I finally knew WHY math was such an issue for me, and 2) I had an instructor who knew how to deal with my learning disability.

But yeah, trig in high school. More common than people might think.

And, speaking of graduation:

When I graduated there were several people who walked that ended up not having enough the grades to actually graduate that year. However, once they redid the courses - either in summer school or by going back for another year of high school - they got to walk the following year. The reason it happened this way is that the grad ceremony always happened before the final grades were calculated. We didn't get our actual diplomas at the ceremony either - they were mailed to us. Instead we all received empty rolls of paper wrapped in ribbons of the school colours.

Now, how my son's school did it when he graduated in 2010 is that they did not do the actual ceremony at the end of the school year. They held it several months later, once they knew who had actually earned the necessary credits to graduate.

[Tama]

If I had had to take trig in high school I would never have graduated. As it was I barely passed Algebra II--BARELY. As in, passing grade is 70, and I got 70.2 (and only then because you get an extra 15 points for passing the SOL, which I also barely managed to get the minimum pass grade on).

[Valinor]

In 2014, Lima students passed at a 45.9 percent rate in science, its lowest of the five categories.

You know what they say :

If you get bad service at every single store that you go to, then the problem isn't the stores. It's you.

I once saw a film that depicted a woman lamenting how horribly all of her children had turned out - in jail, on drugs, flunking out of school, running away from home. Some viewers commented that if all of the children turned out that bad, then it likely wasn't the children's fault.

By the same token, if more than half of your students are failing a state-administered test, then it's likely not the students who are the problem.