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What would school have been like if you never had to worry about getting an F? Students at West Potomac High School in Alexandria, Va., are about to find out, the Washington Post reports.
Earlier this year, the school all but eradicated the standard mark for “failure”, instead supplying wayward students with the letter “I” for incomplete. So what does an “I” give you that an “F” doesn’t? Time to redeem yourself, for starters. Students with an “I” on their report card can (literally) learn their lesson and catch up over the year, at which point they will be given a grade for their mastery of the material, just like any other student.
So is this an inspired move to get those marginal students on track and learning, or just another way in which we’re coddling underachieving kids and hobbling the rest? Parents, educators and students are divided.
Mary Mathewson, an English teacher at Potomac High tells the Post that the new standard not only cripples teachers in that it "takes away one of the very few tools [they] have to get kids to learn," but it gives them “an out,” resulting in a system in which “kids are under the impression they can do it whenever they want to, and it's not that big of a deal.”
Pointing out that the A-F grading system has not been thrown out entirely, but rather, redesigned to reach those who might not learn at the same rate as their peers, Fairfax County’s assistant superintendent for instructional services asked the Post, “"If we really want students to know and do the work, why would we give them an F and move on? I think the students who are struggling should not be penalized for not learning at the same rate as their peers."
Alternative grading is nothing new: Potomac High joins good company—some of the nation's highest educational institutions, including the law schools of Stanford University, Yale University, and University of California, Berkeley all employ non-traditional grading systems. Other high schools like the Big Picture high schools in Rhode Island, which focuses on internships, have found that learning goes better when uncomplicated by grades. The measure of their success? Improvement in their standardized achievement scores, most of their seniors going to college, and high college graduation rates. Proponents of this kind of grading method have long argued that letters are arbitrary, overly focused on the right answer instead of the thinking behind it, and have no corollary relationship from school to school—in other words, not “fair” from the get-go.
But will the process of learning for the sake of learning be lost on notoriously gratification-minded high school kids? And what about the value of learning from losing in the first place?
“Americans tend to frame things in terms of contests and wars that must be won or lost," writer John Schwartz says in his New York Times essay, "Lessons Learned in the Losing." "Many challenges, however, are about hanging in there and managing a bad situation. Losing prepares you for the slog that is life. The world doesn’t give us many finish lines, but it does give us the long run.”
While his focus is on high school sports rather than grades, I can't help but think Schwartz has an excellent point here about teaching our children to persevere in the face of challenges, even if it's hard to watch. After all, what are we trying to prepare our kids for in school, if not life?
-------http://shine.yahoo.com/event/momentsofmotherhood/failure-is-impossible-for-high-school-students-no-really-2410739/
You could say i'm a living proof that this system works very well despite the complaints of teachers. I attended an American school in south america and my class and two others were selected to use a system that was very similar to this one to grade us during our entire high school years (9-12).
The system we used was twofold: Every assignment and test was graded on a 0 to 100 scale. Each segment of our curriculum was then assigned an 'Excelled' , a 'Pass' and an 'Incomplete'. (E, P and I).
To use a simple example, if we were learning math basics: Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division for the semester (3 months) then we would have one letter grade for each segment (add,subtract,divide and multiply).
If by the end of that semester a student had :
Addition: E
Subtraction: P
Multiplication: E
Division: I
then he would be told that during the following semester (or summer school if this was the last semester of the year) that had had the CHOICE of taking after school classes to improve his 'P' grade into an 'E' or take a big exam for the same purpose... and that his 'I' grade did mandate that he take 1 month of remedial classes after school or during summer school to improve the grade to at least a 'P'.
The remedial classes were 2 hours long when after-school and 4 hours long during summer school.
If a student could still not pass that grade then he would have to repeat the entire semester with next year's kids that were a grade below him (and re-do remedial classes or summer school if he still could not pass it) as well as take his regular math class with those of his grade on the same day (the art/sport elective classes were replaced with the math class with the lower grades)
IF the student was still incapable of passing it then he was either remitted to special ed classes (this is in extreme cases) or the parents were told the school was no longer responsible for the child learning that material and the he would not be allowed to graduate from high school unless he passed that remedial course or exam.
The result of this was that the grades of those in the classes using this system shot up dramatically. Not the internal school grades but the nation-wide exams given by the gov. (aka similar to the SAT's). If I remember right we went up from being #20 something to being in the top 8 in 2 years.
It worked because if I could not learn how to..say, divide (using the above example) I was given every chance I could to learn it. If I did not 'get it' while it was being taught on that semester and took the remedial after school class... and still didnt get it... but the next semester when seeing basic algebra I would suddenly understand how division worked and did well on it I could apply to take the Exam and get a P or E on it and that P or E became my grade. The 'I' and all the under-50 score tests,quizes and homework I had flunked simply disappeared from the record. My grade was the P or E.
As a teen the pressure for me to get a passing grade was not the grade itself but the stigma that could come from being sent to the lower grades to take that semester's class with them (PLUS i'd end up having TWO math classes every day which would've sucked)..... and the fact that if I did not get the passing grade I would be stuck forcibly in after school for months or worse, during summer vacation for 4 hours doing it.
Many of us struggled with learning the material in the month or 2 it was being taught before the subject moved on and would get bad grades because of it.. but with the remedial system and the new grade system we could at the end of the year not only know the material well but be rewarded with the grade that showed that we had LEARNED it.
So imo, this system is very good if done right. Grading people on how fast they can learn is not grading what they learn but their ability to learn and everyone learns differently.
