Grade inflation does no one any good. Teachers deal with enough from parents without needing to try and argue why their child doesn’t, in fact, deserve 95% instead of 75%.
The only way I can see forward is to improve the push back against parents by the school board/administrators so the teachers feel they can refuse without the parents just going around them and getting what they want.
idk… I’m more of a mind do to away with percentage grades entirely. There’s no way to make them accurate across different classes, let alone schools/districts/provinces.
Why is it a “core job” of secondary schools to weed out students for university admissions? Let’s just change it to report if students attained mastery or not, using a scale. Mastered, Proficient, Developing, Beginning (or something like that).
Research consistently shows that adding grades to work/classes changes students’ focus to the grade itself rather than the learning behind the grade. There’s a name for this principle from the workplace that eludes me.
The fewer times we distract students with grades, the better. And then teachers can instead focus their efforts on giving meaningful feedback for growth/improvement instead of adding up arbitrary points that only exist because teachers made them up in the first place.
I read an article about a calculus teacher in AB who starts all students at 0%, and their grade is the percentage of the course skills they’ve mastered. Simple as that. If you master all the material, you get 100%. That’s the only way that percentage grades make sense to me, tbh.
Let’s focus our energy on preparing students to be successful, independent citizens and lifelong learners. Let universities figure out how to determine admissions themselves. That shouldn’t be the job of high schools.
Grade inflation does no one any good. Teachers deal with enough from parents without needing to try and argue why their child doesn’t, in fact, deserve 95% instead of 75%.
The only way I can see forward is to improve the push back against parents by the school board/administrators so the teachers feel they can refuse without the parents just going around them and getting what they want.
idk… I’m more of a mind do to away with percentage grades entirely. There’s no way to make them accurate across different classes, let alone schools/districts/provinces.
Why is it a “core job” of secondary schools to weed out students for university admissions? Let’s just change it to report if students attained mastery or not, using a scale. Mastered, Proficient, Developing, Beginning (or something like that).
Research consistently shows that adding grades to work/classes changes students’ focus to the grade itself rather than the learning behind the grade. There’s a name for this principle from the workplace that eludes me.
The fewer times we distract students with grades, the better. And then teachers can instead focus their efforts on giving meaningful feedback for growth/improvement instead of adding up arbitrary points that only exist because teachers made them up in the first place.
I read an article about a calculus teacher in AB who starts all students at 0%, and their grade is the percentage of the course skills they’ve mastered. Simple as that. If you master all the material, you get 100%. That’s the only way that percentage grades make sense to me, tbh.
Let’s focus our energy on preparing students to be successful, independent citizens and lifelong learners. Let universities figure out how to determine admissions themselves. That shouldn’t be the job of high schools.