School District Drops 'D' Grades 617
Students in one New Jersey school district will no longer be able to squeak by in class after the Morris County School Board approved dropping the D grade. Beginning in the fall students who don't get a C or higher will get an F on their report card. "I'm tired of kids coming to school and not learning and getting credit for it," said Superintendent Larrie Reynolds in a Daily Record report.
How about... (Score:5, Insightful)
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
If done the way TFS says, it's a good thing.
The problem is that teachers don't want to fail students, so the D students will get Cs instead of Fs.
Re:How about... (Score:5, Insightful)
But that would make too much sense!
I hate it when people make scales to grade something on, and then never use the damn entirety of the scale. See also game sites that have a 1-10 rating for a game but never really use anything below 7.
I like it! (Score:2, Insightful)
With the crazy rash of pansying up our youth over the last few decades, I welcome a little ass-kicking.
Fast track to Binary (Score:4, Insightful)
Soon enough it is going to be Pass/Fail only.
Why bother with grades at all...either you suck, or you don't. THats at least what these educators seem to be getting to.
Re:How about... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes you are. That's what this article is about. They are no longer giving credit for Ds. Thereby removing Ds from the grading system. If Ds don't give credit, then a D = F.
Logically, you would remove F and give failing student Ds so you have A, B, C and D, but whatever floats your boat.
Average (Score:2, Insightful)
I always thought 'C' was supposed to represent an average grade. I think one of the biggest problems today is that everyone is expected to get a B or above, so teachers are more pressured to give B's or above. Now people are getting through class at a B average, when they haven't done anything above average at all.
Now, with this, it seems as if the D students will get bumped to C's, C's to B's, and B's to A (well, maybe not so drastic on the upper portion).
Average (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How about... (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps the grades could be "Excellent", "Awesome", "Doing Really Very Well" and "Not Left Behind", so as to comply with government standards for education.
The primary role of our education system... (Score:3, Insightful)
...is to pay wages and pensions to those inside the system. Actual education is merely a side-effect.
Re:How about... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:feh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Average (Score:5, Insightful)
Bell Curve (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How about... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How about... (Score:5, Insightful)
Will it really matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, from what I understand, schools just plain do not hold anyone back because they fail...they just continue to promote them on to the next grade regardless of their level of learning the material.
Can't hurt Junior's self esteem you know...
Re:feh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering my wife is a 3rd grade special ed teacher, I assure you that I know what you're talking about :-) Still, I don't blame teachers so much as the curriculum. Public schooling in this country is designed to teach kids how to pass a standardized test, not to expand their knowledge.
Regardless of crappy teachers, crappy parents, or crappy students, you can't expect people to learn if you are training them to pass a test.
Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)
If done the way TFS says, it's a good thing.
The problem is that teachers don't want to fail students, so the D students will get Cs instead of Fs.
Yup.
Frankly, I'm surprised folks are getting D's and F's in the first place. It seems like you'd have to actually try to get grades that low these days.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
No more bell curve :/ (Score:1, Insightful)
I think part of the problem is that it is no longer OK to have a standard bell curve for student achievement. Why couldn't A's strictly be meant for the students that truly excel? Instead we are left A/B students that can get by with just doing their homework and studying for ~30mins a day.
Only if grading on a curve do people have to fail (Score:3, Insightful)
It is entirely possible and fair for a class to get all A's if they all meet the criterion (>90% on exams and so on). Yes, you might then argue that the tests were too easy, but if the tests covered the material you want the students to learn, what's the problem? Maybe the students were all very smart. Maybe the teacher is excellent.
Re:Bell Curve (Score:5, Insightful)
Is normal distribution of grades really necessary, though? That only makes sense if you're only comparing the students to one another, which I think is the wrong way to go. Why not compare them to a standard of "excels in this skill" "has acquired the skill" and "hasn't acquired the skill"? Teaching to standards won't necessarily create a normal curve since some skills can be acquired by everyone (for example gym class), or at least everyone who chooses to take a particular course (my high school AP Calculus class).
We need to have a national conversation about what an "educated" person looks like in the 21st century. Just teaching a list of things we've always taught isn't working anymore, for a vast range of reasons. It is likely that "educated" might differ from state-to-state, but does no one ask "what are we hoping to accomplish by sending all of our pre-citizens to school?" and then work out a curriculum backwards from there?
The focus on getting everyone ready for a university (which is what it seems like public school is doing) is misguided and wasteful as well as damaging to the students. Telling large numbers of young people, "You aren't suited for college, therefore you FAIL" is a horrible thing to do to a person.
Re:How about... (Score:5, Insightful)
From the original article:
"In todays world, youve either got it, or you dont, Kentucky principal Steve Frommeyer said. Theres no opportunity to just be OK. "
People with this line of thought who are teaching anything below university level (i.e. before children/teens have decided what they want to do with their lives) need to get fired yesterday, and be permanently banned from any teaching position. They destroy lives, literally, by forcing children to be "either great or dead".
We no longer live in the caves, and most learning issues, especially at age that young are not "excel or die". People who disagree are in the wrong profession.
Re:They still have A+ (Score:2, Insightful)
Why the hate on the AP program? You dont have to be "affluent" to be in it, you just have to do well in school. The fees for the tests can be waived or reduced if your family is low income. Does your hate maybe stem from not liking the type of people that are in the program? That's understandable, some are pricks, I know b/c I was in many AP classes in HS. However, dont label everyone in the program as such, it makes you look like a douche. AP classes are a great way to get college credit before college, so don't knock the program itself.
Re:We have to stop preaching equality (Score:5, Insightful)
You are exactly right. It has become a big problem in this country. People go to college who have no business being in college because that is the cool thing to do and they want to party. In the long term that has led to lowering of standards at many universities simply because they don't want to fail so many people.
What you end up with is many people with degrees who probably shouldn't have been able to get it. Those people have been taught that having a degree means they get a better job and they refuse to do jobs that would be better suited for them and that they would likely enjoy much more, because they feel the deserve a better paying white collar job.
We need to learn to better respect the blue collar jobs. Without people doing those jobs our world doesn't work, yet people are taught from a young age that doing blue-collar work is something you should work to avoid.
Re:How about... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent up.
This latest action is really just grade inflation in disguise. The truth is, everybody expects A and B grades now; in essence, that everyone in the class should be above average, as if we all lived in some Garrison Keillor-esque world. "A" doesn't mean anything anymore. It's not good enough because now you have to have a 5.0 GPA on a 4.0 scale. It's stupid.
I think letter grades should be done away with entirely, and a numeric scale used instead, normalized to the maximum credit possible. A letter grade ends up being too subjective and thus prone to manipulation, inflation, or ambiguity in interpretation. A number that is guaranteed to fall between 0 and 100, for example, fixes some of these issues--at least, until educators start messing around with giving "extra credit."
Re:Meanwhile... (Score:3, Insightful)
In the last days of this congressional session, our elected reps faced two urgent spending requests. One was for ongoing combat in Afghanistan. The other was to keep several thousand public school teachers from being laid off in the fall. One of those got funded.
They should have both been defeated. It's not my responsibility to pay for California's expensive regulatory regime (which drives up the cost of their teachers' salaries).
Been there (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How about... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or they could make it a bit harder to get a D... Simply you get a passing grade if you deserve to pass...
Oblig:
Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...
Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?
Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.
Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?
Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty DiBergi: I don't know.
Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.
Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?
Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.
Why Am I Suprised (Score:3, Insightful)
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
"I'm tired of kids coming to school and not learning and getting credit for it," said Superintendent Larrie Reynolds in a Daily Record report.
If the student didn't learn anything does that not mean they failed and should get a failing grade? "C" is Average and "D" is below average but still passing. I fail to see the problem with that. "F" means you failed to learn the course material well enough to pass and do not get credit.
But then, I'm not a power hungry, attention seeking, small penis administrator that needs to "shake up the box" for no other reason then to get noticed.
-[d]-
Re:How about... (Score:4, Insightful)
Get with the times. The modern scales go like this:
AAA+: Must invest
AAA: Good investment
AA: Getting dodgey
A: Risky Bet
BBB: These guys couldn't even bri^H^H^Hpay us to give them a higher rating.
BB: Get out now
B: Just kidding, you can't actually get one this low.
Another good scale is the modern video game rank system (Which makes more sense given how bastardized the original system has become)
D: You sucked at this
C: You tried, you passed.
B: You actually put some effort in
A: You were really good at this
S: You aced this section.
At least the S rank does away with bastardizations like A+++, A* or AAA+, etc. In effect the S rank is the sane answer to what these ridiculous higher granulations have done to the original grading system. At least S has a definite meaning. Unfortunately, things like SS and SSS rank again crept in.
Re:Average (Score:3, Insightful)
They have trade schools and a lot of them. Unfortunately they force a liberal arts education on those who attend--just like those in traditional college/university settings. :et's go back to the way trade schools were in the 1970s and 1980s and get rid of the liberal arts education nonsense. Problem is that this won't work as the courses required to master a trade generally only take a year and the additional year of liberal arts credits helps with the school's bottom line.
Re:How about... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well also, to be fair, most modern games are "okay but bland" at worst (aka a 7, which is funnily enough usually the equivalent of about a C- or D+). The GP is complaining because they don't calibrate the 1-10 scale against other games; they calibrate it against some absolute enjoyment scale.
For instance, I disliked GTA 4, but I would have still given it a 7 - it wasn't bad, it just wasn't especially good. When a studio pours millions of dollars into a game, you're guaranteed get something that's at least okay.
Re:How about... (Score:3, Insightful)
Little johnny ( and his parents ) can look at the percentage and figure it out then.
I get the feeling that if little Johnny could figure out percentages then he wouldn't be in this predicament in the first place.
Re:Will it really matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, from what I understand, schools just plain do not hold anyone back because they fail...they just continue to promote them on to the next grade regardless of their level of learning the material.
Depends on the school district, around here they can only hold them back once, then they have to advance them. It isn't about self esteem, not entirely anyway, if the kids don't do well (don't pass), the state cuts funding and fucks it up for everyone. Fuck up too much, and the school has to close, overloading the other schools and the slow downward spiral continues. Teacher salaries are also based on standardized test scores; which is extra fun if you teach special needs kids who either don't take them or cannot do that well. The state of affairs in the public school system here is beyond reckoning, and every "attempt" to fix it just seems to make it worse.
Re:feh. (Score:3, Insightful)
If the parents are spending those 1-2 hours teaching their kids that "dat edumacashun thang" isn't worthwhile it won't matter what a teacher tries to accomplish in their 6-8 hours.
Re:Fast track to Binary (Score:3, Insightful)
"THats [sic] at least what these educators seem to be getting to."
I'll say it again: School systems have two camps, (1) teachers, (2) administrators, and those camps are generally in opposition.
Note that this particular change comes from Superintendent Larrie Reynolds ("I'm tired of kids coming to school and not learning and getting credit for it") -- someone who is not actually an educator (teacher).
Re:How about... (Score:4, Insightful)
If it's cheaper, yes, they often do.
Re:How about... (Score:2, Insightful)
I taught some classes for the Computer Science department at a local university. Initially I was worried that it would be a difficult process to decide who passes and who fails at the lower end of the class. But as it turned out there was never any difficulty. Most students came to class, tried their best, and got A's, B's, and some that had difficulty with the subject got C's. The others rarely showed up, never handed in any projects, and basically signed their names on tests.
There weren't any in the middle.
Yep. I'm a university professor at a large state school and I can you an easy recipe for passing any undergraduate level class:
1. Always attend class and pay attention
2. Start the homework as soon as it is assigned.
3. Go to office hours to ask questions whenever you are confused.
That's it. Really, if you follow those simple rules then you will almost certainly get at least a C in the class. In fact, for many classes, following those rules will get you at least a B in the class.
The students who fail are the ones who don't show up, don't turn in homework, and don't put any effort into their work.
Re:How about... (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate it when people make scales to grade something on, and then never use the damn entirety of the scale.
I don't think you understand the "scale" in use here. The scale is of passing grades, and it was and is used in its entirety. They've simply truncated off the bit of the scale that used to mean "passing" and now means "failing", because "failing" grades don't have a place on the scale at that school any more.
For the alphabetically-challenged, "F" is not "the letter after D" - that would be the letter "E".
"F" is an abbreviation meaning "Fail". It means "you are not within the scale of passing grades, you are below it, and you failed. No cookie!"
In programming, "F" would be equivalent to null.
Most importantly, the letters are only an abbreviation for the actual percentages, probably so they fit on a report card more easily and with less writing on the teacher's part. The actual percentages are really what count, and I assure you they still go from 0% to 100% as per standard mathematical principles.
Re:How about... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is hardly an either/or situation. If a C- correlates to knowing 70% of the material, then that is the bare minimum a student must know to pass a course. This isn't requiring that you need to know 100% of everything that is taught. Heck, it's only about 2/3 of what is taught, which is really pretty pathetic.
If the student has a learning disability and is unable to learn 70% of the material, then that doesn't mean that they should just get credit. It means that they shouldn't be in the class, or need additional tutoring.
Re:How about... (Score:4, Insightful)
Life sucks, the world sucks, and your friends will throw you under the bus in a heartbeat if it gives them an advantage.... get used to it.
Reminder to self: Don't ever make friends with Lumpy.
Fixed percentages as grade markers? (Score:4, Insightful)
What I'm having trouble wrapping my heads around is that there are schools that use fixed percentages as grade markers. That means if you make a test you need to precisely target the questions to achieve an 85% average. That probably means you need to make 50% of the questions so easy that nobody could get them wrong. It also means you can't make any significant fraction hard enough to test the knowledge of the people in the A range. Maybe teachers aren't allowed to make their own exams anymore?
It also means (and I've seen this and heard reports from friends) that these students will have no idea how to handle grades in college. When I teach I like to target exams at an average of 50 out of 100. College freshmen from these schools will panic when the get a 30% on an exam, even if that turns out to be an A. Then they call their parents and their parents call me explaining why Johnny really needs to get into med school. In my dreams, I explain to them why Johnny should drop the class if he can't understand that an A is a good score.
Hard exams are a good thing. They tell you how everyone in the class is doing, not just the below average people. I had a multiple-choice/multiple-answer exam when I was in college where the high was 9 out of 100. I got a -6 (which was an A). The average was -28. It was a damn hard exam, and it really tested our knowledge, but 15% of the class still got an A.
Re:How about... (Score:1, Insightful)
Let's look at education as a building process. If you only half understand addition and subtraction, how are you going to handle multiplication and division? If you only half understand these, how will you do in algebra, etc? I'm guessing this will go over about as well as trying to build a house out of only partially baked bricks - as you build the wall, eventually it will all collapse and you'll have to start over from some earlier spot before the defective bricks were used or possibly a bit before or after depending on what they screwed up. It is similar in learning - if you don't have the necessary prior knowledge and try to build on that eventually you will get to a point where your understanding is so messed up, you must unlearn what you have 'learned' in order to get it right. Realizing this was the reason we decided that social promotion was a bad idea. Passing someone with a D understanding, of the material (particularly after a generation or two of grade inflation pretty well guarantees that that D would have been an F in the 1950's) is just as dishonest and detrimental to both the student and the school as social promotion.
Re:Will it really matter? (Score:1, Insightful)
I was the only person in my first grade who could really read well. By "well", I mean I was already reading at age 5 or 6, at almost what I have come to understand as a 7th or 8th grade level. I had very little difficulty with the language itself, and was only stumped by idiomatic writing or vocabulary that I couldn't deduce from my dictionary (or where the vocabulary was so difficult that learning it was beyond my attention span.)
My early teachers didn't know what to do with me -- I don't think they understood how far I really was beyond their programmed material, and basically treated me like a special needs kid. I totally resented this treatment but my resenment was directed more toward school in general. My parents understood, thankfully. They knew I was already attempting various selections from a set of Harvard Classics that we had, lots of Readers' Digest Condensed Books, various novels and that sort of thing. By 7 I was able to deal with poetry a little bit and was struggling with Shakespeare, at least reading sonnets. Nothing and no one in my school system ever reinforced any of this or even recognized it, at least until the end of my Junior year in High School where instead of graduating, I started university.
My point here is that I never, ever got particularly good grades in school.
There's nothing magical about 70% (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How about... (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree. Kids' egos have been so coddled, from the removal of losing teams in sports games to passing everyone in a class so nobody feels bad for themselves, that they grow up with an unwarranted sense of entitlement and accomplishment. We have a lot of selfish, spoiled people today because of this crap, and the rest of us who actually work for things are supporting everyone else to a greater degree than ever before.
The principal's statement made sense to me--he's saying you can't just skate by in the real world but must put in effort. It's not hard to pass elementary school. At that level, it's all about basic effort. Flunking a kid who would have skated by is doing him or her a service, failing them so they can retake the course or retry the test.
Nobody's lives are being destroyed ("literally") by requiring them to pass in school. Your statement about living in caves makes no sense, because we had to be even less lazy back then, learning how to hunt and build shelters or starve to death. Your precious self-esteem mattered little.
Re:How about... (Score:3, Insightful)