All semester, I have put forth great effort and experienced a lot of frustration in making sure students are receiving the correct grades on tests and assignments. When you have 160 students (and I was only teaching 4 classes!), this is extremely hard to do. I'm not sure whether having TA's helps or worsens the problem. I repeatedly did more work correcting grades by TA's and made it almost not worth having TA's do any correcting at all, especially if it involved anything left for interpretation. In other words, anything other than a black and white letter or number answer.
This was particularly frustrating while trying to get finals in and get final grades reported. However, after all grades were in, one of my supervising teachers explained to me her end-of-semester policy for grades. After all is said and done, she reviews the grades and pays particular attention for anyone on the letter-grade borderline: those with a 59%, 69%, 79%, and 89%. Knowing that mistakes do happen, those students are in the margin of error for having a difference in their letter grades.
In college, 1% is significant. Students are adults, and must be held responsible for their effort and achievement or lack thereof. They can be expected to check their grades repeatedly and address any concerns. They can be expected to spend as much time as necessary to get the grade they deserve. Moreover, they have chosen to be in this school and take these classes, and should expect to make the required commitment and effort. And these grades determine their qualifications for entering the job force and becoming qualified for any number of positions. One grade can make a big difference in whether a student should be allowed to meet prerequisite standards or if they should be allowed to graduate at all. And their qualifications and achievement directly affects society as they are providing goods and services to others.
In high school, however, students are still children. We'd like to think they should be responsible enough to manage their grades, but they seldom do for a number of reasons. Sometimes, these reasons include circumstances that they have absolutely no control over, such has having to babysit siblings after school and not being able to stay and talk to a teacher. They have no money or resources to get tutoring. They are forced to be in school and the families they belong to, and they can only make the best of whatever life has dealt them.
Moreover, let's consider the weight and importance of these grades in the grand scheme.
- High school: No one looks at individual class grades except the teachers within a school to determine whether a student is ready for the next level (this is particularly important concerning Spanish classes) and whether a student meets graduation requirements.
- Employers: Ultimately, employers do not look at high school GPA regardless of college attendance.
- Colleges: Colleges use GPA in determining admittance, but it is one factor among many others that paint a picture of the students.
- Scholarships: This is usually determined by taking GPA into account
And even if you come to the conclusion that high school GPA is actually very important...
- Weight of a single grade in GPA: virtually zero. My grade for one semester is one amongst 64 during a student's high school career. Usually, GPA is pretty solid and reports a trend rather than the achievement of a student in one class during one semester. Even if all teachers bumped students up 1% at the end of every class, the likelihood of the student having enough letter-grade changes to have a significant influence on their GPA is very small. The only case that might be the exception would be in the race for certain class-standing positions, such as valedictorian and salutatorian but I would think that the few students in close contention for these spots would not end up with an on-the-verge grade. If they did, then it might be a case where you don't bump the student up as that would be unfair to other competitors.
But what about the weight of a single grade to a student? That 1% can mean the difference between heaven and hell, at least for a moment. First, there is the ever-so-frequent parent reaction to their child's failure to achieve a certain grade deemed acceptable. It's great to have parents that encourage their students and place priority on school achievement, but many don't have good perspective and don't know how to be good supports. This can do more damage than good. Whether adopted from parents or placed on themselves voluntarily, students come to me having exceedingly high expectations for themselves and setting themselves up for failure. They're focused on the grade rather than actually learning something and learning to overcome what are really very small failures in the grand scheme of things. And then there is the student that has always been a "failure" and that just wants to try even though they believe they're never going to succeed.
Here is where the true weight of a single letter grade truly lies: hope. That 1% can be the difference between the student feeling success and that they can actually do this, which then results in more effort and success in the future. We are molding these kids into the adult they are going to be. In my eyes the benefits of the 1% grade-adjustment has the potential to do much good and no harm is done in it either. True, there are always exceptions, like the student that has consistently shown they could care less about their schooling and repeatedly skips your class and when the grade makes a difference between whether the student is passed on to a class that they may not be ready for, but, in general, I don't believe I could defend the 89% grade against a 90%, even if by some miracle I could prove every assignment and test was graded and entered with 100% accuracy.
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