Found some
info on it. When you here their justification it's actually not as bad as it sounds - it's about giving kids who bomb in a certain assessment a chance of catching up, where it would otherwise be mathematically impossible for that child to pass. Actually I think it's quite a smart scheme.
Their argument: Other letter grades A, B, C and D are broken down in increments of 10 from 60 to 100, but there is a 59-point spread between D and F, a gap that can often make it mathematically impossible for some failing students to ever catch up.
"It's a classic mathematical dilemma: that the students have a six times greater chance of getting an F," says Douglas Reeves, founder of The Leadership and Learning Center, a Colorado-based educational think tank who has written on the topic. "The statistical tweak of saying the F is now 50 instead of zero is a tiny part of how we can have better grading practices to encourage student performance."
This is faulty reasoning based on a piss-poor understanding of mathematics.
The assumption is that a certain minimum amount of knowledge of
the entire subject materials of the course is necessary to pass the course overall. In the case of the current grading system, that is roughly 62% of the material (unless schools have dumbed down the 92-100 = A, 82-92 = B, 72-82 = C, etc standard with which I grew up).
In that scenario, a person who got 0% on half the assignments and 100% on the other half would receive a 50% final grade and would thereby fail the class. This is deserved because they clearly only understood half the course material, not the 62% of the material that is required to minimally pass the class.
Using the new system, the same student with the same performance would have an overall score of 75% (assuming 50% was the minimum grade). So, despite only having a functional understanding of half the course material (and therefore
earning a true 50% failing score overall for the class), the student would be credited with a 75% score and a C grade. That's not better for the student.
This second situation allows students to pass with a sub-par understanding of curricula and artificially promotes them through the grade levels. This creates a situation in which such students are increasingly unable to cope with the higher level courses (since they are passed along despite insufficient understanding of their previous courses) and leads to greater and more significant failures at higher levels. Not only is this bad for the affected students who suffer from an ever more crippling lack of foundational knowledge, but it is also bad for the other students who actually are achieving at the appropriate levels as once the unprepared students who benefit from this plan are advanced, they monopolize teachers' resources which inhibits teachers' ability to provide quality education for those students who actually have the understanding to make use of it.
Furthermore, it is virtually impossible to earn (and yes, even when a student receives a 0%, that's the grade he has earned) less than a 50% on an assignment unless a student is either wholly unable to comprehend even the most basic portions of the curriculum (in which case that student
should be held back for his own educational well-being), or the student simply doesn't care enough to make even a perfunctory effort (in which case the student clearly doesn't deserve to be moved forward and thereby consume educational resources which would be better directed towards children who actually want to learn). A student who gets below 50% on assignments is either academically out of his depth (in which case promoting him is detrimental to his own educational development) or simply not serious about his own education (in which case promoting him is detrimental to the education of others).
The only students this sort of system will help are those students who aren't going to be either able or willing to take advantage of it.
ZV
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