New math

Four years ago, I expressed my low opinion — OK, I classified the post under "rants" — of the news that some local teachers were no longer assigning zero grades, even when students didn't turn in any work (they would assign maybe a 50 or 60). There was a lot of flak about it in the newspaper, and to the best of my knowledge, they backed off from this policy at the time.

But now we have news that Norfolk's school board has instituted a system-wide policy that dictates that the lowest grade to be recorded, as long as the student submitted something, will be a 61. A zero will be given only if the student fails to submit the assignment at all. Parents don't like this policy, many teachers don't like it, and now even the Norfolk City Council has gotten in on the act, by "inviting" the superintendent to meet with the council and explain just what the heck they're thinking of.

What an incentive for low-performing students to make an effort! Let's see, I can study hard for a test and actually learn 61% of the material, and get a 61. Or, I can blow off studying, guess at a few answers (doesn't matter if they're right or wrong), turn in my test — and get a 61. Gee, that's a tough choice...

The school board defends the policy as a way to make sure that a student who "has one bad day" doesn't get their grade dragged down so far by a zero that they can never recover. Y'know, when I taught chemistry labs at Cornell, we had a simple policy for dealing with that "one bad day" problem on quizzes and lab reports — your lowest quiz grade and lowest lab report grade got dropped. It wasn't generally done with exams, because typically you would only have two plus a final, but for types of assignments where you had at least half a dozen grades, it worked like a charm. Students knew that one brain fart wasn't going to kill their grade, but they also knew they'd bloody well better make sure they didn't have a second brain fart; they still had to work.

Call me old-fashioned, but I just can't fathom how a school board can rationalize awarding a 61% grade to someone who has demonstrated that they know only 10% of the material. What do they think a 100-point grading scale means?