Backstory: a middle school teacher in Florida was fired and went to the press with a story about how it was because they heroically refused to give students grades of 50% on missing assignments. As many others have already noted, the school district denies that such a policy exists, and administrators are not really allowed to comment on the circumstances, so the public only gets on side of the story. The teacher was new and was in a probationary period, so the district didn't need justification for terminating her. That's why it's common knowledge that rocking the boat when you're still on probation is a bad idea. If you're officially in a feeling-out period and the people whose job it is to decide whether you're the right fit perceive you to be stirring up shit even when you know you're still on probation, you're going to get what's coming to you. Anyway, I take all of this with a grain of salt.
I saw the story on Facebook and a bunch of people commented in defense of this teacher. Right away, when I saw that reports indicated she'd been on probation, I was suspicious. But even aside from that, I found myself thinking, "Regardless of whether that policy is real, it's probably a better system than most traditional grading policies anyway." Among those bothering to comment on Facebook, though, this would have been a minority position for sure. The crux of the issue seemed to be the notion that a 0% grade for 0% work turned in was just/fair/proper/righteous and that any deviation from this was giving something for nothing, and goshdarnit, kids will grow up all spoiled and such if they get something for nothing. Well, I found that stance to be naive, but I was inclined to leave it alone.
As it happens, the maintainer of one of the Facebook pages I follow is also a middle school teacher, and he wrote an article about this story. A few paragraphs into his article, he linked to some old quotes of the "kids these days" variety. He went on to explain, using basic statistics and some common sense, why he eschewed 0% grades. His reasoning seemed sound to me, and I had this, admittedly misplaced, hope that such a thought-out explanation would change the minds of some of those curmudgeons bemoaning the noxious puerility of today's youth. And perhaps, for some, the article really was food for thought. But most of the comments were critical, grating, arrogant, and really just stupid. And that's why I'm blogging about it!
The naysayers seemed to have two primary objections. Many comments hit on both, but some only picked one or the other...
- Giving a student 50% for no work is inherently unfair. Zero work should mean zero credit. Assignments that are turned in, but done poorly, could perhaps be 50%. But missed assignments must be 0% and anything else would cheapen the work put in by the students who did complete the assignment.
- Students who get something for nothing will grow up wrong. They won't be prepared for the "real world." Kids need to learn that their actions have consequences. Coddling them will hurt them in the long term, etc.
Any grading scale for schoolwork is, to some extent, arbitrary. Confusingly, most schools issue grades using different scaling in different situations. Growing up, I had scales from 0 to 5, from 0 to 4, from 0% to 100%, and letter grades A/B/C/D/E/F and then just A/B/C/D/F (don't ask me what happened to "E" or why "E" was cut instead of "F"). And different teachers had different standards for how those grades were assigned in the first place. Some classes were graded on curves, others were not. Some classes had grades weighted around exams, others were mostly determined by homework. Some classes would drop the lowest few scores before computing an average for the course (like a class with 12 graded assignments could drop the two lowest scores on assignments, then average out the grades on the other 10 to determine course grade). Some classes were set up so that grades were determined by the results of collaborative projects, others were based on individual work. Some teachers had rigorous systems of penalties for late assignments, and others just outright refused to accept assignments pas their deadlines. Some teachers offered extensive extra credit in various ways, and other teachers hated extra credit. And that was just me. Just my real-life experience in the one school district where I grew up. In the abstract, we could devise all manner of wacky grading schemes. There isn't one that is inherently the best. Virtually every grading system at some point takes different grades and uses them to compute a mean, but that isn't absolutely necessary. We could devise a system wherein the median assignment grade is used to generate the course grade, or we could use some other metric entirely. A percentile scale is convenient for doing computational analysis, for getting numbers that are easy to work with for putting into charts and stuff. But don't delude yourself that the numbers are real. They're as arbitrary as any other system.
As far as "the real world" goes, I found it especially amusing to see remarks like, "I can't just fail to show up for work and get paid 50%." In case you didn't know, children don't get paid to go to school at all. Now, some adults do make the conscious decision to show up to a place and do what other people tell them to do without expecting to be paid directly for that, but that's something we do of our own volition with the goal of earning some advanced certification or license, and even then only for a few years. Children are expected to attend school full-time for thirteen years, and not for some high-caliber certification, but for a high school diploma, essentially a worthless piece of paper. That process is wholly unlike anything in anyone's adult world I know of. Griping about how their grade-scaling was set up in such a way that won't "prepare" them is bullshit.
Grading systems are inescapably arbitrary, but we can apply knowledge from different fields to discern advantages and disadvantages of them. While there might not be a single, most objectively fair/just approach, it's obvious that some methods would be more or less generous than other methods. As the author of the article notes, averaging assignments graded on a 0 to 100 scale is actually quite a bit more punitive than most things we deal with the rest of our lives. It means that one missed assignment effectively cancels out several other assignments with respectable scores. Bear in mind that overall course grades as high as 59%, and sometimes ones even higher than that, are considered inadequate, considered "failing." In your adult life, you can probably make some minor mistakes and have them either overlooked entirely or have the issue raised and brought to you for correction, and if you can correct it, you might get some minor penalty (or even none). Even serious blunders could be forgiven if you can show some attention to preventing recurrences and if your other performance has been satisfactory. In most professional settings and in other adult situations, you usually get some "benefit of the doubt." A 0 to 100 scale doesn't do that, especially not when a simple mean is used. Two perfect 100% scores and one missed assignment average out to 66%, usually reckoned as a D, barely passing. If you're generally capable of churning out work that scores 80%, which is typically considered B-, a single missed assignment would average out with four instances of your usual work to get a 64%. And even after another round of five assignments, you'd have a 72% average; you'd be a C- student. That's pretty harsh. Adults can smugly go, "But that's good. Kid's gotta learn accountability. Blah, blah, blah." But ultimately, that's a more punitive standard than you're held to for most things in life, and when you are held to standards that high, it's typically because you are a competent professional who chose to enter into some contract for tangible benefit: you have your shit together and you want to do serious work and get the rewards that come with it. Kids have way less control over their lives than you do.
Opponents see 0% as the natural baseline and are incensed that he seemingly moves the baseline up to 50%, effectively giving away points for free, which they believe to be too generous. But that's framing it like children in school as supposed to be measured as elite competitors in some sort of contest, and you want the numbers to reflect their output. The point of school is to educate, not to cull the weak. As he takes pains to emphasize, a lot of factors outside of school affect performance. Setting the baseline at 50% offsets some of this. Some students might still fail. Consistently missing assignments or missing too many assignments and turning poor quality work on other ones is still going to result in an E average. But at least it gives struggling kids a chance.
