And D25 actually initiated a bit of discussion about colleges today. She is following a few on Instagram. We went through the list I made and we looked at available majors and minors. One college got dropped as they no longer have her major of interest. A couple others dropped as she didn’t feel they had as many options for her. We broke down the remaining list into “Great interest. Still on the list. Lower on the list.”
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D25 is not a top student, but she managed to go from a B first semester to an A second semester in AP Physics. Hope the end of everyone’s junior years have some unexpected wins!
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WHY WON’T THIS YEAR END???
That is all. We are done, mentally at least if not with days in school.
My kid is cranky today - he has this class that grades on a 1-4 standards based scale. I don’t love this grading scale, because I don’t really understand how much he got wrong, or what he needs to do to move from a 3.5 to a 3.75 for example. I also don’t love that there aren’t gradations. You can get a 3 (B) 3.5 (B+) or 3.75 (A) or 4(A) (and likewise a 2 is a C, a 2.5 a C+ etc). But on individual assignments there’s no way to know is that barely a B+ or nearly an A (like on the traditional 100 point scale) and this teacher doesn’t give grading rubrics, so my son has struggled all year to understand why he’s gotten the grades he’s gotten. Just, at the end, they are assigned a number and he doesn’t know why.
Anyway, the year doesn’t end until Jun 12, but the teacher has already inputted fourth quarter and final grades. For the year, my guy has gotten B+, A, A, A; the 4 point scale numbers have been 3.56, 3.75, 3.75, 3.85, so a consistently upward trend. The first quarter, he didn’t understand the grading system, and his team didn’t realize that the teacher was counting some things he was counting - there’s a 0 and a 0.5 at the beginning of the first quarter during the first month of school, everything else is a 3.5-4, but mostly 3.75 and 4. Since then, he’s worked really hard to understand what his teacher wants and his grades have improved every quarter. But you know what that averages to for a final grade? 3.73, which is a B+. He’s so frustrated.
Sigh. There’s nothing to do about this. I suggested he could go in and ask to take a final exam that could potentially add to the weighting, or see if there’s any thing extra he can do. There’s only six grades for this whole quarter and they are all weighted differently so he can’t tell what counts in what proportion. He’s got four 4’s, a 3.5 and a 3.6. Maybe he could ask to do some extra credit for the quarter and it could pull the quarter grade higher than a 3.85 and that would be enough to make a difference in the end of year grade? Who knows. But he’s so frustrated and disappointed.
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My son had an English class in 9th grade that graded that way. Same exact problem, there was no way to figure out why you got the grade you did. And papers were never returned with any comments. The final was an oral report and the only grades available were 4,3,2, or 1, no in between values. He got a 3 because he rushed a little and was barely under the time. He hated that class and the grading system!
Also so ready to be done here. This is our last week!
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ALL of my D25’s classes are graded like that. The whole school is standards based. To me the ONLY purpose to use that sort of grading is to show improvement. If you end the semester year with a 4 then to me the whole year should be an A. It makes NO sense to grade this way IMO. Colleges don’t do this (thank God)! Most of D25’s teachers do find work arounds to this grading system. They always make comments and she always knows what she got wrong on quizzes etc.
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Oh I am so sorry.
Our whole state does this system across all grades, K-12. Proficiency Based Learning. I hate it. My son hates it too. I get that they want to measure growth, and ultimately also provide multiple ways for kids to demonstrate mastery of material, but it is so subjective and seemingly arbitrary! Every teacher seems to have a different standard for “proficient/meets the standard” (3) or “exceeds proficiency” (4), even if the benchmarks are clearly delineated, at least to them - they aren’t generally available to the public though. I think it’s because they recognize if a bunch of kids get 1s and 2s and aren’t meeting the state standard for that particular material, they should, in theory, have to repeat the grade or redo the material at least until they can get a 3. But that would throw everything in disarray of course, so we still have kids who are juniors in high school that can’t read beyond a middle school level tops or do basic math. DS has one teacher who basically never gives 3s or 4s on 1st drafts of papers, even if there are mimimal comments or things to work on, so it seems totally arbitrary and more about what the teacher thinks that particular student is capable of and not about meeting or exceeding a state standard. So frustrating. Next year, S25 goes to a school with very traditional number/letter grades. It will either be a rude awakening when the grading is much more clear or a huge relief. Leaning towards the latter because he’s a diligent student, but still.
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I mean, proficiency based learning is basically just letter grades with different labels.
Getting a B with no feedback is absolutely and precisely the same as getting a 3 with no feedback. But all in all, it’s just the latest fashion that’s been rolled out and forced on lots of teachers without providing the necessary training and oversight to implement it properly.
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Yeah, the biggest issue here is the teacher’s communication. We’ve had a few other teachers with this 1-4 scale before, but at least there was some sort of rubric, so you could see what the expectations were, and where you missed points if you missed them. Here there’s nothing - either to explain expectations for an assignment or to explain what you missed. It’s a problem. This is the same teacher who, in the third quarter, only gave four grades for the entire quarter. And three of them came on the last day of the quarter with no feedback along the way for how the kids were doing. (It’s an engineering class, and it was a quarter long project, so I can see why he thought end of quarter was an ok time to give the grades, it was when the project was done. But there were no mid-way check ins to talk about how students were doing, and if it was meeting expectations or not. This isn’t an AP level class, just regular HS class. It’s the equivalent of shop, but maybe gussied up a bit.) We’ve had issues just trying to understand what this teacher wants and it’s been frustrating.
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This is the argument I suggested that my son make to the teacher when he has his class tomorrow. If the point is to show mastery and improvement, and all year he’s consistently showing improvement towards mastery, shouldn’t the final grade reflect that?
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I agree. The whole point of standards-based reporting is to show mastery of standards. If the student has done that he/she should receive a grade that reflects that.
I will add that I think standards-based reporting is easier at the elementary level than secondary. Elementary students don’t have report cards that need an ‘overall’ course grade for GPA, transcripts, etc. That is where it gets messy for secondary.
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I feel your pain, @OctoberKate. S25 is definitely not getting an A in APUSH this year, and for the most annoying reason: his mercurial teacher has strong opinions about American punk music and stylistic choices in powerpoint presentations and graded their final presentation (about the history and influence of punk music on US culture) rather capriciously (e.g. after being told not to put paragraphs onto slides, their bulleted thesis, which they’d documented meticulously in their backup notes that were also handed in, was described as too vague! and apparently one can’t reference the Cold War chronologically after the 1970s because everyone knows it started in the 1950s and then immediately stopped being relevant, eyeroll.) He also didn’t like them including post-punk music in their slideshow. He wanted to hear the Ramones, not the Smiths.
The boys scrapped hard for points and offered to make changes. I think maybe they got some of the points back, but not enough to bring up their final grade.
Honestly, I think this is a great learning experience for my kid – all of it. Sometimes you fail to read the minds and expectations of others. Sometimes despite your best efforts to work around their idiosyncrasies, you still fail. And attempting to advocate for yourself in a situation where you got docked 10/70 points for bulleting out your thesis instead of putting it in paragraph format is…good, right? Even if it doesn’t work out.
I just wish, as I bet you do too, that these learning experiences and the resulting 3 instead of 4 didn’t feel quite so costly.
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You’re right, it’s definitely a good learning experience. I just wish it were literally any other class. It’s the only non-academic class he’s taking and that’s the grade that’s lower than it should be? This was supposed to be the easy class for him this year.
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Reading your experiences makes me thankful we have traditional grading at our school.
Things are definitely going off the rails here. My kid is turning in crap-work at this point and in some cases, has missing quizz/hw in classes where it won’t affect their final grade, all in the name of being DONE. They missed all but one day of school last week (we traveled for sibling’s college graduation) and apparently c25 is past the point of caring about missing work 
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Right there with you. Things are hanging on by a thread for my kid. He was incredulous about his calculus teacher at dinner last night: “He made us do actual math in class today!” to which S27 replied, “Wow, imagine that! Doing math in MATH class! What could he be thinking?!” Not sure if any of you are Star Wars fans, but I am reminded of the final scenes in the first movie in which Luke is trying to blow up the Death Star and we can hear one of the other pilots just saying “Stay on target! Stay on target!” over the radio while everyone around him is blowing up and Darth Vader is speeding along behind him trying to blow him up. I feel like my husband and I are that other pilot on the radio or Obi Wan… Channeling the Force around here to hold things together, stay on target, and close out the year in one piece… 
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Yep, my son managed to get a single percentage point above the percentage needed in both Spanish and Pre Calc finals to maintain his A in both classes after deciding he’d rather play video games than study. Life in college is going to be shocking.
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I’m terrible with metaphors, but would the math teacher be Darth Vader or a womp rat that Luke used to target with his T-16 back home? 
Regardless, good luck to your son as he finishes up the year.
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Excellent analogy! 
Last year my kid got an A- by a single point (literally). The difference between of a 8/10 and 9/10 on one quiz! I was pushing him like mad at the end to eek out every point since I knew it was so close.. (our naviance has all assignments to that level of detail so had it figured out 
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D25 is taking her last final right now. She only had 2 real finals, the hardest being her dual enrolled class (yesterday). She was SO nervous all afternoon and night last night. Found out her score this morning right before her physics final started. She got a 94! This class is so difficult because it’s taught by her high school teacher and the only contact she has with the college is the final exam. You just never know what that will look like since the person writing the exam isn’t the one teaching the class.
Now she just has to do ok on the physics exam to maintain her status. She had a 4 (100%) in the class going into the final.
After today, she’s just waiting on her SAT score and the AP scores. She’s started 2 college applications but hasn’t gotten very far since she’s waiting on that SAT.
Calm has overtaken this household and I’m so happy about that!
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This is 1000% us right now. Stay on target indeed. It’s SO CLOSE. Soon, we’ll all be done with this year…
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