The Downward Spiral of The School System

    As your probably aware the school system is not doing to well, and if you didn’t well you probably found out just from looking at the name of my article. The school district in which my article is based is a public one, found in the beautiful state of New Hampshire. Now I won’t name which district it is, but that should be fine.

   This school’s grading system is based on a thing called competencies, which is one the major things I disagree with. Remember back when you went to school and you had a whole bunch of factors that effected grade like. (The grade percentage is a rough basis.)

• Tests – 30%
• Homework – 20%
• Effort- 10 %
• Quizzes- 20%
• Projects – 20%

Well all of that is gone now and replaced with two simple, but harsh grades. There’s Tests and Quizzes, which count as 90% of the grade! In other words if your a bad test take than you are screwed. The other 10% is homework. You could never do a single homework in you entire year, and get an A. Well I think that there’s a lot of problems with this grading system. First of all, all the people that can’t take tests or quizzes good at all (I’m one of them) might as well fail themselves right when the class starts. Second of all there is no incentive to do homework. If it grades that low, than why do it?

  Now there are a few good things I’ve picked out of this though. Yes you can re-do quizzes, which is really nice excepct for one thing: they make the redo harder than the original! If you studied and gave an honest attempt on the first test and say you got a 55. You can re-study, re-teach, and more often than not re-fail. Often times it’s not that they don’t understand the material its that they can’t take exams good. That is why I think the school system is not fairing well.