Today’s Inflated Grading System

Dumber Today than Yesterday

We’ve all heard it before; our education system is failing our students. Falling SAT scores and the way our students measure up (or don’t) against students in other industrialized countries, point to a serious problem with our education system. Schools today have a less rigorous curriculum than they did in the past. And yet, you’ll find if you look closely, that more students make A’s, B’s, and C’s than they did 50 years ago.

We aren’t challenging our children. In an effort to make everything equal for everyone so that nobody feels “dumb”, we have lost the purpose for the grading system. When half of the class has an A, the curriculum is either too easy, or the teacher is pumping up the grades of her students.

How Does a Teacher “Fluff” the Grades?

Extra credit is one way that a teacher can fluff her grades. Extra credit essentially allows a not-so-good student who tries very hard to make an A in the class. There is good intention behind extra credit, but the problem is that ultimately we’re teaching our children that if they keep themselves busy enough they can achieve anything. Unfortunately, this is a lie. It is not the hardest worker who necessarily succeeds. If your secretary spent all day filing things, dumping them out, and then re-filing you couldn’t say that she wasn’t working hard. She was working hard all day. The problem is she wasn’t productive with her work. While she spent time filing all day, she neglected the phones, e-mail, and other tasks that needed to be done. Extra credit is essentially the same thing. Not only is the student not working at a task that helps solidify the important lessons that she didn’t grasp, but it is teaching an untrue lesson, that as long as she does some kind of work, she’ll do fine. Unfortunately, this is not true of the workplace, if it were; we’d never accomplish anything because we’d all be like hamsters on a wheel. Spinning in place and getting nowhere.

Another way that a teacher fluffs grades is to drop the grades of a certain amount of missed homework. What is the point of assigning homework if it really doesn’t matter if the child does it? By using this method, the teacher shows her students that homework doesn’t really matter. And if it doesn’t matter, why should the student bother doing any of it?
A final issue that needs to be addressed is the issue of study guides. Study guides are meant to be a list of topics that may or may not be covered on the test. It should be merely a guide to the student’s studying. Unfortunately some teachers give out the test itself under the guise of a study guide. Not only does this inflate the grades, but it doesn’t teach a child how to truly study.