I just started my sophomore year of high school, and am disappointed. The grading scale has been lowered a bit, apparently for those students who don’t apply themselves worth the carbon they are based upon.
You see, last year, the grading scale went (roughly) as follows: an A was 94-100 points, a B was 86-93, a C was an 85-76, a D was 75-70, and an F was any grade 69-0. The grade tied into the grade point average, as follows: an A gave one a 4.0 unweighted GPA, which really helps with scholarship applications. A B gave 3.0, C a 2.0, D a 1.0, and an F gave a 0. All of one’s subjects averaged out; if I had 3 4.0s, a 2.0, and 2 3.0s, I’d get a 3.3.
Now, an A is 91-100, a B is 81-90, and so on. It makes it so much easier to get a higher GPA without even trying, and pretty soon, it’ll shoot the legislators who came up with this stop-gap solution in the foot.
I am disgusted. The solution comes not from lowering the bar, but upping the spending, improving the student-teacher ratio, and providing more outlets for the academically gifted and challenged, along with those who fall into neither catergory. Florida, IIRC, ranks pretty low on the smarts scale of the US when it comes to test scores. It won’t help one iota if we lower the grading scale; we’ll still be at a disadvantage to other states.
Ach, a fine product of Floridian education I am. I pressed ‘submit’ when I meant ‘preview’, so I’ll have to finish here. I’m willing to petition the Florida Department of Education, or whoever is in charge, to raise it to the previous levels.
Just sounds like more of the dumbing down of America. I wonder if I could apply to all of my B+s upgraded to the A’s which they now would be. I could even graduate Summe Cum Laude. (I always liked that phrase)
But somehow, I just keeping getting struck mentally with Jon Lovitz from an old SNL routine: “Ladies, can’t find a man? Lower your standards”
When I was in high school (Ft. Lauderdale) in the mid 80’s the scale was 90-100 was an A and so forth. I didn’t realize it changed. I think I did OK, myself. But yeah, FL could still use some help in the education dept. I wanted to be a high school teacher at one pont, but lost my interest after completing an externship.
Really? I had no idea that this 10-point grading scale was the norm. Still… I have nothing against the government helping out students, but they should give them a gentle nudge, not carry them around in a wheelbarrow. I approve of our scholarship programs, like the Bright Futures scholarship I’m aiming for (100% tuition, if I have a 3.5 GPA, if I graduate with full course credits, and if I apply 75 hours of community service), but lowering the grading scale seems wrong to me.
We should be pushing our students harder, not giving them an easier time. I’m pretty embarrassed that a nation as the United States of America, an industrialized nation, a First World nation, should lose to pretty much every other industrialized nation out there. It’s a shame, a pity.
But… but… the University of Florida is the “Harvard of the South!” :rolleyes:
You should realize that changing the percentage ranges means nothing by itself, because it’s possible (albeit unlikely) that the standards are also changed such that about the same GPA is maintained. I tend to prefer a wider range of scores to a narrower one, because I’ve found that it’s easier to separate the good students from the poor students when the good ones are getting 85-95% and the poor ones are getting 45-55% than when the good ones are getting 95-100% and the poor ones are getting 65-70%. (I remember many classes in college where to get, say, a 60% on a test would be strictly average, and I remember some classes where even getting a 60% was a bloody miracle.)
Oh, and of course there’s always the worry about grade inflation. I don’t know how much of a problem this is in high school, but you hear about colleges where the mean GPA is 3.8 or something ridiculous like that, with the implication that most of the students are A students. I always thought that the average student was supposed to be about a C; I can see raising this higher somewhat because a GPA of 2.0 doesn’t look so hot to universities, employers, etc. But if the mean GPA is too high, people tend to be suspicious that the school really wasn’t teaching much anything (there’s such a thing as too easy). My point is that perhaps, in their infinite wisdom, the powers that be in Florida decided to counter the risks of grade inflation by raising the standards, and then realized later that doing so made the GPA drop (duh) and made them look bad?
You think that’s bad, the grading scale in the LA schools (one of which I went to for the last two years of high school and it was a pretty good school, they don’t all suck) was as follows:
90-100 A
80-89 B
70-79 C
60-69 D
59 and below F
To compare, the district in Texas where I got most of my public school level education counted a C as anything from 75 to 79, and a D from 70 to 74. Anything under 70 was an F.
Personally, I think a ten-point system is easier to deal with. Though I now think making 60 the pass line is sort of weenie, at the time I thought it rocked. I was that much farther from failure…
I’ve allways figured that the best way to handle this sort of thing is to - gasp! - let the teachers grade the students!
My school district may have had an “official” grading policy, but I’ve had teachers that used a ten point system, a four-point systems, a combination of systems, keeping books with just ‘points’ till the end, keeping books with just letters untill the end. For an advance bio course, the teacher used a point system that was even wider than the ten point system. Why? Because she thought it was a tough class.
I mean, the teachers allready have absolute control over what the students grade is going to be. Adding these arbitrary bookeeping regulations is pointless, and more work.
Speaking of dumbing down the education system. Jeb-boy’s pick to head the revamped education dept. in Fla. is Jim Horne, a legislator from the NE part of the state. His main qualifications are that he supported Jeb-boy’s legislative packages and is a staunch Republican. He was an accountant before becoming a politician. Education background? None. Major accomplishment in the Legislature: Extorting Leon County (where Tallahassee, the state capitol is) to remove speed bumps from a residential street he - and others - used as a shortcut to the airport. After county officials refused to remove the bumps - put in expressly because of speeding shortcutters - he put a clause in the appropriations bill (on the last day of the session) denying transportation funds to the county if they didn’t remove the speed bumps. For some reason this wasn’t subject to the Governor’s line item veto. And this guy will be running the state education system. My wife is a teacher, I pray for her retirement time in about 3 years.
If I recall, when I lived in Tallahassee, we had the 94-100 grading scale. But colleges used the 90-100 one, so in order to prep us for the transition, they shifted it my last year there. Up North, all the schools have the 90-100 scale, that I’ve seen anyways.
I dunno…the youth of America’s going to hell as it is, why not help make the trip a little faster?
Florida? You mean the State where people did not want a lottery until they were assured that all of the profits would go into fixing up the school system, which had become the laughing stock of the United States? The school system that in the 60s and 70s was considered one of the best in the US? The education promise made that assured the public that the lottery funds would go along with the State Education funds and give Florida the ‘bestist school system ever’?
Whatever happened to those millions and millions of lottery dollars anyhow? Why are Florida Legislators crying for more Federal Education funds?
Could it be that close to 50% of the designated lottery funds have been siphoned off for crap projects? Could the Florida Leaders have bamboozled the public again? Could they have planned that the whole time the lottery was being set up?
I had to sign a form from my daughter’s Honors Chem teacher acknowledging that I saw her classroom policy. One item, bolded and underlined, stated that there would be no grading on a curve or dropping of lowest grade. This is one teacher’s way of dealing with the lowered grade scale.
I have mixed feelings - I hate that it’ll be easier to get A’s, but with the 100% Bright Futures scholarship a probability for my kid, I’m glad to see her stress factor reduced a bit. She missed out straight A’s last year by one point in Honors Biology - it would have been an A under the revised scale.
Of course, in the grand scheme of life, this seems such a minor issue. At least we’re out of Virginia and away from those inane SOL tests.
I was a few years after you in the Broward County School System, and sometime around 1989 or so, my sophomore year of high school, it changed to 94-100 being an A.
As for the title, yes, Florida is the tenth circle of Hades.
