I found this article on Yahoo! News and I was thinking that this is either a really good move or a really bad move. It’s about a high school that got rid of the ‘F’ grade, for failure, and changed it to an ‘I’ for incomplete so that kids could get a second chance to learn the material.
At first, I thought it sounded great, but then I thought of longer term ramifications, like the real world. When the kid who got by on second or third chances gets a job, it’s not as if they’ll just say “it’s ok, you get another shot.”
This kind of system is good in the fact that it would help kids who actually have difficulty learning the material because they cannot grasp it. However, it will also coddle the kids who don’t give a crap about school in the first place.
So many people wonder “what’s wrong with kids these days?” Heck, I’m only 19 and I wonder that. Is this why?
I’m not sure what the difference is between getting and F and needing to repeat the course to get out of high school and getting an I and needing to repeat the course to get out of high school.
It’s symantics. F has had a long negative connotation. The I is just some new progressive thinker’s way of trying to motivate kids, and hoping they don’t think of themselves as “failures” but just needing some extra work. They both mean the same thing.
I am a parent and I am firmly against these types of unicorn and rainbow initiatives. Early school simply isn’t that difficult to pass as long as you try so you are generally looking at motivational and disciplinary issues for failing whole classes rather than than true academic ones. I want my kids to know that, if they get in ‘F’, it damn well means that not only did they 'F’ail, they also 'F’lunked and when they get a little older, you can just call a spade and spade and admit that they 'F’ucked up badly. There is no need to sugar coat it because the rest of life doesn’t work that way either.
I support it, and I am NOT some “special snowflake” parent.
The job of the school is teach the information, and the transcript should show if the student learned it. To me, a D minus means that you barely learned the material, while an F means you learned nothing. I don’t care if you learned nothing. It does not come into my calculation. It is irrelevant. An F should mean no credit, no points, and nothing on the transcript. You effectively never took the class, and it should not be listed.
This was how Stanford used to do it when I was there. After I left, they “brought back the F” to big fanfare, mainly due to sniping by people who felt that it mattered. Bah.
How does an ‘I’ give them the chance to learn the material again? Do they repeat a year, have extra classes or what? The article says they can catch up over the year, but what happens with all the new content the rest of the class is taught later in the year. Someone from the article also said that many students will put everything off and try to do it all at the end of the year, which is a recipe for disaster.
At technical school here, if you don’t like your grade, you can sit the class again, as many times as you want, and your transcript will have your best result on it. But it means doing the whole class again.
Yes, but you count the units in the GPA calculation. Instead, if you remove or grant an incomplete, those units do not count when determining GPA. Even more, the course is taken off of the official transcript as well.
I went to the Junior University, not Stanford Tech.
So you are in favor of “not penalizing” a student for failing a class at Stanford. You believe that if the class is a 3 hour class then he should receive 0/0 in the GPA calculation instead of 0/3.
Yes. That is the system that was in place when I attended, and I think it was a good system. I do not think that it led to any horrible consequences, and it might have even had a positive benefit.
In a traditional A-F grading system, if a student fails a course they must either retake the entire course the next year or they take it in summer school. If I am reading the linked article correctly, if a student receives an I, they are simply given another year to bring up their grade.
I don’t know anyone directly involved in the school personally, so what I am about to say is based purely on the article. However, I do have some experience with this sort of a program, so I’m not entirely stabbing in the dark here.
Here’s the quote from the article that has me alarmed:
Emphasis added
I am a teacher at a public high school. In the past a select number of students have been granted “Incompletes”. This allows them time to do whatever they need to do to bring up their grade to passing if they otherwise would have failed. They can do homework they previously blew off, retake quizzes they had failed, turn in projects they didn’t feel like doing during the school year, etc.
This sort of an “accommodation” is also given for the same rationale as the article – some students don’t learn at the same rate as their peers. This may be true, but I fear it’s setting a dangerous precedent. It’s potentially providing a safety net for students who blow off their work.
Now I have seen such a system work well at the college level. Incompletes are granted for extreme circumstances only though and had to be documented in some way. When this sort of a system is the norm as opposed to an emergency back-up it can lead to all sorts of trouble.
If it’s a matter of retaking the course, sure, go for it, it’s just semantics.
If it’s a matter of hounding the teacher, demanding your “make up work” and redoing just enough assignments/tests to pass, then I think it is a terrible, terrible policy for several reasons:[ol]
[li]It mistakes product for process. This happens all the time when students are failing: “Can he make up his work?” But the work isn’t the point. If you failed a vocabulary test because you didn’t study, going back and making the flashcards you were supposed to make is pointless. If you sat slack-jawed through a week of lectures, unable to understand them because you weren’t doing the complimentary assignments, what good will it do you to stumble through the assignments now with no lecture to reinforce them? This is why kids don’t mind cheating: they think having the product is the POINT, and so if they have the product, they deserve, fundamentally, the grade. [/li]
[li]Make up work is always, always, always done in a half-ass fashion. This is, at least in part, because it’s graded in a half-ass fashion because it’s really hard to grade something to a standard when you hardly remember the assignment or what your standards even were.[/li]
[li]Kids do less work overall. They sort of kid who lies to himself and says he will just make it up over the summer is the exact sort of kid who won’t do it over the summer. Allowing him to have that comforting lie just screws him over.[/li]
[li]It’s unfair to teachers. It’s hard enough to keep up with the 180 (for real) I have. I sure as hell don’t want to have to accept make up work from some kid from last year, and I really don’t even have the time to accept much late work from last week. If you were sick, we’ll figure it out, but if half the classes stuff is dribbling in . . . Sweet Zombie Jesus, that’s a nightmare.[/li][/ol]