The deflated grading is just exhausting.

[Anonymous]

I’m a HS teacher and I don’t try to limit As.
Class quality varies from year to year obviously but this year I have a strong class and 30% of them will most likely end the semester with an A. Another 40% will have a B. Last year, it was less.
I don’t like to set impossible standards either.
I feel there is a fine line between motivating and energizing the kids to work hard and having kids give up in frustration.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Having gone through this process, I would much rather be a college applicant with a 4.5 GPA from Gonzaga/Landon/Bullis than a 88/89 GPA from St. Albans.

No, top grades are not sufficient for elite college admissions, but they are necessary. Almost no one gets into the Ivies without a near-perfect GPA, I don't care what fancy private school you attended.

The DC privates could solve this issue by simply changing the final transcript they send to colleges. We all know that a STA/NCS/Sidwell "B" is equal to a public school "A", so just alter the transcript to say that.

Just help the kids out when applying to college. Grades are just arbitrary, fake numbers anyways.

No, top grades are not necessary. According to SCOIR, a recent Sidwell graduate was admitted to Harvard with a 3.1 cumulative GPA. Who your parents are, and how much money and influence they have, matters more than grades.

Or what diversity you bring and sport you play well?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m a HS teacher and I don’t try to limit As.
Class quality varies from year to year obviously but this year I have a strong class and 30% of them will most likely end the semester with an A. Another 40% will have a B. Last year, it was less.
I don’t like to set impossible standards either.
I feel there is a fine line between motivating and energizing the kids to work hard and having kids give up in frustration.

For the students who don’t do well, do you get calls from the parents blaming you?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m a HS teacher and I don’t try to limit As.
Class quality varies from year to year obviously but this year I have a strong class and 30% of them will most likely end the semester with an A. Another 40% will have a B. Last year, it was less.
I don’t like to set impossible standards either.
I feel there is a fine line between motivating and energizing the kids to work hard and having kids give up in frustration.

For the students who don’t do well, do you get calls from the parents blaming you?

Yes, sometimes I get calls and emails from parents. Sometimes they go directly to the head of the upper school. It is very stressful. I hate dealing with parents because it stresses me out. Never know when a parent will turn crazy on you

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m a HS teacher and I don’t try to limit As.
Class quality varies from year to year obviously but this year I have a strong class and 30% of them will most likely end the semester with an A. Another 40% will have a B. Last year, it was less.
I don’t like to set impossible standards either.
I feel there is a fine line between motivating and energizing the kids to work hard and having kids give up in frustration.

For the students who don’t do well, do you get calls from the parents blaming you?

Yes, sometimes I get calls and emails from parents. Sometimes they go directly to the head of the upper school. It is very stressful. I hate dealing with parents because it stresses me out. Never know when a parent will turn crazy on you

You sound like a conscientious teacher. Sometimes parents go crazy because the teacher is out of control or verbally abusive. Dealing with one of these right now. Maybe 20+ parents have complained. School is acting like an ostrich. What do you suggest for parents in situations like that?

What does your school do when it gets calls and emails from parents?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
The point of going to a top 3 school is to get a demanding, rigorous education.

If you’re not happy with it, switch to public or Maret or field or someplace like that.

Was your child admitted early, like in kindergarten or elementary? Maybe it’s not the right fit.

Bs are one thing by getting multiple scores like 75 or 65 could be a sign your kid shouldn’t be of the school.

I tire The people who get their kids into super progress schools and then complain that they are too rigorous.

OP here. No, kid was admitted in 9th. Has straight As (some version of them) so far but at such a high cost.
The 65s and 75s are class averages. My kids is above average but still below an A. Will probably eek out As again with a little luck and an immense amount of work.
But the stress getting to that point is so, so high and most peers are not getting As. Playing this game is getting old. Studying for hours and hours
and still getting a B or C on every exam because that is how things are written. When essay exams are graded so that the average is an 82 and only 2 kids get above a 90 (had one of these recently). I guess I get it if a math exam an 82 average. But why grade an essay exam to an 82?
(when your entire cohort can write and has read ALL the material and discussed it in class for weeks, etc).

The problem is that you are expecting your kid to get a public school gpa, probably because he was in public school through eighth. Stop putting that pressure on him. It is fine to get As and Bs at a big three. Aiming for straight As at a big three is unrealistic and ridiculous for most kids. Get over that goal.

yes, but a couple of Bs and a GPA quickly trends down to a 3.5 or thereabouts...
and kids at the 75th percentile or below in the class are increasingly having a hard time getting into decent colleges.

what i don't understand is why the schools don't help out their own kids. They are in charge of the grading. They don't have to grade an essay to an average of an 82 and give half the class a final grade of a straight B or lower And then turn around and wonder why their kids with under a 3.5 can't get into Penn State.

What do you mean by decent college? Are you really thinking that if your kid graduates from a Big 3 with a 3.5, he will only get into a sub-par school? That's ridiculous and you know it. Your kid is getting a great education and will continue to even if not at a US News & World Report top 20. Stop worrying about what sticker you will be putting on your car.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My kid goes to a Big3. Junior year.
The deflated grading feels worse than ever this year and is just exhausting. My kid does homework for 4 hours per night. Some nights it's even more.
Goes in and takes exams. Averages on a recent math exam: 70. Average on a recent science exam: 65. Average on a recent history exam: 85.
Doing well just seems impossible, stress is so high. There are no retakes, no curving, etc. We know from experience that a few kids will end eek their way up to a 90% with lab reports, quizzes, perhaps a better second test. My kid is among these. But many won't. They'll get a straight B or B- in the class even with maximum effort. And then a 5 on the AP exam.
In some classes only 1 or 2 kids will end up above a 90. There is just so much stress and I don't understand why it has to be this hard.
Why take a cohort of very bright, very hardworking kids and then give a straight B as the average (and a tiny handful of low A's across the grade?) It's just exhausting.
I'm not sure what the point it. College admissions aren't even that great--colleges are no longer buying this "a 3.5 is a good GPA!" line.
It's just too far out of the norm of what every other type of school is doing.

Hi, a private tutor here.

Before you assume that your kid is doing that much homework a night, please check the app usage on their phone. Often times "doing homework for 4 hours" is 4 hours sitting at a desk, but struggles to accomplish meaningful work because these apps are simply very addicting (not placing blame, but just providing you with a very real scenario that I see time and time again).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My upperclassman is in a class where an essay turned by last week had an average grade of an 82%. This is what I mean by grade deflation.

My kid spent at least 10 hours on this (a one page essay) and received the average (82%).

It's just ridiculous. The school admitted kids who were at the very top of their sending public and private schools, refined them by fire for 2+ years
years (in very difficult humanities and writing classes) and is now continues to say, "oh no, despite your very best effort, most of you can only write at a B- level." I have a different kid in a top public and this would have been a 98% there. The standard at the private is just beyond unreasonable.

in 20
How long your student spends on something is completely irrelevant to the grade as I am sure you can understand. Does any supervisor you have ever had care about how long something took you or the quality of the work?

Whatever. You're being an ass and picking at the semantics of my post.
My reference to time was just to illustrate that my kid worked hard on this. It wasn't something she wrote in 30 minutes at 11pm. She gave best effort and it was very thoughtfully done and over the course of a week. Classmates were the same--they also all spent 5-15 hours on this---also all got Bs or Cs.

There is something messed up when you take kids who are actively trying to do their very best and are super bright and then you grade them to an average of a B-. And as another data point: this kid just got a 790 verbal SAT in October (1570 overall).

Just because some kid has a 790 verbal does not mean they can write beautiful essays or stories. Sorry, but there is usually a lot of room for improvement, even for kids who score 800. I got an 800 on the verbal SAT back in the day and got my writing torn apart in college whenever I took classes outside of my science major at a selective university. I wish my high school teachers had prepared me for the rigors of college level writing, so maybe your DC is lucky. Scoring well on a multiple choice standardized exam does not equal being a good writer. Writing is difficult and most people who want to be good writers need feedback and training.

I get that there is massive grade inflation elsewhere these days, and it's definitely true that any reasonably smart kid could breeze through and get an A at many schools without much effort. However, grade inflation is the PROBLEM, not the solution. This craziness has got to stop.

Ok, but it's hard when your child's school feels like the last holdout in America regarding not inflating grades. The DMV publics inflate like mad, the area Catholics and most of the other privates do as well (Bullis, Landon, Field being prime examples) and even to a lesser extent so do places like Maret and Holton. The NYC privates inflate like crazy as to the Baltimore privates. It was clear from data presented on last year that Harvard-Westlake inflates. I don't know enough about the top NE boarding schools to know how they grade.

There are really very few schools left in America who don't grade to an average of an A (or at least some form of an A).

Where is the notion that DMV publics inflate like mad coming from? If you look at JR's school profile, only 25 kids out of nearly 500 have a perfect 4.0 unweighted. About a 100 kids have GPAs from 3.5-3.9. That's not much of grade inflation. Also, math education can't be all that rigorous in the area privates. Last year, only a handful of kids from all the big 3 qualified for AIME and one made USA(J)MO.

Source?

NP. Our bright kid in 9th in a STEM academy is getting a mix of As, Bs, and yikes, Cs. Still has time before end of the to bring up the low grades, but I’m waking up to the fact that JR is not matching its low rigor rep! I am not pleased that they barely read books or write papers, though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why is he there OP? If you live near decent public schools, send him there.

Public is worse. Our public AP class 90% quizzes and no retakes.

lol. This is a joke, right?

[Anonymous]

OP, I agree and I am convinced that the teachers who do this are trying to tamper motivation in certain students for personal reasons.

My middle schooler’s report card grade did not match his report card grade and the only feedback she gave him was to do all of the extra credit assignments.

If this is what we have to look forward to in private high schools around here, he’s out. His motivation means more to me than a car magnet.

[Anonymous]

PP: online report card grade does not match the report card posted in the parent portal on the school website.

I’m not mentioning this to school admin, but I noticed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why you all feel Maret is easier? I guess you all don’t have kids in Maret. There is a history teacher and an English teacher who told his students openly, the best score they will have is A-, and only one or two might get that. Rest will be B or lower.

Several of my DC’s teachers at Potimac have said the same. In English this semester my DC apparently got the second highest grade in the class on a hurling- term essay assignment. It was an 83 or a B. 1 top student got the A.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:PP: online report card grade does not match the report card posted in the parent portal on the school website.

I’m not mentioning this to school admin, but I noticed.

Why not mention it?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:PP: online report card grade does not match the report card posted in the parent portal on the school website.

I’m not mentioning this to school admin, but I noticed.

Well maybe the participation grade wasn’t included yet or maybe a final grade on the assignment work test?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kid goes to a Big3. Junior year.
The deflated grading feels worse than ever this year and is just exhausting. My kid does homework for 4 hours per night. Some nights it's even more.
Goes in and takes exams. Averages on a recent math exam: 70. Average on a recent science exam: 65. Average on a recent history exam: 85.
Doing well just seems impossible, stress is so high. There are no retakes, no curving, etc. We know from experience that a few kids will end eek their way up to a 90% with lab reports, quizzes, perhaps a better second test. My kid is among these. But many won't. They'll get a straight B or B- in the class even with maximum effort. And then a 5 on the AP exam.
In some classes only 1 or 2 kids will end up above a 90. There is just so much stress and I don't understand why it has to be this hard.
Why take a cohort of very bright, very hardworking kids and then give a straight B as the average (and a tiny handful of low A's across the grade?) It's just exhausting.
I'm not sure what the point it. College admissions aren't even that great--colleges are no longer buying this "a 3.5 is a good GPA!" line.
It's just too far out of the norm of what every other type of school is doing.

Hi, a private tutor here.

Before you assume that your kid is doing that much homework a night, please check the app usage on their phone. Often times "doing homework for 4 hours" is 4 hours sitting at a desk, but struggles to accomplish meaningful work because these apps are simply very addicting (not placing blame, but just providing you with a very real scenario that I see time and time again).

This. And because almost no one can focus and work efficiently and effectively for four hours straight. There are absolutely diminishing returns.