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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.  [/quote]
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? [/quote]

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).

[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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).  [/quote]

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