Reply to Skills-Based Grading

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Again, this isn’t coming from the board. It’s coming from administrators. And I am not understanding that this is equity driven. It seems harder to get good grades.[/quote]

Here’s the explanation: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/19/05/grade-expectations

The idea is that grades should reflect what the kid knows at the end. That means, grades for quizzes, homework, class work, participation, etc. count for nothing. It also means for kids who are low A students down to about C+ students, their grades will often come down because there is no buffer to help boost their grade to the next level. Kids who are tippy top As, are fine, but that’s not the majority.

Of course, you also have teachers who have very hard grading policies, extremely hard tests, and are poor teachers. Add that to some schools/teachers applying this process and others aren’t, it’s a terrible policy. I know others will argue that in college there are only final assessments and shouldn’t kids’ grades be based on what they actually know at the end. The problems with this are: this isn’t college yet, it’s not a universal system so kids who are under it, are compared to kids who aren’t, and these grades have a major effect on the student’s trajectory. [/quote]

Actually, I taught in college, and this is not how college is.  Or at least, it varies widely by teacher and department.  To be fair, including participation in a grade has always been problematic and very unscientific.  So I'd be glad if that were gone.  But as usual, FCPS takes a thing that could work and makes it awful.  The idea of this kind of policy is that it prevent students from doing poorly simply because of missing an assignment or doing badly on one test, which is admittedly a problem with strict grading policies.  Like for example, my kid got all A's on all assessments in one class, and then got a B because he missed a couple of homeworks (because they were a waste of his time).  But FCPS has apparently managed to implement this in such a way that grades are somehow even more dependent on a single missed thing or poor performance, which is the exact opposite of how it's supposed to work, which makes it exactly as ass-backwards as everything FCPS does.[/quote]

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