I was checking out Sara Bennett’s blog, Stop Homework, when I came across an interesting article that proposed getting rid of the zero as a grade. It got me to thinking. Conventionally, grades are ranged in groups of ten; an A is between 100 and 90, a B is between 89 and 80, and so on, but not an F. An F is between 60 and 0. That’s right, Nada. Zip. As in, sorry about your luck Johny, I guess I’ll be seeing you next year after all. A zero can be absolutely devastating in terms of your overall class average, and can be quite difficult to recover from. By ranging an F from 60 to 50, kids have a better opportunity to bounce back from an early mistake, instead of giving up on passing not even half way into a semester.
Sara links to an article about a school district in Iowa that is an early adopter of this idea. The area superintendent had the following to say:
“Some teachers are really wrestling with, ‘I don’t want to give them 50 out of 100 points,’ and to those teachers I say, ‘Fine, you don’t have to. Go to a different grading scale, like 5-4-3-2-1-0,’” Bruckner said. “We’re not saying give them half credit. We’re saying, give them the F. Just don’t kill them with the F.”
That really rang true to me. Don’t kill them with the F. I remember being an eleventh grade FST student, and having that sort of an experience. I was generally a B math student, and I was working pretty hard to maintain that average in FST. About midway through the semester I flopped a test. I mean I really flopped it. I can’t remember for sure, but I think my grade was around a 20 percent. It wasn’t that I was a terrible student, I just wasn’t prepared for that test. After that I was despondent; because of the way the grading system was structured around tests, I couldn’t hope for anything better than a C in the course–and that was if I got all A’s for the rest of the semester. The F killed me.
Where does the student benefit from that sort of scenario? Under the current system, all they have to go on is, don’t miss an assignment or really mess up on a test, or you’re completely screwed. I’d prefer a system where if they do make a mistake, students don’t have to pay for it Old Testament style. Lets say, hypothetically, that Johny B. Student does slip up and fail a test with flying colors. If I give him a five percent F and doom him to repeating the course, what has he learned other than to hate his teacher and the educational system? Instead of all that, I could give him his 50 percent F, and work with him on some sort of make-up test, or redo assignment to give him the chance to really learn what he needs to know, and maybe earn some make-up points on the side.
To me, handing out a zero seems like a teacher saying, well, “you gave up on me, so I’m giving up on you”. What do you all think?
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February 1st, 2008 at 8:52 am
I’m glad to know your thoughts on this. Are you a teacher? If yes, you might consider doing what some other teachers have done–stuff copies of the article in their mailboxes with a FYI.
February 2nd, 2008 at 8:14 pm
That’s a great idea, but no, I’m not a teacher—not yet anyway. I have one more year of school to go, and in the meantime I hope to keep getting ideas from blogs like yours. Do you recommend any others?
February 5th, 2008 at 8:34 am
I highly recommend .
By the way, have you ever taken a course on homework in your teacher training or is one offered?
February 5th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Not that I’m aware of, but I think it’s an important pedagogical issue that needs more attention. One of my English professors has suggested that I do some research on what progressive homework techniques are being offerred in secondary level English courses. Or how, as a future teacher, I can reconcile the limited-homework ideology with English or Writing course frameworks?
It’s an interesting topic, and one I’m sure you are familiar with. Are there any resources out here on the web I can look through? I think the website you tried to hotlink in your last post did’t work, but I’m very interested in finding more information on the subject . . .
February 6th, 2008 at 7:10 am
I was recommending susanohanian.org.
As far as how to teach high school English or writing, I suggest you look at Chapter 9 of Nancie Atwell’s, The Reading Zone. She has plenty of suggestions for high school teachers. Etta Kralovec, co-author of The End of Homework, also has plenty of suggestions in her book. And I bet if you emailed her, she would be happy to talk to you. She taught high school English for many years. (Tell her I recommended you contact her.)
As far as writing goes, I once spent a semester teaching a writing and advocacy skills class in a law school. You would think that students who were in law school would be accomplished writers, but many of them could not write a coherent paragraph. One thing I did, and it’s something I think all writing teachers should do, is write with their students. (How I did this is I would write on the board the students’ suggested sentences. After I had paragraph or two up on the board, we would start to edit the work. The students quickly began to see how to formulate an argument, how to structure it, etc.) Too often, students are given assignments, told to write at home, and then their papers are corrected by the teacher. But they continue to repeat the same errors, because the corrections alone don’t help them figure out what’s going wrong.
I hope you follow your professor’s advice and do some research on progressive homework techniques. Feel free to email me directly for advice.
February 16th, 2008 at 11:57 am
I think that you make a great point, Brad. For a long time I couldn’t understand why some of my teachers used a grading system like 1,2,3,4,5 because to me those numbers are low, and if they’re low then that must mean that it’s harder to get a five and easiest to end up at a 2 or 3. But after reading your post and argument, I don’t know why all teachers don’t do that. An ‘F’ can really kill a students motivation, and why? Because they didn’t study hard enough, couldn’t recall facts fast enough, or heaven forbid you didn’t teach it well enough.
I was a decent student in high school, A’s and B’s mostly, I always did well to please my parents and myself, but never really exceeded teachers expectations because if you do that once then you’ll always have to. Math, however, was the thorn in my foot. Three years was way too much and by the fourth, when College Algebra came along, I just wanted to pass it and move on. Even after being tutored and really working hard to compensate for my lacking of sweet math skills, I knew my grade would be stuck at a C, solely because I failed almost ever single quiz. I got B’s on the tests but the quizzes were like my practice for them. When I talked to my teacher about it, her advice was to do the homework. Well, thanks for the great advice teach- I’ve already been doing that.
The grading system is a tad out of whack. If she would have set her F’s to a 50 to 60 percent then already it would have helped me more than seeing that dreaded 40%.
February 27th, 2008 at 9:26 am
I definitely agree with getting rid of the “0” F as a possible grade. From a psychological point of view what are teachers telling kids with a “0” grade on an assignment? In my opinion teachers are not only telling a student that he/she has failed to meet even the lowest of requirements but even more than that he/she completely failed as a student. They didn’t have a poor test or a bad day, instead they didn’t do one thing correct. I plan on using a grading scale that consists of letter grades. I know that sounds exactly like every other grading scale, yet the difference is that I will attach a percent or numeric value to the grade after I attach the letter grade. This will allow me to give a student a deserving “F”, yes sometimes kids deserve an F, but it won’t destroy their grade because I’ll attach a sixty percent to it. This will allow me to grade still objectively (I will not have to advantageously grade struggling student’s assignments while tearing into a “good” students assignment). In short, I think that getting rid of the “0” F is a great idea. The only question I have is how can you remain objective on a multiple choice test or a math test? If a student gets three questions out of one hundred correct and receive a 60% (F) and another student gets sixty questions out of one hundred correct and receives a 60% (F) wouldn’t the teacher be discounting the work of the second student? (This comment isn’t meant to oppose your ideas; I’m actually looking for a response so that I can eventually use a zero-less grading scale.)