<p>Sure I can. The kids for whom class rank is important are generally all taking the same classes. They all “suffer” the same fate.</p>
<p>Let the teacher go teach in some school district where no one cares about their grades and especially what they learn, then see what she complains about!</p>
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<p>That reasoning only works when one person teaches all the AP English or all the APUSH.</p>
<p>Navaltradition…nope. She was pretty stunned. The good news, she started providing more feedback to the kids who did want to improve their work/grades. So, gotta credit her for that, even if she was the most difficult teacher to work with. Ever.</p>
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<p>In my experience, “improving my mastery of the material” accounts for a tiny fraction of the time I spend “talking about the test.”</p>
<p>This is not an either/or situation. Learning is important AND grades are important. For me, AP classes are the easiest to gauge. If a kid gets an A for the class and a 3 on the test, something is wrong. If a kid gets a C in the class and a 5 on the test, something is wrong.</p>
<p>So far, my D’s AP classes have been consistent. Classes are rigorous and test scores very closely match grades.</p>
<p>Not at the HS level, since I teach college courses, but I HATE it when students come to me after an exam wanting to know what they can do to pass the course when they just did poorly on the latest exam. </p>
<p>Last week, in comes a girl immediately after the test wanting to know what she can do so as not to fail. I look on her grade log and she’s missing the last 6 assignments. How about doing the work I actually assigned? How about doing more than the assigned problems until you actually understand what you are doing? How about coming to class regularly and getting credit for the group work and labs we do there? How is this so difficult? What does she want me to say? That she should wash my car?</p>
<p>Sylvan, exactly.</p>
<p>Why should a teacher give your child anything but a “C” if she earned a “C”? And the answer to the question of “What could I do to improve my grade?” is usually obvious. Do the homework, hand it in, ask for help when you don’t understand, read the assigned text or books, study.</p>
<p>And life after high school isn’t fair, either. Sheesh. Some professors give one midterm and one final. Period. Some don’t grade on a curve. There isn’t necessarily any continuity among professors teaching the same course. The only continuity throughout a university may be whether an 81% is a “B” or a “B-”.</p>
<p>No, the teacher is not nuts.</p>
<p>Satan’s Mistress! Now, perhaps, known as Satin’s Mistress… :O</p>
<p>Sylvan - I agree whole-heartedly, based on what my kids have seen at school. Kids don’t want to do the work, they just want good grades. A corollary to what you describe is the teacher who caves to pressure and offers Extra Credit to the entire class - the kids who most likely to complete the EC assignment are those who need EC the least (and vice versa).</p>
<p>I am rather shocked at the responses on this thread that expect/demand grade inflation simply because everyone else is doing it. There is a private school in our area where grades have become a complete joke - more than half the school has GPAs over 3.5, including the freshman class which does not have weighted classes. A student there was caught cheating on an exam but the administration decided they couldn’t do anything about it - giving her a zero would have dropped her from Val status to the lower half of the class rank. Her parents had a team of lawyers lined up and ready for blood.</p>
<p>My kids’ school has an AP class where no one has ever received any grade other than A. The teacher simply believes that if a student is qualified to take the class, then they are qualified for a top grade. Of course, less than 20% of her students take the AP exam - and the other 80% predictably do little work anytime after Spring Break.</p>
<p>Should a school have a uniform policy for the parameters of assigning grades? Absolutely. Does this mean students should expect A/B grades for average, or lesser work? Absolutely not. However, in the real world, there is too much pressure on administrators to inflate grades (such as indicated by some posts on this thread) and no pressure whatsoever to maintain a reasonable grade distribution.</p>
<p>I feel for OP. My kid was in a similar boat – took honors to challenge self, but the teacher routinely gave Cs and Ds. Kid went in for help on one assignment and was told it was “just fine” and then was given a D with no other feedback. How is that “just fine”? Competition in the school district is insane, and while if you don’t do the work or understand the material, of course you shouldn’t be getting high grades, but if you are doing the work, preemptively asking if you are doing projects correctly BEFORE they are due, and getting poor grades with no feedback, then I think the teacher needs to correct his/her grading since that’s not fair in comparison with/to the 80% of the kids in the same grade that don’t have this teacher.</p>
<p>Also related to this subject is the theory that non cognitive skills are as important to success as cognitive skills. I saw an interesting TED talk by Angela Lee Duckworth ( UPenn psychologist) about the importance of “grit”’ in long term success. Grit being defined as perseverance even through initial failure, working for long term goals, etc. in studies of kids, grit is more related to long term success than IQ or talent. </p>
<p>A little failure is not a bad thing, particularly " failure " in the form of a “C”, if the child learns to work through it.</p>
<p>Sing it, Sylvan. You know, I taught the easiest class on campus this year (an intro to college/orientation-type class). Show up. Participate. You should get an A. One-third of my group failed for not being in class regularly. Seriously?! How hard is it to show up? This morning, in another class, I had a student tell me his work wasn’t done because he hadn’t been paying attention to what I wrote on the board. (Apparently, he hadn’t read the syllabus either.) </p>
<p>You’ve got a high school teacher with higher/different standards than the other teachers? Lucky you. Maybe those kids will go off to college better prepared than some of the others I’ve seen.</p>
<p>If a C was the class average, that implies that there were students that had As and Bs, so no I don’t think the teacher is necessarily nuts. What about the kids that got the As and Bs? They had better mastery of the material and deserve to have their grades differentiated. Those kids are trying to be competitive as well and if the teacher lowers the bar so that more kids can get an A how is that fair to the students that are already performing well?</p>
<p>And generally I think kids know why they are not doing as well as they would like…the test is in front of them and they can see what they lost points on. It is one thing to go to the teacher and say that you need help with concepts that you don’t understand, but “what can I do to get a better grade?” That answer should be clear from the syllabus and I can understand a teacher finding the question irritating.</p>
<p>Rampant grade inflation is one of the reasons we agreed to send DS to a school where he was guaranteed NOT to get As. We got tired of all-A report cards. In our neighborhood, every kid has straight As or close to. This is not Lake Woebegone; all of the kids are NOT above average, but they mistakenly believe they are because their grades tell them so. This disservice continues through high school and then many find themselves in colleges where they cant keep up because they dont know what real excellence looks like, and they are not equipped to handle the hits to their self-esteem. Someone needs to tell the emperor hes not wearing any clothes and stop this inflated grading madness. It rewards mediocrity, and it teaches kids that there is always a do-over (or extra credit, or a curve, or some makeup). Life isnt like that; best to learn this earlier rather than later.</p>
<p>The teacher isn’t nuts. She’s just trying to fix a broken system all by herself. Fortunately, your daughter’s competition for college admissions are all in the same boat, because they’re taking this class, too. And if your school doesn’t weight grades when determining class rank, then class rank won’t mean anything and the ad comms will know this.</p>
<p>Still, a C is a bummer for a kid used to As. My sympathies to your daughter, but she will be better prepared for college grading than her peers at other schools.</p>
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<p>See, I think that is kind of nuts. Especially when she’s not actually fixing anything, but she may be putting her students at a disadvantage relative to students who took somebody else’s class.</p>
<p>It’s a romantic notion to give your full-throated support to the last teacher in America who has any standards, but it isn’t necessarily practical.</p>
<p>Now, it’s possible that most of the kids in her this class this year really are just so-so–or, at least, the quality of their work is no better than OK. If so, then good for her for holding the line. But there are teachers who view it as their mission to be grade deflators. I knew a teaching fellow when I was in college who said, “I don’t give A’s in the first semester in English 10 [which was the college’s survey of English literature–kind of Beowulf to Virginia Woolf]. It wasn’t so bad when it was a year-long course, but now that they’ve broken it into English 10a and English 10b, it means that none of my English 10a students can do any better than B+.” Well, why on earth does it have to mean that? Whom did this woman benefit by deliberately giving lower grades than everybody else? Her students learned a great deal. But did they learn more or better because she didn’t give A’s in the fall? I doubt it.</p>
<p>I think being the last teacher holding the line against grade inflation isn’t akin to being the little Dutch boy with your finger in the dike. I think it’s more like saying, “I think they shouldn’t have raised the speed limit on interstate highways, so I’m going to drive 55 m.p.h. in the left-hand lane.”</p>
<p>Um, no.</p>
<p>The OP’s kid earned a “C” on <em>one</em> test. The OP isn’t disputing that grade. She is arguing that it isnt <em>fair</em> to be given a “C” because college admissions are so competitive. </p>
<p>I don’t blame the teacher for being annoyed. If the teacher said, "Next week’s test will be on chapters 2-4, and be sure you know X,Y and Z, and that is what the test was on, the question of “What else could I have done?” is ridiculous. Study. Read chapters 2-4, know XYZ, write in complete sentences, show your work…</p>
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<p>I thought that the historical interpretation of grades was:</p>
<p>A = outstanding
B = good
C = solidly passing, enough to go on to the next course
D = barely passing, probably not enough to go on to the next course
F = failing</p>
<p>Of course, with rampant grade inflation, the interpretation probably becomes (for college-bound high school students and college students looking at medical and law schools):</p>
<p>A = acceptable
B = bad
C = catastrophic
D = disastrous
F = forget it</p>
<p>Even if she can’t fix the system all by herself, she can instill valuable lessons on the children that other teachers can’t (won’t) instill. </p>
<p>Isn’t it better that your student learns what level of effort college level classes require BEFORE they arrive at college? It’s better that they learn how to work hard, through challenging problems at home, with a solid support system behind them, rather than when they are away at college.</p>