Volume 2.2 | Letter to the Editor

Dear El Ciento-Siete, we wanted to state our opinion on the recent “Grading System” article.

Although we don’t disagree with this new direction that grading is headed because we see the value that standards based grading can offer, we believe the way Admin is implementing this system is hurting students, not helping them. Respectfully to Admin, we would like to highlight some points about why we think this way.

It’s great that changes are being made to accommodate future generations so they will have a better grading system, but has Admin ever stopped to think about how their trial-and-error approach affects us high schoolers? Slowly easing into a new system makes sense, but not when it is at the expense of current students. We don’t want to be lab rats in the school’s fusion experiments, where even some teachers either don’t understand, or don’t agree and the only ones with anything to lose are us.

This mixture of percentage grades and standards-based does not work the way it should. The whole point of the four-point scale was to eliminate percentages, but now teachers are forced to transfer grades across completely different systems. In what way does it make sense that one wrong question in a quiz/test can take you from a 92% to a 75%? Most teachers don’t even isolate standards out of assessments, only assigning one number as a representative of the whole thing. On top of that there is complete dissociation of what a 4 is. Some teachers believe one must be a god in a certain subject to deserve a 4, and others will hand it out regularly as the 100% it represents.

This improvised system is only hurting the grades of current students. Seniors especially will leave next year and won’t even have the chance to see what good might come out of this mess. How can our school so calmly put in jeopardy the future of their students? Have they noticed, that this broken semester will be the first one that colleges see when looking at our applications? The intention is definitely in the right place, but does the execution make it worth it?

*Note from the editor: This letter was written before the high school assembly about the grading system took place.