Let’s Show How You’re Really Doing in School
Two high schools, Bryan Station and Paul Laurence Dunbar, in Lexington are changing their grading system so their report cards to show how a student is doing in a class. Both schools want their students to understand the material, instead of just doing busy work about it. Some changes at Bryan Station include the following:
- Students will no longer be able to raise their grade with extra credit or point for effort, participation or following rules.
- Teachers won’t be allowed to take away points for late or missing work.
- Teachers won’t be allowed to give zeros for cheating. Instead students have to redo their work.
- Teachers will not give group scores. Instead students will be graded individually.
- A student’s attendance will not determine a grade.
The Bryan Station principal, James McMillin, believes the grading policy is broken. He and his committee came to an agreement that learning takes time so it is a good idea to emphasize more on the most recent student achievements.
Dunbar High is also introducing many of the same policies as Bryan Station. However, Dunbar is also taking on a standards-based grading system. An example of this grading system for English would be: Analyze in details how an author’s ideas or claims are developed and refined by particular sentences, paragraphs or larger portions of a text. The Dunbar principal, Besty Rains, understands that schools have been using the same grading procedures for years. Rains said, “It is time to do something different. If we continue to do the same thing, we’re going to continue to get the same results.” Those same results include students not comprehending the content and not doing well on standardized tests.
Many parents and teachers may have concerns that this new grading system will not prepare them for college. But Thomas Guskey, an educational psychology professor at the University of Kentucky, believes that teaching students bad habits is not a good way to prepare for college.
“Everyone deserves a second chance,” Guskey said when asked why this grading system is better. Guskey compared the students to physicians stating, “You wouldn’t want to be the first patient a physician has ever worked on. You would want them to have some type of experience. That’s why they try everything out on dummies to make their mistakes early. We want to give students the same cushion.”
Bryan Station and Dunbar are hoping this grading system is adopted by all schools in Kentucky very soon.