“I have had struggling students who worked their butts off only to get a 50. A real 50, not one given to them. They then see that they could have gotten the same grade without even trying and it then becomes extremely difficult to convince them to work hard and keep trying.”
I had one with a 35 over 2/3rds of the course and 72 on the final. 23.45 + 24 = 47.45. Needed a 78 to pass. Failed, retook course the next term and passed easily with a B. She’s now a nurse and doing well.
I could have passed her but she learned her lesson having to repeat the course. The best part was breaking the chain. Once she realized she could do the material - she was fine. Other teacher wasn’t happy when she heard what happened she complained to me about it and I told her - the reason she’s doing much better is because of what I did with her last year.
This is going to be hard for some people to believe. I have taught HS science and math at a public county school and at a private Christian school; policies were very similar; they were not how I was taught or wanted to teach. I had to fudge grades to be sure no more than two kids failed the class for the year (no athletes ever failed anything) or be fired; a failing student was interpreted as the teacher failed to teach the student. Students begged me to go over the exact questions that would be on my test because other teachers did just that for theirs. The first seven questions on a test were so easy a 5th grader who never attended class should get them right. The next three were to separate A’s, B’s and C’s. Then there was an extra-credit question. I gave partial credit if any part of the solution made sense. Two curves were used in the classes: one A to F for students that were on the high curve (avg about 80) and one A to F for students on the low curve (avg about 30); race was the difference. The school would not let me group students by ability because certain parents would “riot”. I averaged the test for all classes and classes below average got points to bring that class to the average; this was because the same test averaged higher as each later class took it that day (I was forbidden to give different tests to different classes of the same subject). For the six weeks grade, I threw away the lowest score for each student. I must have missed the memo on recording grades below 50 as actually 50. For the annual Nationally Normed Student Achievement Test, the school reported “grade equivalents” to parents instead of the percentile rankings (because they were obviously very low).