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A high school in a Chicago is implementing a race-based grading system “to adjust classroom grading scales to account for skin color or ethnicity of its students.” The move is necessary, advocates say, because “traditional grading practices perpetuate inequities,” a slide used in a presentation said. Students, depending on their race, will not be held accountable for missing class, misbehaving in school, or for failing to turn in assignments.

As high school students transition out of distance learning imposed by pandemic restrictions, several California districts are dropping the use of “D” and “F” grades in an attempt to reengage students in school and boost entry into the state’s public colleges. Los Angeles Unified, Oakland Unified, Sacramento City Unified, and San Diego Unified are among the districts phasing out “D” and “F” grades for high school students. If students fail a test or don’t finish their homework, they will be given another chance to retake the test or receive an extension on submitting assignments. “Our hope is that students begin...

“White language supremacy” is the problem, and destroying grading standards is the solution, at least according to one Arizona State University English professor. Asao B. Inoue is a professor of Rhetoric & Composition at ASU and he is urging his fellow (xello?) teachers to fight “white language supremacy” by implementing “labor-based grading” which “redistributes power in ways that allow for more diverse habits of language to circulate.” The problem is this: “White language supremacy in writing classrooms is due to the uneven and diverse linguistic legacies that everyone inherits, and the racialized white discourses that are used as standards, which...

A self-described Marxist professor at San Diego State University, who is a leader within the international communist movement, has told his students that “grading is a quintessentially bourgeois practice,” and is blaming the capitalist system for unfairly grading students on their individual academic ability. This message, from professor Emanuele Saccarelli, is in a syllabus for a class on Marxism which he has used for the past five years.

I’d like to expand upon the recent PD article about grading in the Cotati-Rohnert Park Unified School District (“Cotati-RP schools rethink grades,” Thursday). What may not have come through, amid all the confusion, is the reasoning behind our search for a better way to grade students. For about the past 15 years, teachers have been using electronic grading programs to keep track of grades. While there are many benefits to the programs, they have an unintended consequence: They report a simple average of scores entered rather the more intuitive method of examining students’ grade trends. This way of calculating grades...

A new grading scale that redefines what constitutes an “A” or an “F” is causing strife and confusion in the Cotati-Rohnert Park school district. Some teachers and officials say it lowers the bar for student success, while others say it encourages students to succeed. The new system is called the equal interval scale. Essentially, it makes it harder to get a failing grade. It departs from the traditional A to F scale in which students receive F’s for scores below 59 percent. Instead, the scale awards F’s only for scores below 20 percent. “My mentor teacher, she’s not enjoying it....

While flunking out of college is common, some institutions have lax grading policies that make it remarkably difficult for students to fail. Whether its college, law school, or business school, we found 13 schools that make it nearly impossible for their students to fail. Most of these institutions are elite private schools with extremely selective admissions. Some argue that the students who gain entry to these schools are highly qualified, and therefore they perform higher than the average university student regardless of their grades. These schools also have lenient grading policies and high grade inflation. Some have abolished the letter...

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A Whistleblower 9 investigation uncovered a new grading practice in Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools.

So my student gets the report card today and quite frankly expects her high 90 gpa to continue. All of the grades I've seen have been high. She wanted to keep her average, each quarter, above a 90 to receive a special award at the end of the year for never having a quarterly average below 90 in the past 4 years. It's a big deal to the kids, I know it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, but it's important to them. Two years ago, I found grading errors (averaging and such) and had to complain...

I must be living in Lake Wobegon, that mythical Minnesota town that my fellow Anokaian Garrison Keillor created where all the children are above average.

The head examiner of a British school-examination board, Peter Buckroyd, whose examinations are taken by 780,000 children, recently explained to teachers why a pupil who answered the question, “Describe the room you’re in,” with...

BETHEL — When the first school report cards come home this year, parents will see a change in the way their children are marked. Gone is the traditional way of grading for kindergarten through fifth grade. Instead of A’s, B’s and C’s, there will be numbers and descriptions designed to give parents a more accurate idea of how their children are faring. The student progress reports were 18 months in the making. They were developed by a 24-member committee of administrators, teachers and parents who studied report cards from around the state and used input from a focus group of...