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I stum­bled across this arti­cle the other day:

Chill­i­cothe Schools Con­sider No-Zero Grade Proposal

Basi­cally, a school dis­trict in Ohio is think­ing of set­ting a grade floor of 50%, so that teach­ers can no longer assign grades between 0 and 49%.

Assis­tant Super­in­ten­dent Jon Sax­ton pro­posed the idea of a no-zero pol­icy to get stu­dents to do their school work.

Chill­i­cothe Board of Edu­ca­tion and admin­is­tra­tion say not all stu­dents are aim­ing high and they want to change that by remov­ing what they con­sider a harm­ful practice.

“We look at the prac­tice of giv­ing stu­dents zeros for work that’s not com­pleted and it’s puni­tive, as it, it’s like an F to the sixth degree, because the grade that’s given for a zero is six times greater than the work that’s poorly done,“ Sax­ton said.

Incom­ing fresh­man Emily Gray said she thinks the no-zero pol­icy is a good idea because it will help stu­dents to pass their classes.

There are two argu­ments in favor of this pro­posal at work in the arti­cle. Nei­ther is any good.

1. School offi­cials claim that stu­dents would work harder, because fail­ing classes or receiv­ing zeros for skipped assign­ments hurts morale.

My ques­tion is this: if they care so0000 much about moti­va­tion and kids skip­ping assign­ments or school, then why not change the real cul­prits — tyran­ni­cal teach­ers, cur­ricu­lum that seems use­less, demean­ing behav­ior man­age­ment poli­cies, and the list goes on… As long as these neg­a­tive fac­tors per­vade com­pul­sory pub­lic schools, stu­dents will con­tinue to fail. On top of that, the way stu­dents are often treated in schools is a moral abom­i­na­tion (will have to write an entire post on that some­time), and wouldn’t be jus­ti­fied even if the schools were suc­ceed­ing by edu­ca­tional mea­sures. But they aren’t — edu­ca­tion data is dis­mal. So, to sug­gest that the no-zero pol­icy will fix moti­va­tion prob­lems is like sug­gest­ing to fix the Titanic with duct tape.

2. School offi­cials claim that cur­rently, the thresh­old for earn­ing a pass­ing grade is dis­pro­por­tion­ately high, because there is a 59-point range for Fs and only 10-point ranges between the other let­ter grades.

This fea­ture of the let­ter grad­ing sys­tem is there for a rea­son — you need to get at least 60% of the work cor­rect in order to pass or get a D, because any­thing less than that doesn’t deserve to pass. The zeros aren’t nec­es­sar­ily meant to be “puni­tive” as the man quoted alleged; instead, it is just com­mon sense that there is a big­ger dif­fer­ence between doing noth­ing and pass­ing than between earn­ing a B and earn­ing a C, which could be a much finer dis­tinc­tion. On the con­trary to his point of view, it would be much less intu­itive to have the no-zero pol­icy than cur­rent let­ter grade policies.

Even those crit­i­cisms notwith­stand­ing, the injus­tice of this poten­tial pol­icy runs even deeper.

The girl men­tioned in the quote above has got things fig­ured out: she likes the pol­icy because it would “help stu­dents to pass their classes.” Indeed, it would prob­a­bly raise the schools’ grad­u­a­tion rates with­out nec­es­sar­ily chang­ing a sin­gle thing about how much stu­dents are learn­ing. This might make the schools eli­gi­ble for var­i­ous fund­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties or awards. School dis­tricts that retained the sen­si­ble, stan­dard grad­ing scale would have their stu­dents put at a com­pet­i­tive dis­ad­van­tage. The stu­dents would be com­pet­ing against no-zero pol­icy stu­dents for col­lege schol­ar­ships and admit­tance. The no-zero pol­icy would clearly be unfair, and the injus­tices it would cause against many other stu­dents could out­weigh the ben­e­fits alleged by its sup­port­ers (assum­ing those ben­e­fits were real­ized, which they prob­a­bly won’t be any­way, for the rea­sons above in 1).

Hand­ing stu­dents (many) free points unfairly is not going to solve the real and press­ing prob­lem that “not all stu­dents are aim­ing high.” A no-zero pol­icy itself makes a mock­ery of “aim­ing high” by low­er­ing the bar but keep­ing the same grade labels. Bet­ter get back to the draw­ing board, Chill­i­cothe educators.