What If Students Get a Diploma but Not an Education?

Okay, so I'm really, really undecided about this.

I'm really torn about the merit of these different grading scales where, you know, you have the traditional scale where you need a 60 to pass and getting a zero really tanks your grade.

You have the GPA-style scale where it's 20, 40, 60, 80 for the different letter grades.

And in that case, you can do a pretty small percentage of your work and still pass.

You know, teachers would have to grade more strictly.

to kind of keep up the rigor and then you have these ideas like giving students 50 points at a minimum no matter what they do even if they don't turn in anything give them 50 and in those cases they can actually not do the the great majority of their work and still pass and i think what gets lost in the debates about grading scales and grading policies is learning right at the end of the day what we really want is for our students to learn we don't want our students to just walk away with a diploma or with a report card or a transcript we want them to walk away with knowledge and skills that they can actually use in life and i feel like sometimes our incentives are a little bit messed up as education systems right our incentives are to make our numbers look good and student learning doesn't show up in those numbers except in the way that we choose to represent it, right?

Like if you graduate a student who doesn't know how to read, well, that student shows up as a graduate.

There's no statistic separate from that that makes it clear that you failed to teach that student how to read.

And now that kid is out in the world living with the consequences of not knowing how to read.

and that's true in any subject if we give grades if we give course credit for a subject that a student didn't really learn like we look good they have the credential they have the transcript they have the piece of paper to prove it but mostly in life we don't benefit on a day-to-day basis from the credential like that gets you in the door that gets you access to things but you can't actually use knowledge that you didn't develop so I think There's kind of a double-edged sword when it comes to compassion here, right?

Like if we want students to get the credential, we want our stats to look good selfishly, but we also want students to have the high school diploma that we know is so valuable to them.

But I worry that we're ignoring part of the reason that a high school diploma is valuable, right?

Like if you apply for a job and you're a high school dropout, your chances are gonna be much, much lower, right?

But if you get a job because you have a high school diploma and then you don't have any skills, you can't read, you can't do basic math, you can't make change, You can't follow through on work because you've never been required to turn in hardly any of your assignments.

I feel like there's really a double-edged sword to this compassion here where if we lower standards so far that everybody gets the credential, A, over time the credential becomes meaningless and maybe that's too abstract for us to really worry about, but B, the student doesn't have what they need to succeed in life.

So I'm really torn.

I really genuinely cannot decide which grading scale of the three that I've been talking about is the most compassionate towards students, is ultimately the best for students.

Let me know what you think.