What’s with the new school grading standards?
When I first started Santa Fe High, it was the place of my dreams. And then junior year hit, and there was a distinctive shift with ‘standards-based’ grading.
Standards-based grading is a 1 through 4 scale that essentially puts every single assignment under a standard. Every student is graded upon the exact same thing, which sounds amazing in theory, but in practice it was a big mess.
You don’t really know what you’re being graded on. It took away the motivation to actually do your schoolwork because you don’t know if it’s going to count. Four is an A, three is an A, two is a C. D is one, and anything below that is an F. So per each standard, those three grades that have a 1, 2, 3 or 4 get averaged together then created into that one standard, then they average and round it to the nearest whole number. So if you have a 2.5-2.99, you get a B.
The purpose of it was to take out the subjectivity, but it just made it more subjective, because now teachers can drop different grades for different students and all of these things that I still don’t fully understand.
My teachers went from passionate and loving and caring about their jobs to stressed out and burnt out. Unfortunately, Santa Fe Public Schools has not fostered that safety of environment for our teachers to be able to speak up. There have been, according to my teachers, some threats to their positions. I feel they have been borderline abused.
I don’t feel as though I’m a lone wolf in speaking out. I’ve had peers who have come with me to school board meetings and multiple students who give quotes and email the district, but it appears it all falls upon deaf ears. They failed, and they refuse to acknowledge the failure. This is a multi-million-dollar mistake on taxpayers’ money.
Still, I hope there is change. I just don’t know yet.
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