Recently, School Board officials of Fairfax County, Virginia announced that the county would switch to a revised grading method in its large school system. Henceforth, 90 points or more on a test or assignment will earn the student an A, 80-89 a B, and so on. In addition, the county will now provide more point credit to students who take advanced placement, international baccalaureate, or honors classes. This scoring system is evidently in use in a very large majority of the school districts in the country.
The previous Fairfax system, in which an A required a score of 94, had been in place for many years but was increasingly under attack by high school students and their parents, who argued that with other schools using a more generous scoring standard, they/their children were at a disadvantage in applying for college admissions and scholarships. That's undoubtedly true, so it's difficult to fault the Fairfax School Board for caving in to the pressures of parents and perhaps leveling the playing field.
The change from a 94-cutoff to a 90-cutoff seems reasonable and practical (not to mention politic!). Why shouldn't everyone be on the same system?
Still, it's a little sad to see a high standard in any field obliterated in favor of a lower one. As the English playwright Alan Bennett observed through one of his characters in Forty Years On, "Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards." But it's not just nostalgia. There's a lot of talk these days about slipping standards in education, yet here we are, succumbing to education politics in assessing our students. Defending their accession to this change, School Board officials opined that students these days are "taking tougher classes." Sorry, I really doubt it. I would hazard a guess that whatever it takes to achieve a 90, or 94, in 2009 is rather less than it might have required in, say, 1989 or 1969. I wonder what percentage of students now are getting A's, as compared to those in previous generations.
Even more dubious, in my view, is the practice of awarding extra points for taking AP or other "special" courses. I have some experience in this line, having taken a number of such courses myself (this was back in the Middle Ages -- you know, back when we all had to walk 9 miles to school through snowstorms). At that time, just taking an AP or Honors class was itself the "bump." Those classes are identified as such even today; college admissions officials can easily assess them for what they are. So what purpose can it serve to award extra points? Very little, I suppose, except to swell the number of students who sign up for them to get the points. If they fail, is a point deducted from their overall GPA? (By the way...why do we use A, B, C anyway? Why not just provide colleges the raw scores --- 98, 90, 85, 60. Wouldn't that tell them a lot more?)
I don't mean to castigate Fairfax officials unfairly. Their decision is reasonable. But it's a slippery slope. The students who benefit today from this change will have children who will probably be getting A's for scores of 85. Sad.
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