How policy changes throughout the semester have impacted students, teachers, administrators, and staff

Graphic by Melissa Liu, Managing Print and Design Editor

Melissa Liu, Managing Editor & Madisyn Signal, Staff Writer

Grading

Since the beginning of the school year, Fulton County Schools (FCS) has changed its grading policy three times, largely in response to communtiy feedback. Under the current grading policy–which will remain in effect until the end of the first semester–teachers only count summative assessments or assignments towards student’s average, and students who achieve a score of 89 or below on a summative have the opportunity to raise their grade to a maximum of 89 by retaking or redoing the summative. 

The first change in grading policy, which was in effect at the start of first semester, had some unintentional consequences. Under this policy, students who earned a 75 or below on a summative had three chances to retake it and could raise their score up to 100. While this attempted to give students the opportunity to be successful, teachers and administrators alike soon noticed that it disincentivized students from scoring above a 75 and created an unfair situation, in which students who failed assessments could end up getting higher grades than their peers who passed because they could earn up to 100 on retakes. Administrators, including Northview Principal Brian Downey, received an overwhelming number of complaints.

“District-wide, school board members, [the] superintendent, all the district leaders were getting a bunch of communications from parents, from kids, and even teachers that said ‘something's not right,’” Downey said. “The kid who gets the 76 can't do anything, but the kid who gets the 74 can.”

In response to the feedback, FCS enacted a second change in grading policy beginning on Sept. 21 to minimize unfairness. Under the new policy, students who received a 79 or below on a summative could retake it and earn up to an 89. While it was an improvement from before, many felt that unfairness was still a possibility, which led to the third, and most recent, change on Nov. 2.

Economics and AP World History teacher Mark Anderson finds the third policy unsatisfactory. He wants students to earn their grades and feels the current grading system does not reflect how much work students have put in and how well they have truly mastered the course material.

“I just know that naturally, there’s no way the majority of the students in the class are getting an A in a college-level class,” Anderson said. “If you do allow there to be retakes of everything below a 90, that is grade inflation.”

Junior Diane Zhao agrees. 

“Let's say I study really hard, and I get above a 90 on an exam, and another student fails the exam, but then they have maybe an extra week to study,” she said. “It's not fair to have [anyone with] a grade below a 90 just go back up to an 89.”

Zhao prefers the second grading policy, where students who score below an 80 on summatives can retake them, because having a second chance has reduced the amount of stress she experiences compared to normal years.

However, Assistant Principal LeMetra Dismuke believes the third policy strikes a good balance between allowing students to succeed while also providing an accurate measure of their content mastery at the time of the assessment.

Anderson notes that while students should have the opportunity to demonstrate improvement in theory, the current system causes students to view retakes as a crutch or shortcut to a higher grade. The third policy, in his opinion, assumes all students have the goal to master the content, when in reality, many of them care more about their grades.

“I don’t feel comfortable [having] a student who in no way proves to me they were paying attention during class, that they did any of the reading, get a retake, no questions asked,” Anderson said. “You have to prove to me that you’re not just waiting to see the test and retake it.”

To ensure students are making an effort to master the content, Anderson requires them to meet certain criteria before they are eligible for retakes. Students must have done all the work he has assigned for that unit and complete an additional remediation assignment. Even though the majority of his AP World History students score 89 or below on any given assessment, only a third of these students meet these criteria, and in the end, only 10% of them and even fewer Economics students end up retaking summatives. Despite this, he is still having difficulty creating high quality, fair summative assignments, or assessments for retakes. 

“These materials aren’t just growing out of trees,” Anderson said. “That’s some of the hard work that goes on behind the scenes that students don’t see, is what it takes to come up with a good test, or a good essay prompt, or a good project.”

He and other teachers often end up giving students who request retakes the same assessment or assignment as before. According to Anderson, this makes grades an even less accurate measure of mastery of content, since students may be scoring higher not because they learned or studied more, but because they have already seen the assessment or talked about it with their peers.

French teacher Catherine Francisse has experienced fewer challenges than Anderson has with summatives. To her surprise, almost none of her students have requested retakes, even though a fourth of them usually qualify for any given assessment.

“Some students, when they get an 85, they are happy,” Francisse said. “They don’t know if the retake will be an easy one, so they have to balance and see if it’s beneficial or not.”

Usually, it is Francisse who must track down students who fail and tell them they have the opportunity to retake instead of the other way around. For both Anderson and Francisse, the biggest flaw in the current grading system is the lack of late penalties because it means students can turn in assignments whenever they want.

“It’s amazing that for first semester, even if students have incomplete [summatives], they can still do [them] second semester,” Francisse said. “That is pushing things a little bit. If someone doesn’t turn in something, and we’re moving onto another subject, how do you catch up?”

She finds that the lack of penalty is unfair to students who participate and turn in their assignments on time. Anderson has experienced similar issues, and in some of his classes, only 15-20 out of 30 students regularly turn in assignments on time. He attributes this to a lack of motivation.

“There are a lot of kids who will meet the bar that is set for them, but they won’t go above and beyond,” Anderson said. “If you set a low bar of things are never due, some students will do that.”

Many of his students never do their homework on time, so they are only eligible for retakes several units after the original test date and end up falling severely behind. Anderson wishes teachers could enforce late penalties because not having clear time frames for when students must complete assignments and retakes puts him in a difficult situation where he cannot maintain the same expectations for every student.

Zhao believes FCS could improve its grading policy by allowing teachers to count formative grades––along with the current summative grades––not only because it will reduce the amount of stress students experience while taking assessments, but also because it would incentivize students to work harder and improve their performance. She has noticed that many of her peers only try on summatives and do not complete homework because it does not affect their grade.

“Not having formatives does make people less incentivized to complete their assignments, which in turn affects their summative assignments because if you can't complete the work before that, then you don't have the knowledge the teacher wants you to know for the summative assignments,” Zhao said.

Though Anderson, Francisse, and Zhao disagree with aspects of the third policy, they acknowledge that the district is trying to do what is best for students and teachers.

“My purpose is more [about] reaching out to the kids, and the administrative part is not my role,” Francisse said. “We are living in such a difficult situation that if I am told to do something, I look at it and I try to do the best that I can with it.”