IL

THE GRADING SYSTEM
I already wrote about the phenomenon of losing a love for reading outside school. So now I will write about the grading system at LM, and what could be changed, and what must be changed…

LM has one of the more unique (unique is a euphemism) weighting systems for any school that I have ever encountered. LM, as many of us know, weights its quarters as 20% of the final grade, and then the midterm and final count for the remaining 20% combined. In many other schools in the area (particularly private schools), midterms and finals factor in the weight of the final grade much more. Don’t quote me on this, but at Shipley, their midterms and finals are factored into their first and second semester grades respectively, and count for 25% of that grade. 25% of an entire semester’s work. I’m not saying that LM should weight our midterms and finals in such an extreme manner, as I and many other students love that we can fail a final and it will often not affect our final grade for a class.
I bring up the disparity between LM and other schools in the area as more of a question than a proposal: should LM weight its exams more? I am truly unsure of this answer. The highly unpopular opinion is that exams should weigh more that 9% or 11% of a final grade; after all, the exam is supposed to measure “retention” of knowledge from the course throughout the year.
Then again, when after high school and college will we be tested on our retention of a year’s worth of knowledge? Very rarely. For example, once acquiring a driver’s license, you do not have to go back to the DMV and re-test when your license expires; it is an assumption that you still know enough about driving to maintain your license.
So practically, midterm and final exams are unrealistic representations of testing outside the school. They do, however, promote good studying techniques (as long as you are aiming to achieve a high grade on the test). This is where I run into my issue, or my contradiction; I do see that midterms and finals are slightly unrealistic and unnecessary, and therefore shouldn’t be weighted any more than they already are, but they do promote good study habits, and these study habits would be put into more practice with more incentive to do well on the exams.
What about quarter grades? A 91% is not the same as an 83%. To acquire a 91, you must put in much more work and effort than to acquire an 83. At LM, we call both these grades “B”s and group them in the same category. They carry the same weight. This should not be.
PROBLEMS WITH THE GRADING SYSTEM
1. 91% counts the same as 83% → unfair, should we change it?
a. Do we move to system solely based on percentage?
2. No incentive do study or do well on a final exam.
3. Discrimination in the grading system→it’s hard to propose a surefire solution when some people will be adversely affected by any solution.
a. Do we change our points system? Do we radically depart from anything any of us know as grades?
4. Pressure to achieve an A. I understand this is a societal stigma that isn’t easy to suppress, but if an A was not held at the ridiculous esteem that it is, than we as students could strive to do “well” in a class, whether that meant getting a low A or a high C. This involves pressure from college and parents and administrators and teachers and probably goes outside the realm of grading systems…