I’ve just started following the current high-school grading controversy in Fairfax County, Virginia. The video above highlights one high school student’s very public statement about the extent to which she feels unfairly penalized as a function of Fairfax’s grading policy (i.e., not accepted to her college of choice).
If I’m getting this right, Fairfax uses a six-point grading scale, which starts at a 64 (as the lowest possible “passing” grade) and culminates in an “A” at 94 or better. A 93 translates into a B-plus.
The student in the YouTube video above complains that colleges do not take this idiosyncratically weighted grading system into account when they assess Fairfax County students’ applications. Instead, she says, what might otherwise be an A or A-minus from another school system looks like a much less impressive accomplishment for her and her classmates, especially when so many admissions offices already assume that rampant grade inflation is putting a thumb on everybody’s scale anyway.
Some colleges are claiming to de-emphasize SAT scores these days, highlighting other criteria (such as grades). At the same time, a few experts call for admissions departments to move from a focus on any grades (standardized exams or high school transcripts) to an emphasis on student writing as a demonstration of theoretical rigor, communication skills, and discursive sophistication.
As a faculty member who still hasn’t absolutely mastered the fine art of confidently distinguishing between B-plus’s and A-minus’s, especially for courses that are predicated on inescapably subjective assessments of students’ written work, I don’t have any easy answers to Fairfax’s grading controversy. I can say, however, that I didn’t complain too much about the grading system Howard University employed when I was an undergraduate there. Professors gave out A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s, and F’s — and without any plusses or minuses to nuance things. There was no need to parse the difference between, say, a low A and a high A-minus. And where there aren’t any interstitial options to soften a B or proffer a half-hearted almost-A, it becomes a lot easier to tell the difference between an A student and a B one.
Of course, some of my undergraduate A’s could have been A-pluses with a more fine-grained grading format. And a few of those same A’s certainly would have been A-minuses anyplace else. But all in all, things evened themselves out. And it meant that I had a little less incentive to bicker with my professors over the difference a plus or minus makes.
