Re: San Francisco Institues New 'Equity Grading' System; Allows Students to Graduate With Failing Grades

On 2025-05-31 9:46 AM, Nyssa wrote:

BTR1701 wrote:
 

California once again pulls out into the lead in the race
to the bottom.
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Sounds like Progress! to me...
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https://thepostmillennial.com/san-francisco-students-can-graduate-with-failing-grades-under-new-grading-for-equity-guidelines
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On Tuesday, the San Francisco public school district
announced a new grading policy that will allow students to
graduate classes with a score as low as 21%. The "Grading
for Equity" method eliminates homework and weekly test
scores from a student's final semester grade. Instead,
there will be one test at the end of each semester to
decide if a student has passed the class. The final exam
can be retaken several times, The Voice San Francisco
reported.
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Maria Su, the Superintendent of the San Francisco Unified
School District, enacted the new guidelines without
seeking approval from the school board, according to the
nonprofit. The changes will impact 10,000 students across
14 high schools in California's Bay Area.
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Students may submit assignments late, fail to attend
class, or choose not to attend at all without consequence
to their academic performance. Currently, receiving an A
requires a minimum score of 90%, while a D is set at 61%.
Under the new scale, a student can obtain an A with a
score as low as 80% (typically a B-) and a D with a score
as low as 21%, which is otherwise known as an F.
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Educators, students, and parents have expressed concerns
regarding this diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)
initiative, particularly how it would impact academic
standards and college readiness, Newsweek reported. The
San Francisco school district's experiment comes in spite
of President Donald Trump's executive order signed in
January that eliminated DEI programs in federal
taxpayer-funded institutions.
>
Supporters of the policy argue that by reducing the
emphasis on behavior-based penalties like missing or late
assignments, it more accurately reflects a student's
learning, while critics believe it would hurt students who
are already on pace for college placement.

 Even their pre-equity grading scale would be considered
extra easy in the school district I grew up in. :/
 An 80 score on a test (even a ten-question pop quiz) was
a D. Yeah.
 95-100 = A
88-94 = B
81-87 = C
75-80 = D
below 74 = E (a failing grade)
 Tough love in the Olden Days, but at least most students
geting a diploma could read, write, and do basic math.
 How is San Francisco going to pay for all the unemployment
benefits for these equititized/non-educated graduates
 I'm glad they're on the opposite coast than I am.
 Nyssa, who thought the grading scale was too tight then, but
at least it was the same for all of the students in the
school system who suffered through it
 

Things were different in my school. Your grades could vary significantly by which teacher you had within your school and vary with what kids in adjacent schools got.
Within the school, term exams in a subject were usually written by a single teacher and it could be a "tough" teacher or a "soft" one; we knew by reputation that if the exam was written by Mrs. X it would be tougher than if it were written by Mr. Y. Regular tests would be written by your own teacher who might be tough or soft.
When you talked to students in other schools, you found their school could be very different. For instance, my high school made every English exam 100 percent essay questions, no exceptions. However, my friend at a nearby school told me that they allowed their English exams to be 25% objective (true/false and multiple choice). In my school, only a very small handful of students got an English grade higher than 70%; the best English mark I ever heard in our school was claimed by the smartest guy in the school, he got 78%. In my friend's school, English marks in the 80s were quite common and I expect there were some 90s.
Consider an entire province run like this. I truly don't know how universities decided who was fit for admission. (I'm talking about a time when MCATs, LSATs and whatever were virtually unheard of in this country.) Someone with an average of 70 from our school might still be far better equipped than someone from another school that had 90s.
Then, a provincial government saw the madness in this system and devised standardized testing so that everyone in the province wrote the same exams so that you could finally make apples to apples comparisons.
Of course it happened after my time so it didn't affect me.
Standardized testing had another interesting consequence. One of my oldest friends, who took part in many hiring decisions in his engineering firms, told me that there had been a lot of grade inflation since our day. He said that a student who got a 70 in our day was now getting a 90.
--
Rhino