An F is a 50. Not a zero.
At least for the purposes of calculating New Haven public school students’ grades. At least for now during the pandemic.
Asst. Schools Superintendent Ivelise Velazquez informed teachers of that policy in an email message.
“Given all the challenges and disruptions due to COVID,” she wrote in the message, sent late Tuesday, students should receive “a default grade of no less than 50” for the third and fourth quarters of the academic year “in all grades that use numeric grading.”
“Teachers will continue to determine grades for individual assignments, quizzes, tests, projects, etc.,” Velazquez wrote.
New Haven Public Schools adopted a similar policy early in the pandemic, then let it lapse, and has now revived it as the spread of the Omicron variant has led to renewed high levels of absences
The memo took some teachers aback, seen by at least one as “forcing teachers to change their gradebooks regardless of student work, participation or attendance.”
Schools spokesperson Justin Harmon told the Independent that the rationale behind the decision is that “when it comes to quarterly grading, limiting a failing grade to 50 leaves open the possibility that a student can work his or her way out of the failing range over the course of the year. We want to maintain students’ motivation to pull their grades up. When it comes to individual tests and assignments, teachers have full discretion; it is quarterly grading where having this limit comes into play.”
Teachers union President Leslie Blatteau echoed the point that teachers “can have high expectations of our students. We can support our students. We can control our grade books.”
“Teachers are still in control of the grades that we give. We can give whatever grades we deem appropriate for students’ work or lack thereof on tests, projects, essays. That is what our protected right is. We have not lost that,” Blatteau remarked.
She noted that the district “has the right” to control parameters of grading.
Some in the education field have advocated the F=50 policy from before Covid. The rationale is that 50 represents the same kind of failing grade in a 100-point scale that a 0 represents in a 0 – 4.0 grading system, in which a D is calculated as “1” rather than in the 60s, and an A as “4” rather than in the 90s. In both cases students would have the same challenge, and opportunity, to make up for poor performance earlier in the year.
“[T]he common use of the zero today is based not on a four-point scale but on a 100-point scale. This defies logic and mathematical accuracy. On a 100-point scale, the interval between numerical and letter grades is typically 10 points, with the break points at 90, 80, 70, and so on,” argues one such advocate, Center for Performance Assessment Chairman Douglas B. Reeves, in this paper on the subject, entitled “The Case Against Zero.” “To insist on the use of a zero on a 100-point scale is to assert that work that is not turned in deserves a penalty that is many times more severe than that assessed for work that is done wretchedly and is worth a D.”