Today (1/15/) we received one of the most cherished gifts God can give—a snow day. Actually, it was a “cold” day, the temperatures dropping to below zero. We should have been off yesterday, but the principal made her decision not to close school before the 6-8 inches started falling at 5 am. By the time school began about 4 inches had fallen, making driving to school a nightmare for both students and teachers. It took some almost 2 hours to make the usual 40 min drive in. While she really didn’t need to, the principal gave the school the day off to make up for yesterday, though I doubt she would admit to that. By the time I got a chance to finish the post our snow day had ballooned into a 5 day vacation. Friday was even more bitterly cold than Thursday, so school was called off for a second day, and Monday was Dr. Martin Luther King’s holiday resulting in a 5 day weekend.
In response to my last entry on semester grades, some think I am crazy or incompetent for not understanding the Spanish teacher’s point of view, some think I am dead right and think something needs to be done about it by the administration, and some wanted to know what innumerate¹ means. These people are, respectively; English teachers, Science teachers, and Social Studies teachers. I suspect if a fair poll was taken that students and parents would be firmly in my camp.
A friend from the Theology Department wants to side with the Spanish teacher, except for the fact that she is very bright and sees the inherent problem with what she did. The Theology teacher does not trust the program that calculates the grades, so she is conflicted about what to think. She is just too bright not to see the powerful logic in my argument. Some of her colleagues in Theology should be as intelligent.
One of our colleagues has taken the calculating of grades to new heights of illogic. The administration has specified a grade scale that we all must use; matching percentages with letter grades. The computer has been programmed to follow this; each teacher is required to use it for his or her own class. If a student has an average of 92% in my class, the computer assigns that a letter grade of A-; while an average of 91% receives a B+. The computer calculates percentages to two decimal places, but rounds off to the nearest whole percentage when assigning grades; so a 91.50% is an A- and a 91.49% is a B+.
Our misguided colleague goes over her grades and changes the rounding so a 91.99% becomes a B+; her reason being that it is not 92%. She does this for every grade that is just below the cut-off, but would round up to the next highest letter grade. She claims that is more “accurate” to round using 3 decimal places instead of the two the computer uses. Not only does she not understand the concept of “accurate”, but “fairness” as well. There is no justice in a grading system that assigns two different letter grades for the same percentage grade. This is just another instance of a lawsuit waiting to happen; or, in the hands of a different principal, grounds for dismissal (falsifying grades).
A colleague in the Math Department thinks that someone in administration changes the grades back to what they should be if the parents complain; never telling the teacher who issued the grade that it was changed. This solves the problem of legal action, and prevents an uncomfortable confrontation with the teacher. It is more likely that the person in charge of entering the grade changes requested by the teacher on the grade verification sheets knows what is going on, and has been instructed to leave the grades as they were. This makes sense because after the grades are verified they disappear from the teacher’s screen and can’t be viewed again.
¹in•nu•mer•ate; unable to do arithmetic, lacking a basic knowledge and/or understanding of mathematics and unable to use numbers in calculations (Encarta Dictionary)
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