Where to even begin with this story? And how long will it take colleges to take up this trend?
Evidently, some local school districts are setting the minimum grade at 50, rather than zero. Otherwise, it’s unfair that an F takes up the space from 0 to 60, but other grades only get ten points each.
The benefit to the space between zero and 50 is that it allows some credit for effort. A student who shows some work on a math problem but doesn’t get the right answer, or a student who spends time writing an essay but shows no skill in doing so, has earned a 50 — students who don’t try, or don’t do their work at all, have earned zeros. Yes, this digs them a hole that’s tough to get out of. That’s the point.
At the very least, schools doing this should reset their scales to run from zero to 50, rather than from 50 to 100. As one source in the article remarks, “I certainly don’t want to teach my children that no effort is going to get them half the way there.”
UPDATE: A reader alerts me that at Hamilton College, the lowest grade a student can get in a class is an FF — which, for GPA purposes, is considered a 40 percent. Therefore, the lowest possible GPA is a 1.6.