Everyone has their own needs. It’s a common cliché at this point, but it makes sense that we know when the needs of one person are different than the needs of another. But that is not the case with proficiency in our schools, where needs of the many do outweigh the needs of the few, and not in an effective way. And though our community is OK with that, I’m not.
This issue cannot remain unnoticed in our classes where the problems continue to persist. It has come to the point of increased stress on our community on what they are doing wrong. For example, it has come to the point where an AP language and composition teacher worries about things being “overly quantified” in his class, because percentages are compared to writing skills. And yet the community seems to blame those kinds of students or teachers for having that mindset. One reason has gone unnoticed, and that is the implementation and impact of the Student Information System, or SIS, into our academic community.
SIS is a new way of allowing students to have “instant access” to their grades. With anything that allows people to see it instantly however, there is always abuse. Both the students and teachers agree that SIS has put an emphasis on grades and GPA rather than learning. With the instant access of grades, SIS has consumed the lives of students and parents. This mentality of putting individual grades or numbers over mastery is even more harmful when those students transition into college, where having a “grades first” mindset may get a student into a good college, but that does not mean that he or she will do well in college.
Unfortunately, this behavior is only perpetuated in high school, where the “grade grubber” mindset is completely acceptable. In fact, it's exactly what our community is going for. Allowing students to constantly check their grade is certainly a double-edged sword. Every time a teacher puts a test score on SIS and some students do not perform well, those students panic as if it was Monday morning in the NYSE and the Dow Jones fell 500 points. At times, the panic is justified. What worries me is that those people who underperformed on a test do not usually try to improve their understanding of that subject. Instead, these students usually conclude that the teacher is “unfair” or “mean.” Like the stock market, there is constant speculation on whether a group of numbers goes up or down. This is not just idiotic. It’s dangerously idiotic.
Surely this social stigma did not arrive overnight, as the root cause of this kind of behavior comes from the community itself. Because parents want the very best for their kids, they are mostly responsible to substantial changes to the grading system, such as the 50 percent rule and the 80 percent retake rule. These rules state that the lowest grade a student can have is a 50 percent, and any student can retake a test up to an 80 percent. I cannot assert that SIS is 100 percent responsible for an emphasis on grades over learning, as the 50 percent and 80 percent rules are key factors as well. A calculus teacher listed the 50 percent rule as a rule that “inflates the SIS grade book along with student scores, and is simply lying to everyone about what a student has really mastered.” Learning should be a beautiful experience, but these changes and SIS added on to the problem.
I am not arguing that SIS has absolutely no benefits to it. On the contrary, I can recognize the benefits that SIS offers and can say that it should stay. The ease of access is crucial for certain teachers, such as a learning disabilities teacher who credits SIS for allowing him to “see if a student struggles across the board, or needs remediation after school.” For certain types of classes, the use of SIS is a vast improvement compared to previous grading systems. Unfortunately, as Centreville High School student Caton Gayle put it, “SIS has become the new focus compared to literally everything else.”
Now, a lot of skeptics might say that this is all great philosophically, but it seems impractical. To fix this issue, the system itself must be changed, then the problems that SIS and the overall “grade grubber” problem will be fixed. I am suggesting however, that classes should be modeled after the AP computer science curriculum. In that curriculum, the grades are secondary, as people can retake tests any time before the AP exam to boost a previous grade. What matters is whether one learned the material or not, and that makes sense. This is not a one size fits all solution, but it is a good place to start from.
What we have now are far too many students with 4.0 GPAs, many who don’t understand the material in the first place. Of course, it will all be meaningless if the parents, teachers, and students do not strive to put learning ahead of GPA. Only then will those students truly be ready for the complexities that life has ahead of them.
The writer is a junior at Centreville High School.