Many GDS high school students remember how daunting ninth grade felt to their eighth-grade selves. The GDS middle school does a somewhat satisfactory job of preparing students for the next stage in their academic careers. However, one fault creates a worrying and seemingly unnecessary discrepancy between the GDS middle and high school: the grading system.
The lower/middle school has a grading system drastically different from the one in high school. It uses a standards-based grading system where there are only five possible grades: Exceeding, Demonstrating, Progressing, Limited Progression and Incomplete. The high school, however, uses a grading system where a letter grade corresponds to roughly a three percent range.
From my conversations with fellow freshmen, there now seems to be a common understanding that an Exceeding corresponds to an A+, and a Demonstrating corresponds to a grade somewhere between a B- and an A. A Progressing corresponds to a C or C-, and a Limited Progression corresponds to something between an F and a C-. In middle school, my classmates and I were always told by our teachers that an Exceeding was great, a Demonstrating was good and a Progressing was mediocre.
The standards-based grading system leads to a lot of ambiguity, which in turn leads to confusion. In my mind, I converted Demonstrating into an A, so I thought a lower grade like a B+ must fall into the Progressing category. I was wrong. It seems that Demonstrating encompasses a much larger swath of the spectrum—including grades ranging from a B- to an A.
Toward the end of my eighth-grade year, my English teacher talked about letter grades and said they were going to be a real challenge for us in the future. He did not provide any specifics about what this new grading system would look like. Instead, he instilled fear of this new grading system in me because of how unprepared I felt for this new, alien system. I wish that there was a teacher who had given me any specific information about how grades would operate in the high school. There was not.
Towards the beginning of my freshman year, my English teacher was about to hand back our first essay. She prefaced it with a speech that, to me, was completely mind-blowing. She explained that any grade in the A range was excellent, and an essay in the B range was still good and solid. At that moment, I remember feeling amazed because my understanding of grades was completely reshaped. I ended up receiving a B+ on that essay and began to understand that it was actually a good grade, not a mediocre one as I had previously believed.
By far the hardest part of adjusting to high school was reframing my thinking; now there is not just one good grade—there are many of them. I, and many of my classmates, came into high school with the mindset that if we didn’t get an A, we did poorly. That is simply false. As all of my teachers in the high school have said, getting upset over a few Bs is not the correct reaction. If you get a B, you are still demonstrating all the skills needed to pass the class. Coming from the GDS middle school, I was not prepared for such a major difference in grading.
For lower school students, the standards-based grading system is a great way to convey how they are doing in class without the stress associated with letters, pluses and minuses. However, these training wheels are left on too long; eighth-graders should have letter grades to help prepare them for high school.
Grading eighth-graders with the same system used for third-graders seems a little weird to me. Eighth grade would be the perfect opportunity to introduce letter grades—the workload is not at a high school level, but the grading should be. When I was in eighth grade, no one told me about the specific differences between the two systems. Because of this lack of preparation, rising freshmen are thrust into ninth grade with nothing but a warped perception of grades and wishes for good luck—this is bad.
The middle school should support its rising freshmen by changing the grading system. Right now, I have felt more supported in the high school than I ever felt in the middle school. It is unfair to thrust eighth graders into high school without experiencing a vital part of the experience. In this way, GDS fails in its responsibility to help transition its students into the next era of their academic careers.