Proficiency

When you heard the word, grades, what comes to mind? Here at York Middle School we have switched from the standard, A,B,C, to a proficiency based grading system: Progressing, meets, exceeds. It probably sounds confusing, and I know for a fact it is for many of the students that go to York Middle School and their parents. But is it bad? I personally think it was a bad idea. Why?

To start off, no one really understands it, at least parents. If someone asked you the difference between a meets+ and an A+ I think most kids would be puzzled. Well basically an exceeds is about an A, meets can either be A or B, progressing can be a C or D, and insufficient evidence is an F. But I have some problems with this. One, there is not a lot of discipline when it comes to redoing tests. Although they added 48 & 2 (48 hours to talk to the teacher, and then 2 weeks to fix it), I personally wish you wouldn’t redo test, but instead just have more. Also if you do that, then we could learn more, and take more tests to justify our grades, in less time. This kind of leads me into one of my other problems; there’s no final grade. Instead we just have tons of confusing grades, and no one grade in the end. So if the grading system itself wasn’t confusing enough, it’s even harder to figure out what your final grade is. Another problem I have is there’s no actual clarification in Middle School for grades. So in some cases, you could get 4 problems wrong on a 10 question quiz (60% right) and still meet it, and if you ace it, you’d still get a meets because there’s no exceeds. So in Proficiency, an F and an A+ are the same grade, in some cases. See what I’m saying.

It also can be good in some cases. Well to start off, it gives kids a chance to redo stuff if the mess it up, although personally, I would rather just have more tests to balance out the grade. Which you couldn’t do as much in letter grades. Also colleges know it, so they will know what grade kids have. People might think that proficiency is more easy going. So I can see why some people would like it, but personally I think A,B,C, or Letter grades, would be a better, more fair, easier to understand grading system.

Now hopefully you can understand proficiency, its goods and bads, and all about it. So in conclusion, I feel the York School District should consider going back to traditional grades, or at least do a better job clarifying the grades for the students and parents at York Middle School.