LETTER: Student says Clark County’s new grading proposals are misguided

As a rising junior attending Clark High School, I wish to provide a student’s perspective on the changes the Clark County School District wishes to make to the grading policy. The district’s proposal would allow students to retake tests and assignments as many times as wanted, raise the minimum grade to 50 percent from 0 percent and let students turn in assignments late without penalty. The policy states that “grades shall not be influenced by behavior or other nonacademic measures (e.g., late or missing assignments, attendance, participation, responsibility).”

Under the new system, not only will grades be artificially inflated, they will become meaningless measures of performance. If grades are not affected by late or missing assignments, cheating, participation, responsibility or other “nonacademic measures,” they lose value.

As many others have stated, schools must teach their students values that are needed for life: accountability, integrity, hard work and discipline. They mean something to all students who are successful in school and later in life. The policy fails to impart students with these core tenets. Combined with the inflation of grades, this lack of guiding values means that generations of unprepared district students will be sent to college and into the real world.

Changing the grading system does nothing to address the fact that district students are falling behind their peers. If the NBA changes the rules and every shot is worth one point more, it will improve the scores but not the quality of the players. Rather than change how student performance is measured, the district should focus on passing new regulations that improve student learning so that any grading system will record definite improvement.