The Picard Maneuver
People TwitterNow ask, what a student should get, who did their assignment but only got 30%!
This would've been a godsend to me tbh. I was really bad about completing buzywork homework assignments but I paid attention in class and already understood the material. In high school I'd ace every test and wind up with a C or worse because of the number of missing assignments, it wasn't even intentional, I just frequently forgot about them because they weren't interesting and probably because of some kind of undiagnosed neurodivergence. Of course, there are also kids who might struggle to complete assignments due to complicated home lives.
I don't think making an incomplete count as a 50 is really making grades meaningless. A 50 is still going to hurt you, it just doesn't drag your grade into oblivion. If a student gets 100 on three assignments and misses a fourth, is a grade of 75 really the most accurate representation of how well they understand the material? Counting the incomplete as a 50 would make that an 87.
Sprinkling in zeros can really drag your grade down and can make it feel like your grade doesn't really have much to do with your understanding of the material, and has more to do with being willing and able to work outside of school hours (or to just copy down answers from a friend five minutes before class, which I also didn't do).
Rather than giving students points for not doing assignments why not just not have busywork assignments. Just make the grades an even 50% tests and 50% large projects unless the student needs their busywork graded.
I was in the same situation as you (except I did wind up diagnosed with ADHD in my 20s). I aced all my tests and never did homework so was constantly on the verge of failing classes. I always hated having to do the same repetitive memorization busy work when I already knew the info. The best teacher I had in highshool had a rule where they would only ever grade your homework if doing so would improve your overall grade. So because I did well on the tests, in class work, and biger projects I never had to actually do any homework. It's the only class I ever scored over 100% in because I aced every test and did one extra credit project. Why the hell should anyone have to waste their time doing pointless busywork and waste their teachers time grading that pointless busywork when it isn't benefitting their learning in any way. If the student doesn't need it then just skip it. The only reason I can see for it is to desensitize students to doing pointless busywork jobs but we should be eliminating those jobs not conditioning the next generation for them.
Yeah, although tbf some people struggle with tests and for them homework brings up their grade, and it might help some people learn. But I 100% agree that it ought to be optional and shouldn't be able to tank your grade if you demonstrate an understanding of the material.
I can sympathize with people who work hard and still score poorly on tests. But if someone's a quick learner and they're motivated by learning then naturally they're going to put in less effort once they understand the subject, and making grades a reflection of effort rather than understanding feels unfair to people like us.
The problem is students are ABSOLUTELY AWFUL at knowing what assignments are busywork assignments, and every one of them thinks they're experts. I tell my students "You don't have to do any of the assignments, but make sure you understand what's on there before you decide not to - I might ask you later." And almost without FAIL, every single time I ask a student who didn't do one about one of the questions, or ask them to demonstrate one of the skills they were supposed to be practicing, they can't.
Most daily assignments are neither hard nor time consuming if you know how to do them, which is why the students who DO do them eagerly are actually the ones who don't need the practice. The ones who don't want to do them usually want to avoid them because they are difficult for them, which are the students who need the practice the most.
I'm not saying it's a great system - but it has its reasons.
Exactly. It also gives students the ability to improve and not just give up.
Let's assume 10 assignments determine your grade in a class. You completely skip the first 4 assignments and get 0%. If you completely turn around and score 100% on the next 6 assignments, your overall grade is 60% and you fail the class.
But! If you were the student who skipped the first 4 assignments, what incentive do you have to even try and improve?
The 50% score is to give students without hope a chance. If it's college level, sure maybe failing is the best option. But high school? Middle school? Even younger? Give kids a chance to improve.
This is by design. MAGA wants kids to be stupid, only stupid people vote MAGA.
"I love the poorly educated" DJT
Can I have 50% of my salary for doing 0% of my work?
that's what landlords do
False. They get much more than 50%.
And they work hard, it's not easy thinking of bigger numbers every month /s
I think the whole idea of grading kids like they're show dogs is pretty gross in the first place. "Welcome to the world, kiddo, the first thing you need to learn is that we're here to judge you, and if you don't bark on command you will be deemed to be a failure."
Fuck that shit.
I mean, it's sort of preparing them for the real world.
Once they finish school it's not like people won't immediately start judging them and labelling them as failures if they can't compete / keep up.
If you don't change society before changing the school system you aren't really doing the kids any favours by sheltering them.
School is the real world. It's just their world, not yours. It's where they spend a huge fraction of their day and year. School needs to be a livable place regardless of what comes after. "Preparation" if necessary at all, can come at the end or be taught explicitly instead of implicitly.
Who has gone through life not judged on their merits (and a million other things)?
COVID fucked up my kids education so badly they are still trying to catch up. They were in 3rd and 4th grade in 2020, so they lost those prime reading comprehension lessons. But at the same time the schools failed to catch the students up and now they are struggling and instead of helping them they just push them along and pass the buck to the next grade.
My son was in 8th grade, he lost prime socialization time. It really pains me to see him struggle to make social connections now.
If your kids are fucked up so badly that they can't handle the next grade then they shouldn't be in the next grade. Who cares if they graduate high school at 18, 19, or 20? None of that matters anymore. But you got to be right for your own kids and hold them back if they need to be held back. If you think the school is doing the wrong thing then you got to step in. Don't just let it happen and complain on the internet.
It is infuriating seeing Parents complain that schools are simultaneously doing too much, and too little for children. Be a Parent, help your kids succeed and stop blaming everyone else for not doing your job for you.
It reminds me of another thread on here from weeks ago where someone made a meme about ignoring their kids when they talk about their interests. What the heck? Why did you have kids just to ignore them?
Be a Parent, help your kids succeed and stop blaming everyone else for not doing your job for you.
When people stop understanding child care and education is everyone's job societies collapse
They (public school) convinced us that they would take extra time with all the students after COVID. The school was fighting parents trying to hold back their kids. We did change their school to one of the charter schools and they are doing much better.
Yeah of course they're going to fight because they have rules from no child left behind that say they must graduate children or they don't get money. But we're 20 years into that now and parents have to realize this or their children will suffer. It's a personal family problem now. We can advocate for better public schooling in government and help our kids individually at the same time. Don't just wait for the system to fix itself before your kids get fixed.
I'm really sorry to hear that. I think a lot of parents are in the same boat, and we're going to see the effects of it for years.
Speaking of disservice to kids in school, I recently learned about the "Three-Cuing" system and how it is basically making kids less literate by having them simply guess the meaning of things they don't understand instead of teaching how to read context, subtext, and use critical thinking skills or basic phonics.. It kinda pissed me off. Especislly since I had already been noticing a trend of young people online putting words into others' mouths or defining words wildly differently than the norm and misunderstanding the entire thing they just read.
I have a theory that the people who think having Ai make a summary of books were taught ‘three-cuing’ and thus, cannot actually read.
Incidentally there’s a really interesting podcast about teaching reading in the US, called ‘Sold a Story’. It’s wild how kids were supposed to somehow magic up the meaning of words.
... Suddenly I think I understand why a some things with very specific meanings are getting redefined by younger folks who call you names if you don't accept their new definition.
Three cueing peaked in the 90s.
Do you have any examples? I’m genuinely curious if this goes beyond youth slang into reshaping the language.
fr fr
I heard about this too, and it's so insane.
I saw an article recently about Mississippi (and/or Alabama?) 4th graders beating out California and New York on reading, and many were crediting that the state mandated phonics over this "take a guess" nonsense.
Am I reading this correctly? MS (and/or AL) having a better reading education system than CA & NY with this?? Wow.
Yes! MS went from 49th to 9th in like 10 years. Most people are crediting it to phonics and their willingness to hold students back if they don't learn the material.
Something about holding students back seems like it might artificially inflate numbers. Like, if they administer a test in 4th grade while keeping the kids who are struggling in 3rd grade, well only the kids who made it to 4th grade are taking the test.
I'm likely wrong.
I mean, thats the point. If the student is not smart enough for the 4th grade, they get held back to try again. They are not 4th graders even if their age suggests they are.
Right. But while 4th grade has great literacy results, 3rd grade has 38 students per class who are deficient in reading now. How long can that last?
I mean, in theory, they learn during the repeated year and become part of the great literacy results of the 4th grade.
I'm likely wrong.
I dont think you are. Having higher requirements for 4th grade definitely bumps the results up, question is by how much? Not that many students are held back, no idea how much they would contribute to the statistic
I thought about that too, but I would imagine a LOT of students would've had to be held back to make this kind of impact on the state average. I would bet that the pressure it applied to students, schools, and parents did most of the heavy lifting.
I used to be a teacher. In my state, before COVID, 3rd grade is the grade that you don't pass if you don't hit certain criteria for literacy. After COVID, they didn't hold anyone back due to an emergency executive order from the Guvnah. Pretty much all the teachers I worked with hated it and believed that holding kids back was beneficial to all.
Where? This isn't something I've seen in CA schoolwork. My teacher friends have a lot of problems with matriculation right now but guessing at definitions isn't one of them.
There were a bunch of articles when the data came out from the NAEP report card. Most I saw were mentioning phonics as the biggest factor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/us/mississippi-schools-transformation
https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/09/mississippi-not-california-is-the-education-future/
It's often being referred to as the "Mississippi Miracle" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Miracle
I mean, both of those are right wing sources though.
I thought the second one might be (unfamiliar with it, it was just in the search results), but NYT is definitely not right wing, and the NAEP and Wikipedia are fairly neutral.
NYT has proven in the past few years its a trash rag propping up shitty right wing policies. See also the Washington Post.
Your logic is very aesthetic.
Do you even conundrum what he's saying?
Foreal cap.
“Three-Cuing” system
Huh. Apparently Georgia banned it last year, with a bipartisan bill that my (D) state senator co-sponsored. A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one!
That was a right wing grift, that is thankfully finally being phased out of most schools.
Especislly
Well, however you learned literacy wasn't perfect either, I guess.
Admins like that are treasonous to the lives they're supposed to be preparing for autonomous-living.
& need be eradicated from education.
No matter what their rank.
School-board types who sabotage learner-opportunity/potential, admins, principals, teachers, processes, policies, proceedures, I don't care what the saboteur is: rip it out & replace it with what is loyal to the learners' lives & potential & opportunity.
If that means segregating the intentionally-ignorant & the bullies from the majority of learners, then do it.
( still bitter over how I wasn't allowed calculus when I was in grade-8 & 9, because the institutional-process dictated I wait, then brain-injury robbed my ability to finish learning algebra, a couple years later.
I COULD HAVE HAD IT IN MY LIFE, but for their "process" regime.
fuckers. )
_ /\ _
currently have a stack of students' academic records on my desk, the state of grading in the U.S. is just insane. I hate GPA with a burning passion. Very talented kids burn themselves out over a number that might as well be set arbitrarily, because schools do some very fucky math to inflate their numbers, and they all seem to do the math differently. Why do they do this math? Well, it's because they're allergic to giving out grades lower than a C, so their entire scale would cease to function if they didn't heavily weight different classes over others. It's like a tower of self-caused problems.
It really should be more standardized, or else schools are just going to find reasons to cook their books.
Remember last year when San Francisco schools were going to adjust their grading scales so much that they could pass students with a D if they scored as low as a 21? Pure insanity. (They fortunately received a lot of backlash and reverted the change)
https://www.newsweek.com/san-francisco-public-schools-equity-homework-2078003
After following a friend who joined XHS after the initial tiktok ban a year or so ago, I started to notice this trend of Chinese people calling American education "happy education" and I bristled a bit because I didn't find it all that happy. But as I see more and more people point out things like this, how the No Child Left Behind policy was implemented, how resources are diverted away from actually educating children... I kinda get it.
To be fair, I think the Chinese also have a biased lens here since their school days are like twelve hours long, I'm sure 7 AM to 3 PM seems more like daycare in comparison. But I think there's some truth in the mockery.
This doesn't apply to doctoral programs which really just seem like abuse and trauma factories. I don't know a single happy, well adjusted doctor.
China kills themselves for schooling and does as well as Americans in business and science so it's hard to see one being better than the other.
We should just keep trying systems that push everything to the absolute extremes. It’s worked out for every other fallen civilization. Why should we be any different?
I'm not trying to make an evaluative comparison between China and the US, I'm lamenting the state of US education and found a new phrase that felt descriptive about that online.
I would wager that the average Chinese citizen is more educated than the average US citizen. And particularly, students who attended school in China are more intelligent, on average, than US school students.
I don't have anything on hand to back it up, but I would be shocked if it wasn't true.
I'd have had a 4.0 if i got a 50% for not doing my work.
Because no child left behind worked out so well... Here we are having the same idiotic argument 25 years later.
A good argument for the 4-point grading scale.
