Teachers, students and parents continue to struggle to understand and make use of the new way of evaluating and grading of students and their class work in schools today, as education systems seem to have abandoned altogether the tried and tested methods of evaluating that everyone understood before, such earning actual marks or grades for their work.
As with any system or method of evaluation, there are pros and cons involved, and these should be weighed against one overall factor: is all of this going to benefit the student at all? After all, it is their education that is at stake, and their futures as students and eventually as adults who can contribute to the local community and to society.
An example of the clash between the former system and the new one was played out as a teacher had the audacity and the temerity to grade a student's work with a zero because the student had not done any of the work in an assignment. To show how truly ludicrous things are getting, this teacher (who did what only makes logical sense) was actually fired by his school board, and it took a judge to overturn this decision as an illegal one.
A criticism of the new system is its vagueness, using a colour system of grading, or non-specific vague terms like "meeting expectations", rather than a student scoring a 96 on a math exam or being graded a "B" on an essay.
In truth, using measurements like "meeting expectations" is only one of a wide range of evaluative tools that are available to teachers to use. The argument could be put forward that this system will force teachers to consider other ways of dealing with students who have difficulty learning the material rather than just simply handing them an "F" on their term paper or exam.
In addition, it may give teachers more opportunities to see how students work and learn, and to use more of a variety of methods of evaluating their work in class.
The argument could also be made that these varying methods of learning and evaluating could have been used with the old system of marking. Education is an evolving system as all learning should be, as we all should be life-long learners, both in and out of school as we learn and grow throughout our lives. When changes are made, the parents should kept in the loop so they know why the changes were made.
