Grading the Grading System :: Free Essays Online

Grading the Grading System My formal, institutional education began in kindergarten while my dad was stationed at Fort Carson, an Army base in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I don’t remember too much from kindergarten, other than the fact that I found it to be very boring. My first report card reflected that my progress was satisfactory in all of my subjects, with the exception of cooperating with my peers where I was categorized as being in "need of improvement". I don’t quite remember why I was evaluated this way, nor do I think that this grade had much impact on my admission to college or the way my parents raised me, but I do find myself wondering what the criteria may have been to achieve a mark of "satisfactory." What was the point of this report card? In retrospect, I perceive this incident to be my earliest introduction to the educational system. My performance in school would be represented by the marks I would receive on my report card. At the end of kindergarten, my dad was relocated to Fort Devens in Massachusetts, and I continued the next twelve years of my education in rural New Hampshire. As I progressed through the school system, report cards started to hold more meaning. They became a symbol of my success as a student and, to a degree, my success as a person. I received straight A’s throughout the first few years and I anxiously looked forward to fourth grade when my outstanding grades would be recognized by having my name in the newspaper under the heading of "high honor roll." Aside from a couple of exceptions, I maintained my desired place on the "high honor roll" list throughout my middle and high school years. Most of my friends felt the same way, and very often, when an assignment was handed back, we would look at the grade on each other’s papers before we would even be concerned with our own. The competition was intense, but unspoken. And the educational system quietly confirmed our strat egy. I had a 4.01 GPA entering my senior year of high school. I was proud of this and determined to keep, if not raise, it. AP classes in our school were weighted on the GPA scale; an A was worth 5 instead of 4. With hard work, I could apply this system to my benefit. That is, until Maureen Grady, my AP Calculus teacher, obstructed my goal of graduating with a perfect GPA.