MPC Essential Reads
No more zeros in K12 education
One education researcher calls it “the academic death penalty”: A grade of zero on a 100-point scale, a mark that spells disaster for a student’s class average.
“It’s such an extreme score in a percentage grading system,” says Thomas R. Guskey, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Kentucky. “To recover from that single zero, a kid would have to get at least nine perfect papers.”
As educators across the country move toward standards-based grading—which often replaces the percentage system with rubrics linked to a 1-to-4, four-point grading scale—a growing number of schools no longer give zeros for late, missing or incomplete work.
No more zeros in K12 education
One education researcher calls it “the academic death penalty”: A grade of zero on a 100-point scale, a mark that spells disaster for a student’s class average.
“It’s such an extreme score in a percentage grading system,” says Thomas R. Guskey, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Kentucky. “To recover from that single zero, a kid would have to get at least nine perfect papers.”
As educators across the country move toward standards-based grading—which often replaces the percentage system with rubrics linked to a 1-to-4, four-point grading scale—a growing number of schools no longer give zeros for late, missing or incomplete work.