As far as I can tell, this is NOT a joke:
Beaufort County district limits poor grades
BEAUFORT--High school students in Beaufort County will have a chance this school year to pass a class no matter how poorly they do in the first semester. District officials have implemented a new policy that says first-semester grades can't drop any lower than 62 on a 100 point scale.
That way students who do poorly at the start of the year aren't doomed to fail a class, deputy superintendent Edna Crews said.
"What we're trying to do is look at how can we send the message to students that we want them, number one, to be successful," she said. "We want to give kids some hope."
Beaufort schools are the first in the state with this type of policy, state Education Department spokesman Jim Foster said.
The message it sends is that, no matter how little one tries or how little one knows, no grade of less than 62 will be given. This is simply redefining the zero point of the scale, and students who should have gotten less than 62 will be in for a rude surprise when a scale with an real zero on it is used. Students with half a brain will find this technique transparent, and risible. Any school deputy superintendent who believes that faking the numbers, rather than conveying useful educational skills, is what really gives kids "hope" should be demoted to janitor.
Beaufort (pronounced BYEW-fert, not BOH-fert), SC, is ranked as one of the richer counties in South Carolina, and it was the fastest-growing county in SC in 2000. The median income in Beaufort County is $46,992, but that's not the whole story. The use of aggregated data gives one a false impression of the true academic abilities - and earning power - in the county.
For starters, check out this chart of SAT scores for the class of 2002. Hilton Head Island is the relatively wealthy resort area off the coast of Beaufort, and their SAT scores have not only recently increased, but also surpass the SC average (though not the national average). The scores for Beaufort High School look quite different - yet both of these scores go into the Beaufort County ranking. Why pretend that Beaufort High School students aren't scoring less than 62% on their classwork? Their SAT scores are reflecting the truth.
The income data show the same thing. Of the four major cities in Beaufort County - Beaufort, Port Royal, Bluffton, and Hilton Head Island - three of them are below the median (two well below), and only one is above. Guess which one?
Why am I spending so much time on this? Well, I just find it interesting because I'm from SC, and spent a lot of time on HHI growing up. I found that untangling the data gave a much more accurate picture of the area, one that jibes with what I remember, which is the bimodal distribution of income and educational acheivement that is suggested above. This article from 2001 claims that Beaufort's schools are buckling down to improve education. Fudging the numbers scale is not a method of doing so.
Posted by kswygert at August 19, 2003 06:22 PM