Grades are a common topic in the halls and classrooms at Joliet West. “Hey what’d you get on that English paper?” or “How’d you get an A when we got the same answers and I only got a B?” This is most common because some teachers look for different aspects of how you explain and defend your answer choice.

At Joliet West, our grades are the typical 90-100 percent is an A, 80-89 percent is a B and so on. Freshman Mariah Sanchez would describe our grading system as, “I would say it’s somewhat fair depending on the people in this equation. Teachers like to see the top students do better but at times when someone outstands that one person, the teachers show favoritism. At my old school, our grading system was different because an A would be 94-100, so I would much rather have this grading system.”

Although, there are some students that could argue that our grading system is biased and completely wrong. Sophomore Haylee Powers adds, “If you do badly on a summative grade, then it brings your grade down immensely. But then if you do well on another summative, your grade only goes up a little bit. And a lot of teachers don’t allow retakes so there’s really no room for their error.” F’s are a different story, an F is anything from 0-59 percent. Some would say that that’s not fair or that there should be other letter grades to resemble something less than an F. In the article “Is Our Grading System Fair?” by Monte Syrie it states, “And, as we continue down the scale, it remains uniform until we get to F, and then it abruptly dives from 59 to 0.

F’s should stop at 50. There are no G through K grades, only F’s. In terms of numbers, scores given in this range may reflect a degree of completion (a kid did 3 out of 10 problems, so he gets a 30%), but in terms of learning, scores given in this range whether its fifty nine, thirty four, or seventeen reflect one thing: failure. When kids or parents see scores below sixty, they generally understand that indicates a performance well-below standard; students have not been successful with the content.” The point being anything that’s considered to be an F automatically means that a student doesn’t understand what’s being taught to them, or that they couldn’t care less about their grades.

There are many different components of deciding whether or not our grading system is fair. Everybody has their own opinion about how they view our grading system but in the end it comes down to what the state has to say about it.