Rules That Were Supposed to Help But Ended up a Big Fail

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Testing, Testing… Chaos Ensues!

My 4 years of high school were full of my school trying out new policies and procedures to use in the future.

In my sophomore year, my school decided to make tests count for 100% of the grade and homework count for 0% (but it was still assigned). And as you’d expect, kids did absolutely no homework. The ones that didn’t retain information well (or were bad test takers) struggled pretty hard to make the grade without homework padding it. Our failure rate was pretty high that year.

Then my junior year, they brought homework grades back and made a new rule that there were no due dates nor penalties for turning in late work for your 6 weeks (we didn’t do quarters). As long as it was before the next 6 weeks started, you were good.

This led to students doing no homework until the last few days of the 6 weeks, and teachers had to accept and grade them all before grades were due. This put teachers under immense stress by causing them to work insane hours and spend every hour at home grading, which made them very irritable and more likely to just shove pointless activities and busywork at us until they could finish grading.