Corolinth wrote:
Interesting. In that case, it's really a scam, although it's the parents being scammed out of money. Allow me to present an alternate perspective that probably hasn't come up, yet.
Any student who purchases a letter grade improvement will have one of two things happen. The first is that it will be readily apparent, upon looking at his entrance exams (SAT or ACT), that the student is not actually an A student. The second is that the student practically aces said exams and was only a B student because it was never worth his time to do homework assignments.
High school grades are complete bullshit. Students are graded, not by how well they do, but by how hard they "try," or some other nonsense. I had a biology class my freshman year of high school where some essay on a black scientist was worth half of our grade. It was some stupid Black History Month assignment. High school classes do **** like that. In most high school courses, students are graded primarily (sometimes exclusively) on homework. Exams are given as a token gesture. They don't effect your grade any. This was something that perennially frosted me.
So is the school actually selling better grades, or are they just holding the kids hostage for the grades they might have actually earned? "We realize that your child is very bright, and is actually at the top of all of his classes. For $150, we'll let him have his A in trigonometry without making him write that report on breast cancer awareness." You might be wondering what breast cancer has to do with trigonometry that makes it worth a full letter grade.
The A student who earned it, and aced his standardized tests is cheated by this, and it is disingenuous to say that a student who has a middling performance on his SATs and has an A average has no clear advantage over another student with similar testing and a B average. It also helps foster the erroneous notion that a bachelors degree has any real merit, and disincentives hard work. Incidentally, this is one of the more affluent districts in the state.
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19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
Ezekiel 23:19-20