The Glade 4.0

Today I came across a practice of our local pubic high school which I found to be more than questionable, and while I am only giving you second hand information from another parent with whom I am friendly who used the program last year, I will be doing more research on this, and following up on this post:

This high school offers the option, at the end of the school year, for students who are unhappy with their final grades, and who have passed any class coming into question (with a grade of 60 or higher) to pay a one time fee of $150 dollars per class, in cash only, for a complete letter grade of upward adjustment. This does not go on the students transcript in any way other than how a grade would normally be posted. The only requirement made of the students seeking this, outside of the cash payment, is to attend a five day long ungraded seminar for one hour per day beginning the day after school ends.

I find the whole practice to be very shady and counter productive to actual learning if it exists as I had it described to me, and I plan on looking into this.

Thoughts?

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Unsurprised.

What!?

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Sounds shady indeed.

What is the content of the seminar? And out of curiosity where is this school? (city/state)

Really? I'm pretty shocked. I can see giving people who want to boost their grades the option of attending summer school and them charging a fee to cover the costs involved, but any resulting change in grades should be dependent on the student doing additional graded work during that summer session. If the description in the OP is accurate - i.e. no additional graded work required - that's ridiculous.

Quite.



This is part of the further research I will be doing, and will be posting about once I can give concrete answers. I don't want to speculate.



This, I'm not sure I'm comfortable posting.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Not to mention the fact that summer school attendance goes on your transcript, while this does not. And the fact that they only accept cash. Both of these are verifiable facts.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Have they been verified (you said you were going to look into it, so I'm just wondering if this is pre- or post-investigation)?

Honestly, it sounds fishy. But terrible, and damning if true. And of course people have done far shittier things in the past, so the baseline for "this is a shitty move" is pretty low, and thus, moderately believable. However, if it is accurate, I doubt it's something endemic to the system. Too many asses to cover, at the very least. It sounds more as though there are a couple of people who decided since they have access to records, they'd make themselves a bit of pocket change.

Given this is the same system that espoused the merits of social promotion, ebonics and a myriad of other poorly conceived and ultimately failed plans, no, this really doesn't surprise me.

Given that schools have a history of coming up with ways to "pad" their results at educating children, no, this really doesn't surprise me.

Is 150 to pay for the seminar?

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I should probably also state that I in no way agree with this program, and even the one that RD suggested would cause me concern.

Its probable the only people that would actually make use of this "plan" are star athletes who need a minimum GPA to be accepted to college (assuming they can make the min SAT/ATC as well), and B students of junior or lower high school years trying to make their transcripts look better for college.

This is my first intinct, too. "Cash only" reeks of under-the-table income. But then, why bother with the pretense of a seminar? I doubt that anyone taking advantage of this offer would have ethical issues with just giving a bribe. It feels like there must be another piece to this puzzle. MLM pitch? Cult? This all sounds very weird.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Yeah, I'm torn about the transcript thing. On the one hand, I get that people who do things right the first time deserve some advantage over those who need a second shot. On the other hand, however, I think high school grades are a pretty lousy proxy, at least at the margin, for evaluating someone's ability and future performance, and yet relatively minor differences can have a huge effect on the subsequent 10 years of a person's life. It seems ridiculous to literally make the next decade (or more) of a person's life harder because they turned in some 12th grade English assignment a few days late and thus wound up getting docked a letter grade on the class. Does the kid who turned it in on time really deserve that much of an advantage/reward, particularly if the one who was late is willing to do extra work to make up for it?

Yes.

If for no other reason than that's the the way the world works when they get out of school, might as well get used to it now...

Actually, one of my big reasons for disliking the whole "grades determine your future" approach is that it's not how the world works outside of school. We don't get explicit numerical/alphabetical grades in our jobs. If I'm at a company for four years, and I turn in one report a little late somewhere in the middle of my third year, chances are it will have zero impact on my bosses' opinion of me or on my future career opportunities in other companies. However, if a high school student turns in a late report in the middle of his junior year in high school, and he gets a B instead of an A as a result, he might as well say goodbye to the Ivy League gravy train. The entire rest of his life just got significantly harder for no good reason. Real-world jobs are almost never that cut and dry or long-lasting in their impact on one's future prospects.

If I read that right, it doesn't change your transcript. Which looks like the only thing this really does is let you show your parents a B when you really got a C. A college receiving your transcript to consider you for acceptance would still see the C.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

If I am reading it correctly your transcript would just show your new grade without any indication that it was altered (ie an asterisk) so colleges and future employers would be none the wiser.

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Where are you reading this? I have seen nothing in this thread thus far from Rynar that suggests what you state.

RD:
If one B is enough to drop your grade from an A to a B, then it's more than a singular "little late" in effect.
Are you really going to stand behind the opinion that being accepted to an "Ivy League" school for your undergrad really equals "gravy train", and that not being accepted makes the "rest of your life" "significantly harder"?

I really don't see a BA from Harvard with a 2.5 GPA being a golden ticket, and I wouldn't think that an English degree from Harvard and $140,000 of debt is really going to make life significantly easier for someone as opposed to an English degree and $20,000 of debt from CUNY.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I keep reading the title of this thread as "Buying a better gLade"...

Yes. He turned in his work on time. He met the standard. The kid who didn't, failed to meet the standard.

If you want to go to an Ivy-league school, you should expect minor mess-ups to have a major impact. You're trying to get into the best place. Only so many people can go. You have to have extremely high standards and maintain them to maintain the overall quality.

Furthermore, this sort of "minor mistakes have a major impact" only matters at that level. Your life hasn't gotten significantly harder if you don't go to an Ivy-league school; there's plenty of other fine institutions out there; in some fields better than Ivy league. Ivy league isn't the "gravy train" anyhow. I suppose it might be significantly harder if you have aspirations to be a White House Fellow and rub elbows with all kinds of bigwigs, but if you lose out on that due to your own performance.. well, **** you. You probably need to be back in the real world more anyhow.

The kid who wants to go play football at the big-name sports school is certainly being held to that standard; only so many kids can be on the field.

I don't totally oppose this since they aren't gettng the letter grade just handed to them; there's a monetary penalty and time investment, and I don't basically have a problem with allowing people to fix a mistake. I do think the seminar should be graded, however.

I also never heard of a high school class where one late assignment cost you an entire letter grade in the class. That's more like college.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The grading depends on how they do it. I've been in courses where one specific paper was a HUGE amount of the grade and could very well drop you an entire letter grade if it was late/not accepted. I've been in some where if you didn't get the final paper in you would have actually failed the class entirely.

If you aren't doing post graduate work, your GPA means exactly squat. And the degree is only part of the package, there is a lot to be said for the good ole boy networking that the Ivy league schools seem to have. But even then, a Business degree from Harvard sure as hell is going to look better on a resume than CUNY, and open doors for you.

Just FYI Aizle, this is HS level courses, not college.

I have never heard of a HS class that that graded in the system you describe (which is however, common in college).

Depends on the circumstances. I had classes where the teacher accepted nothing late and some individual assignments were worth as much as 25% of your grade. I agree, though, that if the student is chronically late on everything, that's more worthy of a ding on the transcripts, since the bad habits will likely carry forward into college and career.


Before I went to law school, I would have said it didn't matter that much, but now I believe it really does. Most of my current colleagues were on the Ivy League express, and the degree to which they were able to coast into six-figure salaries once they got into Harvard/Yale/Columbia/etc. as undergrads is genuinely shocking. Harvard undergrads with mediocre grades going straight into $100k/year investment banking jobs at age 22; Columbia Law graduates at the very bottom of their classes getting their pick of a dozen different offers at top law firms paying $150-200k; and so on.

To use myself as an example: I did my first year of law school at a Tier 3 school (because of crappy college grades), where it was typical for graduates to send out 200 job applications and get maybe a handful of responses. I did well in my first-year and transferred up to a top 20 school. Immediately upon arrival at the new school, I was added to the on-campus interview program, lined up a dozen interviews and, shortly thereafter, had several offers for $40k summer jobs that inevitably (literally 95-100%) lead to a $150k+ permanent position at the firm after graduation. And the only difference was that my transcript now said "Top 20 Law School" instead of "Tier 3 Law School". I hadn't even taken any classes at the new school yet!

So yeah, the kids who get into Harvard/Yale/etc. as undergrads have their tickets pretty much punched. They can still screw it up, of course, or choose not to go the big money route, but the opportunity to coast into financial success is very much there in a way that it simply isn't anywhere else. And since getting into those schools requires near-perfect high school performance, I'm inclined to give kids as many second chances as possible to get their grades up, as long as they're willing to do the work.

And RD, you improved your situation by busting your tail at the level you "earned" and proving you could do better, not sitting in a 5 hour ungraded "class".