The Glade 4.0

Yes, and if you've performed well enough to get into Ivy League and do graduate, you've established that you can perform. Bottom of the class is purely relative to other Ivy Leaguers.

If you didn't, you have a lot more to demonstrate. There are lots of programs like that; once you've passed you're "in the club" so to speak because getting in is **** hard as ****. This is true with physical as well as academic accomplishment.

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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."

I've had those types of classes in HS. Certainly much more common in college, but I had a few in HS as well.

Oh totally agree that the 5-hour ungraded class is nuts. I don't think higher grades should just be handed out like that; the extra work involved should be significant and definitely should be graded. I'm in favor of a second chance, not a freebie.

I would think you would support students doing exactly what you did, not short cutting the system.

If you screw up in HS, prove yourself at the college you got into and transfer to a better if you can prove you can handle the workload.

Then I guess you've done the equivalent of screwing up 25% of what your boss cares about, right?


Sure enough.


So, what you're saying is that if you make good grades in college, even if you screwed up in HS, and in early college you can still get into an Ivy League school? I'm guessing that makes the whole "turn in a paper late in Junior year HS, and your **** for life" concept moot, eh?
Hell, I went to a state school in WI, a community college in CA and graduated form a state school in CA - Boalt Hall was still willing to take in this little stray.

That's the crux.

If you eff up something like that you obviously didn't take the importance of the paper seriously. I guess the proper business analogy for that situation would be that you didn't prepare/show up for a presentation to a client your company has been trying to get for nearly a year. I'm betting that such an event would not "have zero impact on my bosses' opinion of [you]".

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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

Interesting. I don't recall any of my HS classes with that kind of grading. However, if it was the case that so much weight was riding on a single item, the responsible student would make sure that one item was taken care of and not late, lost, sucky, etc and certainly moves the mistake out of the "minor" category.

That grading still doesn't justify this "class" though.

I am not in any way attempting to justify the "class" in the OP. However, much like RD, I believe that especially for a HS student, who is still a child and prone to the mistakes of childhood, their lives shouldn't be made excessively more difficult because of a mistake. There should be concequences (summer school, extra work, etc.) for the mistake but they should be able to repair it so that it doesn't negatively impact their ability to get into a good college.

I don't get what you're trying to imply here.



Certainly that is the case. My argument is that I don't believe that HS is necessarily the place to have such a harsh mechanism. I'm more concerned about the students learning the material vs. being as focused on deadlines that are "drop dead". Again, there should be repercussions for missing the deadlines, but I think that having to go to summer school to repair the grade is perfectly acceptable.

I would posit the consequence is having to prove yourself at the next level and transfer to the better school, not competing against students that didn't screw up, for those slots at the first choice school.

I would have done that for every class I got less than an A in. Maybe more, because I would realize that putting in the work for an A might not be worth it.

The amount of work needed to move from a B to an A is typically huge. Much more so than the effort involved in coming up with $150.

At the risk of straying too far off-topic, I wonder if this is getting at a core difference between liberal and conservative perspectives. I screwed up in my late teens and early 20s, and as a result had to take a longer, somewhat harder road to reach my current career position. One of the lessons that I've taken from my experience is that I should be sympathetic to people who've made similar mistakes and help them avoid or at least minimize the long recovery process I had to deal with. You guys seem to be saying the opposite, though - i.e. that my experience shows that people clearly do have the opportunity to recover from a youthful screw up, so I should expect people who've made such mistakes to just deal with it by going through the same lengthy recovery process I did.

In short, for liberals, successfully overcoming an obstacle encourages the desire to eliminate that obstacle for others, while for conservatives, it encourages the belief that others can/should overcome it on their own as well.

Why would you eliminate the obstacle? What concrete benefit do you gain from making a Bachelor's degree easily obtainable?

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I am not trying to imply anything. I am stating that to use RD's business world to HS analogy about a singular paper having that much of an effect on your grade would need to have the equivalent weight in the business world.



Certainly that is the case. My argument is that I don't believe that HS is necessarily the place to have such a harsh mechanism. I'm more concerned about the students learning the material vs. being as focused on deadlines that are "drop dead".[/quote]
I guess I'm more concerned about students doing what is needed in order to get the grade they desire -an integral part of the experience of "learning the material" is doing it in a timely manner. Deadlines exist.


That's agreeable to me, but summer school is not what brought this discussion about.

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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 guess I see that mind-set having resulted in the education system we have today. The reason it takes a perfect record to get into the best schools is because the best schools know that the effects of rampant grade inflation et al make the grades themselves suspect.

If you follow your desire to eliminate the obstacles, why not just admit everyone to Ivy League schools and be done with it?

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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

Which lesson would you say was more valuable? The BA degree itself or the lessons learned by picking yourself up, dusting yourself off and getting down to it? Which has given you more perspective on life and helped you avoid similar pitfalls?

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I can see how you got that. The wording isn't very clear. It looked to me to be more of a scam to let kids lie to their parents about their grades for $150 per class. A fool and his money, and all that.

Although to be quite honest, I don't think high school grades are that big of a hurdle. I mean that in the sense that it isn't worth $150 per class, not that schools should be selling higher GPAs.

I screwed up in my late teens and early twenties, too. What's your point? I'm sympathetic to people who've made similar mistakes, but the long recovery process is good for them. I know, because I've been there. I'm actually glad I **** up, and had to take the long way. I'm better than everybody else in my classes because of it. I learn material quicker, and I retain it longer.

What's more, I know how to pick myself back up when I fall on my ***. I'm not biting my fingernails worrying about losing my scholarship if I don't keep a certain GPA. I don't have one to lose. There's no stress hanging over my head when I go in to take tests. I sit down, work out some engineering problems, hand in the exam, and either go home or go to work. Crunch-time is a regular day for me.

That's the rub. That lengthy recovery process was good for me. Cutting corners on it would have been bad. There's a difference between cutting someone a break and shortcutting to something they haven't earned.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Law school is way different than other things RD. To lawyer Ivy League is, to quote several different lawyers "like being sprinkled with fairy dust".

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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

Screw that, man. College is hard. Just mail everyone a diploma.

Incorrect. Hopwin and others here have the right of it. Parents must sign off on it, and your transcript shows the new, purchased upgrade.

Basically, for $1000/year you can buy your average straight B student and honor roll transcript. This is no small thing, either. After digging around, and speaking with 10 other parents, this is no secret, and no small deal. According to the independant estimates of 4 of them who took advantage of the program themselves, somewhere between 150-200 students participated at the end of the 2009-2010 school year.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Rynar,

That's crazy. Also, why are you hesitant to name the city/state this school is in?

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.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I am Dr. Doom, and I approve of Corolinth's post.

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Because it also happens to be the district that I live in, where I am fairly well known, and I don't want to post a map to myself on an anoymous internet message board.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Don't get me wrong, I get it. Schools selling higher grades violates all kinds of professional ethics. But seriously... there's more reasons that this should be pissing folks off.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.