Inflated Grades, Deflated Effort: A Silent Policy Shift in Public Schools

If you’ve ever wondered why a child seems to be “passing” but still struggling, this is a conversation you’ll want to hear. A new grading policy is gaining popularity in public schools: "Minimum Grading” and “No Zero grading”? Some schools now enter a 50% or even a 60% for work that’s missing, unfinished, or never attempted, and the impact goes way beyond the grade book. 

This week, we walk through the logic districts often use to justify grading reform. Then we talk about the part that matters most: what these policies teach kids about effort, deadlines, persistence, and responsibility. I also share what teachers are saying behind the scenes and how inflated grades can create a false sense of mastery that shows up later on standardized tests, in college expectations, and in the workplace.

I close with practical parent advocacy steps you can use immediately. Instead of confronting teachers who are following directives, I outline specific questions for principals, superintendents, and school board members about how grades are calculated, what research supports the policy, and whether student outcomes reflect real learning. 

If this helped you see your child’s grades differently, subscribe, share the episode with another parent, and leave a review so more families can find it.

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Transcript

The 50 Percent For Nothing

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Welcome to Tuesday Talks, your educational podcast helping parents become strong advocates for their kids and teachers to make big impacts in the classroom. Here we go. Hey, hey, hey. Welcome again for another Tuesday Talks. Thank you so much for joining me for another episode. And if this is your first time listening, thank you so much for joining me. I have another great topic for us tonight. And really, I want to ask parents and teachers something. How would you feel if your child turned in something that was not completely finished or didn't turn in an assignment at all, but still got a grade of a 50? How would you feel about that? Because in many schools across the country in the United States today, this scenario is not hypothetical. It's actually policy. And when I posted about this on TikTok, the comment section lit up. And if you're not already following me, please join the conversation at Dr. Tiffany SLP. Some of the conversation in the comments said, hey, this type of grading system gives kids a chance to recover. And others said it teaches kids that effort doesn't matter. And today we're going to unpack this debate, not from a place of outrage, even though when I came across it, I was outraged. But we're going to approach it from a place of understanding. Because the question isn't just about grades. The real question is, what are we teaching kids about effort, responsibility, and persistence? So when I shared this topic on TikTok, I referenced an IEP that I reviewed for a client. The child's teacher shared grades in the IEP, which all IEPs should have a teacher input section. If yours, your child's IEP doesn't, there's a problem. So the teacher shared grades. Um the math grade was noted as a 60. In parentheses next to it, it said actual grade 54. Reading grade, it said 60. And in parentheses, it said actual grade 36. And I was so confused because I'm thinking, what does this mean? And a lot of teachers commented on the post saying that they've been instructed to use this grading period, get this grading policy. They are required to enter a minimum grade of 50% or sometimes 60%, even if the student earned a grade lower than that. So that means a student who earned a 15% on an assignment, a student who earned a zero because they didn't do anything, or a student who doesn't even turn anything in at all may still get a 50 or a 60 in the gradebook. And this is often called minimum grading or no zero grading. And the practice is becoming more common in US schools. There's an article about an education week. Supporters say it prevents students from becoming discouraged. Critics say it lowers expectations and weakens accountability. And that's where the debate begins. Because believe it or not, grades weren't always the system we use in schools like we do today. Early American schools didn't even use letter grades, and teachers often wrote written evaluations or narrative feedback to describe a child's learning. But over time, schools needed a way to evaluate large numbers of students. So the grading system of A through F evolved, and that became really common in the early 20th century. You know, traditionally, A means you're doing excellent, a B means you're doing good, a C is average, D is barely passing, and then F, you know that F stands for failing. Most schools defined 60 or 70% as the cutoff for passing. But over the past decade, grading practices have really shifted. And some districts introduce policies where the lowest grade a student can receive is a 50%, even when no work is completed. The logic behind that is math. You all know if you've listened to episodes in the past, not my favorite subject, but I'm gonna break it down for you. So if you think about a hundred-point scale, a zero makes it extremely difficult for students to recover their average. If you remember back in your schooling days, you got a bad grade, one bad grade, it dropped your average down so low. You got a bad grade in the class, it brought your GPA down so low. And it took everything you had to get that grade back up, to get that GPA back up, right? So for example, if you have two grades in the grade book, a zero and a hundred, the average grade from that is going to be a 50, right? 100 divided by two, that gives you your average, 50. But if the lowest grade is a 50 and you get a 50 on one assignment and 100 on another, now your average is 75. So the policy is designed to give kids a chance to bounce back. But the bigger question is, what does this teach them about effort? Remember the example I just gave you. When that grade dropped because you got one bad grade, you had to work so hard to pull your overall average back up. Same thing with your GPA. You got one low grade in a class, you had to work so hard to pull that GPA back up. So if this is the new grading system where you can get lower than a 50 and it's gonna boost everybody's overall average, what does this teach kids about effort? To me, it says you can give half effort and uh still come out all right. And I don't agree with that. And I think a lot of parents wouldn't agree either, but that's if they knew how teachers were being instructed to grade their child's work. Teachers from across the country are having honest conversations about this because grading isn't just about math, it's about motivation. Some educators say minimum grading helps struggling students stay engaged. Others say it creates a different problem, right? Students quickly realize why do I need to rush to do the work if I already have a 50 and I haven't done anything. Research and teacher reports suggest that if these policies are not paired with strong accountability structures, student engagement can actually decrease. And that's the tension. The intention of this new grading policy might be support, but the outcome can sometimes be lower effort. A teacher friend shared with me that at their schools, middle school, they have something called credit recovery, I think is what they told me. And so what it is is that if a kid hasn't done any work, turned in anything all semester, at the end of the semester, they have a chance to turn in all of their work and get full credit for it if they turn it in. Now, when I was going to school, you didn't turn in something on time, one of two things happened. Either you were just gonna get a zero because the teacher was like, I don't accept late work, and that was the end of it, or you could turn it in and you would have a max number of points that you could get because it was late. But it wasn't you could turn in and get a hundred, you might turn in and be able to get a 70. But there was a penalty, right? Because you didn't turn in the assignment when it was supposed to be submitted. But my teacher friend is telling me that kids can go all semester, not turn in anything. Then towards the end of the semester, when report cards are coming out, grades are being reported, they can have the opportunity to go back and do all the work that they miss and have that chance to get full credit for what they turned in. So my question was well, where's the incentive to do things on time? Where's the incentive to get work done when it is supposed to be done? And so, really, the long-term question is where the conversation gets bigger than school because grades are supposed to represent learning, but they also teach life lessons like effort, responsibility, persistence, delay, gratification. Because eventually these kids are gonna grow up. You know, I talked on Tuesday talks before about this generation that will just not grow up and be adults. They will always need someone to handhold, to guide, to tell them what to do. We don't want to raise those kind of kids. And I know teachers don't want those kind of kids in their classrooms, let alone in their college classrooms either, right? So these kids are going to enter college, they might enter the workforce. And in the real world, you don't get half credit for work you didn't do, right? Your boss doesn't say, hey, you didn't complete this work I gave you, this project uh that put you in charge of, but hey, here's 50% of your performance bonus. No, no, no, right? You have an hourly job as a teenager in high school, and your boss gives you a closing checklist to do, and you don't get through half of it, you have the potential of being fired, being let go. So we're setting our kids up for what? To fail. And that is not what we should be doing as parents, and definitely not what school should be doing either. And I don't lay this at the feet of teachers because literally it's don't kill the messenger. They are doing what they're told to do. So we're gonna talk later in this episode about where you can go to ask questions to get down to the nitty-gritty about how your child is being graded. And it's not to the teacher, they're actually doing what they're told to do. Even one teacher in the comments on the TikTok post that I made said she moved to a new school district teaching fifth grade. I think it was her second year of teaching, and she graded the child based on what they turned in. And so that was the grade that was put on report card. And she got called into the office and she basically said in the comment, she was the one that made the mistake, not the student, because she was grading based on what the child actually did and not on this minimum grading system where you're going to give them a 50 or a 60, no matter what they've done. And so are we preparing kids for real life or are we protecting them from discomfort? Because discomfort is where growth often happens. And so the proponents of this grading, what I want to call debacle, but this new grading system, they say that, you know, it really dampens a child's motivation. If they know that they can't bring their grade up, why would they work harder to try to bring their grade up when they know they can't? But if you're giving them grades that they haven't earned, where is the motivation to want to do better, to want to do more? So I feel like you end up at the same destination, a child with a lack of effort and a lack of motivation. So we're giving them this invisible boost, but it's not really helping as far as long-term producing, you know, productive citizens, those that can go into the workforce or go on to start their own business or go on to college and create a better life for themselves and their families. So the US system is actually very different from many other countries. Like there are some countries that grade on a scale of like four to 10. Um, Finland is actually one of those where four is failing and five to 10 are passing, right? But the system focuses heavily on mastery, teacher feedback, and individualized support instead of constant grading pressure. We've talked on here before about some teachers being instructed to collect a minimum number of grades. And that's because the more grades you collect, the higher your average can be if you have lower grades, right? So if you only collect five grades over the semester, you better do really well on all of those assignments. One bad grade can take everything. But if I tell you you got to take 20 grades over the semester, now I'm giving the child a better opportunity for having a higher average because now they're having more chances to show that they can do the work or just pull up their grade. So, you know, there's different thoughts on that as well. But I feel like there's this constant grading pressure. So I can kind of appreciate what other countries are doing, taking that away. And Finland also uses very little standardized testing, which if you've listened to Tuesday Talks before, you already know how I feel about standardized testing. I think it is a way to demonstrate mastery of the moment, not of a skill over time. And Finland is focusing more on learning than test scores, which is what I definitely think something that needs to be done here in the United States. Um, another country, Germany, grades um from a scale of one to six, one being excellent, six being insufficient, and students who fail may need to repeat the year or demonstrate improvement. And in a lot of other countries, the focus isn't about protecting students from failing, it's focused on supporting them until they truly learn the material. Because isn't that the goal? That we want them to learn the material. That should be the goal. But unfortunately, in our public school systems here in the United States, it just is about what that final grade is. That's it. And if we talk about standardized testing, if you're giving kids a 50 or 60 as the minimum, and so they haven't done anything to actually earn it, you're just giving that to them. How do you think they're gonna perform on these standardized tests? They're gonna bomb it because you haven't been grading them according to what they can actually do. You've given them this huge boost, and so they're not diving deeper into any material, and that's how teachers end up teaching to the test. Because we know standardized testing is something that all schools have to report back to the state. And if your district isn't doing well, then you know have that possibility of the state coming in and taking over your school to help boost up grades, and uh that's a whole different tangent I don't want to get on today. But what I really wanted to focus on there was we need to be focused on kids learning the material and supporting them until we do that. And that is a really different philosophy than what's going on in most schools right now. So, as parents, what can you do? Now, this is the part that I think matters the most because parents, you have more influence than you think. If your school district uses minimum grading policies, here's some questions that you can ask. So, again, remember, we're not going to the teacher. No, we're going straight to the people that are giving the teachers their directive. So asking the principal, how are grades calculated in this school? Are teachers required to enter a minimum grade, even if the kid doesn't do the work to reflect that grade? If a student earns a 20 on an assignment, what goes in the gradebook? And how does the grading policy ensure that students are mastering the material? So those are four questions right there. You can either schedule the meeting with your principal, talk about, put it in an email, stop by after school, before school, whatever, have this conversation with the principal because the teacher, again, is doing as they are instructed. And based on the comments from that TikTok post, most of them are not on board with it. They're just doing what they're being asked to do, even though it goes against how they have been trained or morally what they think is right. They're following orders, which again is another tangent. We're not letting teachers teach and actually use the expertise that they went to school to have. We are just still in a position and giving them orders to follow. I'm not gonna go there today. Also, if you go to the principal and you don't feel like you've gotten answers, or maybe you did get some answers, everybody has a boss. Everybody has a boss. So you can go to the superintendent, you can go to the school boards. And I know these are people that are very hard to get in touch with. Most school board meetings are in the evening on a weekday. I think that's by design. You know, you do it at five o'clock on a Thursday, and not a lot of parents can show up, right? It's just that simple. If they wanted more participation from parents in the community, they would put it on a day that's more accessible for more people. But again, I digress. But you can send an email to your district superintendent, associate superintendent, go to the district website and look up people by name. They have their contact information there. Ask this school board member or the superintendent what research informed the district's grading policy? How are teachers measuring actual learning? And how are we preparing students for college and workforce expectations? And finally, are we tracking whether these processes and policies are actually improving student outcomes? Because we know that all districts, the district leaders, they're looking at student outcomes. And I think my own two cents, that's why we have this minimum grading or no zero grading, because this makes the student outcomes look better than they have been in the past, but they're not accurate. So there's always a story behind the numbers. And so the district is getting this data now that shows that more kids are passing classes, more kids have passing grades. But the story behind those numbers is that there's padding on those grades. They could never get less than a 50. They could never get less than a 60. So it's not right. So they're getting what they want, higher student outcomes, but at what cost? And it shouldn't be the cost of your child learning. That's my two cents. Use your power as a parent. Your voice has so much power. There could be teachers that are in the building all day complaining, voicing their opinion about this minimum grading system. And the school probably isn't going to do much about it. But when the parents come together and start using the power of their voice and demanding change, I have literally seen things happen. Use the power of your voice. As a parent, you can also ask your kids some questions too. Like, you know, what grade did you get? Okay. That's typically a question we ask. What grade did you get on this assignment? What grade did you get on this project? What grade did you get on this test? Right? That's what we asked. But now we know that the grade isn't always the actual grade. If you have taken nothing else away from this episode, remember that the grade ain't the grade sometimes. So instead of asking what grade did you get, ask what did you learn today? What was hard? What did you do when it got challenging? What will you try different tomorrow? Because learning isn't about avoiding failure, it's about building skills to overcome it. And that is what we want. We want to raise efficient, effort-filled, motivated, resistant, persistent kids. That is what we want. And schools should really want the same thing. But the way that this grading system is set up, you are you are you are conditioning kids to put as little effort as possible into something and get a mediocre outcome. We're not pushing for greatness. We're not pushing for excellence. We're not pushing for their best. And the their best might not be the same as somebody else's best. We gotta stop this comparison thing, too. We want them to be at their best. And so asking those types of questions, what was hard for you today? What did you learn? What was challenging and and how you push through it? And if your kid doesn't have answers to those questions, there's your information right there. Because they should have answers to this. What was what did you learn today? Pick a subject in math. What did y'all work on today? What did y'all learn? What was that was hard for you when you did it? And instead of asking that very genetic, generic question about what grade did you get, you shift the kids' focus from the grade to what they learned. And that mindset shift can cause a ripple effect for them to analyze what they're experiencing in class every day and not matching that up with a grade, but correlating it with what they learned, how they got through a challenge. So when they're sitting there at their desk and something is hard, they know mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, auntie, uncle is going to ask them after school what was challenging today and how did you get through it? And knowing that they're going to be asked that question could spark them to push through on an assignment. Pushed through on a test when they wanted to just give up because they know they're gonna have to give you an answer later. We got to start holding these kids accountable, accountable for their learning. They are accountable for their learning. Teachers are there to support it, but your kid is responsible for their learning. And if we can take that mindset mindset shift as parents, that will go a really long way in creating more partnership with teachers instead of this push-pull um relationship that most parents and teachers have. So the truth is grades will always evolve, right? Education changes, policies change, but the goal of school should never change. Schools should help kids become adults who can think critically, solve problems, and persist when things are difficult. Those are life skills. The future workforce doesn't just need people who can pass. It doesn't need people who can just do the bare minimum. It needs people who can figure things out. And sometimes the most powerful lessons in life come from the moments when things don't go perfectly, when things don't go as planned. I put together this project and it bombed. I worked really hard on this assignment and it bombed. I got feedback from my teacher, and this is what she said. So next time I'm gonna make those changes. But if we're giving kids this invisible boost, what motivation are we getting them, giving them to try something different to reach their best? And so I want to leave you with this thought. Are we grading learning or managing failure? Think about that for a moment. Are we grading learning or are we managing failure with these grading systems of minimum grades and no zero grades? And most importantly, what kind of adults are we preparing our children to become? They will not always be our sweet little ones. They are gonna grow up into adults. And I don't know about you parents, but I want my child to grow up to be the adult that can be independent, can think on his own. So if God forbid something happens to me, I know that he can be a productive citizen, that he can figure things out. And he's not always running to me to figure it out for him. And I hope that that's what you want for your kids as well. And if we're leaving that skill development in the hands of schools, you are making a mistake. There are too many variables involved in public school education for you to add one more responsibility onto the plate of teachers, principals, superintendents, school boards. They're not gonna do it. They can't do it. It's already too much work as it is, even with all the days off from school, it is a lot of work. And so then we have to do our part as parents to make sure that we're asking those questions, to make sure our kids are learning and not just focusing on the grade. We need to make sure we're asking principals and superintendents how the grading system is being put in place, what is the research behind it, and what are the outcomes? Now, how much better are children doing? Because no one sends their kid to school for them to get dumber. It just doesn't happen. And nobody goes into the teaching field to make kids dumber. It just doesn't happen. We're all there sending our kids for the same reason and showing up to teach kids for the same reason, but there are factors in place that are causing our children to lose out. And I want you to advocate for your child and advocate for your school to ask and in some cases demand better. So if this is a shock to you, I'm glad. I want you to share this with another parent, another friend, a colleague, because it might be a shock to them as well. And I want you to ask those questions of your child, of your principal, and of your superintendent as well. Leave me some comments, give me feedback. What are you thinking about the grading policy? If this is actually happening in your kids' school, if you've used your voice as a parent to create change to a grading system in your kids' school, or if you were just unaware, share that with me as well. Because we're all learning from one another. We're all in this together. And I think if we collectively use our voices, then we can make real change. And that's what this Tuesday Talks podcast is all about. So thank you so much for joining me for another episode. I will see you next week with a brand new one. Take care. Bye. Be sure to share this episode and join me next week for a brand new Tuesday Talks. See ya.