Report Cards, Grades Not Easy for Today’s Kids to Fake

Pete Gilbert — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 07:01:00 +0000

It would be easy for me to say, “Kids these days! They have it so much easier than we did growing up.” And, boy would I be wrong.

It is true that kids today can watch any show they want instantly and repeatedly while we had to wait all week to see our favorites. Assuming mom and dad would let us have control of the one TV in the house. Today’s kids have access to seemingly every song ever recorded at their fingertips while we had to sit by the radio until our favorite songs in the hope they came on so we could record them onto cassette.

When it comes to school, though, things are tougher now than ever before.

Take report cards, for example. Remember when report cards were handwritten by your teacher? It was almost too easy to change a D to a B. If you were really bold you could even change that F to an A. (I never did anything like that. Honest. But it could be done.)

“Remember when report cards were handwritten by your teacher? It was almost too easy to change a D to a B.”

Schools also sent those report cards home with kids. If you didn’t want to show your report card to your parents, you didn’t have to. Or at least you could choose the best time to give it to them. Let’s say you didn’t want to be grounded for the weekend. You could hide your report card in your backpack all weekend and leave it on the table as you headed out the door to school Monday morning. Proper timing was essential. My daughter’s report card arrives by email. She has no chance of getting her hands on it before I do.

Kids today can’t simply brush off an assignment by telling their parents they didn’t have homework that night either. Now assignments are posted online, for kids and parents to see.

Also, for better or worse, parents can email teachers 24 hours a day. Parents can also check their kids’ grades online every month, week or day if they choose. Big Mother and Father are constantly watching!

So next time you think today’s kids have it easy, just remember we didn’t have it quite so bad at least when it came to our grades.

A version of this first appeared on Indy’s Child. Books photo by PixaBay from Pexels; report cards photo by Kevin McKeever.

School Report Card Too Complex to Make the Grade

Pete Gilbert — Thu, 19 May 2016 14:00:57 +0000

As a kid, I knew if I brought home a report card that wasn’t mostly As and Bs, I was in trouble. If I printed my daughter’s report card off my computer and showed it to her, she would have no clue where to begin making sense of it all. (Photo: Kevin McKeever)

I found one of my old report cards the other day.

It was a single, half-sheet of paper.

It listed six school subjects.

It also had a small box next to the name of each subject where the teacher could enter a letter grade, and that was it!

My third grader got her report card the other day.

It was 10 pages long.

The first page contained a “Proficiency Levels Explanation,” with one to three additional bullet points further explaining each proficiency level.

The following nine pages listed each of the seven standards along with 24 sub categories for the state standards. In each of the 24 boxes there were numbers from one to five depending on whether my daughter showed No Evidence, Little Evidence, Some Evidence, Expanding Evidence, or Clear Evidence of each specific topic, and in most cases a short description written by the teacher. Are you still with me?

Her report card was mind-boggling.

Why does it have to be so complicated? What was wrong with the system used for generations before this? More importantly, how is this new way better?

For me, I wasn’t looking at the fours and fives my daughter received. It became a game of “find the threes.” I barely even knew what a three represented, but surely my daughter showed more than “some evidence” because she “writes narratives that retell sequenced events, include details to describe actions, thoughts, and feelings, use transitional words, and provide closure.”

Maybe the better question to ask is, “Who is benefitting from all of this?”

It certainly isn’t the teachers. To put it mathematically:< (24 four different sections to assess) x (25 kids in the classroom) = 600 assessments and comments every nine weeks.

You can double-check my arithmetic on that if you want, but my old report card said I got an A in math, or as it would be called today, I showed “clear evidence” in math class.

Are the kids benefitting from it? Doubtful.

Maybe the intention is to benefit the parents. The newer report cards definitely give more information than the old ones used to, but not all parents want all that extra information. My guess is many parents want to look at a sheet of paper with a clear summary of what their children are up to at school and then stick it on the fridge. There will always be a few parents wanting more information and surely they will seek out the teacher regardless of the length of the report card.

What do you think? Am I in the minority on this one? Leave me a comment and help me find the benefits to these expanded report cards. If we can’t find any, then let’s go back to the old ones.

While you’re leaving a comment, I’m going to refill my printer’s ink cartridge so I can print off all 10 pages of my daughter’s report card and put it on my fridge, just like my parents used to do.

A version of this first appeared on Balcony Dads.

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Report Cards, Grades Not Easy for Today’s Kids to Fake

School Report Card Too Complex to Make the Grade