By Maddy Buffardi
Op-Ed Editor

High Schools nationwide as well as locally – as close as Pennsbury High School – have been enacting a new rule regarding their grading systems. The rule will no longer allow students to receive a zero percent on assignments, even if they don’t hand them in.

This policy is being instituted in hopes of negating student tendency to “dig themselves into a hole.” Meaning, that once a student gets a zero he or she will be unable to pull their grades up to passing, since the zero plummets their average so extremely.
Detractors of this plan may say that students should not get credit for doing nothing, but it should be kept in mind that both a zero and a 50 percent are considered failing grades – one just gives more opportunity to come back from.

High school is stressful, and it is no secret that the course load is heavy. There will be times, for most students, that they simply miss an assignment. But this new grading system is to suggest that these slip-ups happen and that the student should have the chance to redeem themselves and their grades.

Cases do occur where a student in their final year of high school will be failing a class, or classes, and it is to their knowledge that they do not have a possibility of passing and subsequently cannot graduate. In cases such as these it would be the hope that the student pushes through and takes summer classes or even another year in order to graduate at some point. But, some students, with such an overwhelming sense of failure and inability to change it will drop out of high school.

This grading system hopes to give students opportunities so that they do not feel that their only option is to drop out, and so that high school doesn’t make them feel helpless.
Some may feel that this is catering to the student who chooses to do the bare minimum to get by. But the system is not to take away from what students who excel in school do, but rather to make high school seem possible for some who may have felt that it wasn’t.

There are times in which the American education system allows it’s students to fall through the cracks, often times the “average” student is catered to. Those who excel go unnoticed and those who struggle go unaided. Sometimes, if a student feels stupid; like they cannot understand or do a particular topic – they won’t. The new system hopes to not lose those who may have been failed by their schools.

By implementing this system into schools you are not deterring the student body from learning, but rather giving them incentive to keep trying. This plan is not to reward students for doing nothing, but rather to cater to all students – and to understand that there are some individuals who will give up when they feel like failures. Implementing this new system would be a step forward for our high school and would be beneficial to the student body.