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Catcher In The Rye

Decent Essays

Imagine this: a school without an emphasis on letter grades. It may seem like a utopian ideal, however, this idea is being tested in English 1 classes. So that brings the question, can this concept be applied school-wide or will we succumb to society’s desire to quantify us?

Currently, all English 1 Poetry/Drama classes participate in this initiative of non-letter grading as an effort to combat students’ extrinsic motivation to attain As. Instead, students are being assessed on how well they embody and work on “the aims of a Punahou education”: things like critical thinking, persistence, resilience, and interpersonal collaboration. Over the course of the semester, teachers take notes on how students are applying these aims; for example, if a student creates an English 1 project about the symbolism of Holden’s red cap in The Catcher in the Rye using thoughtful outside research and supporting quotes from the text, a teacher may construe that as an excellent example of critical thinking. At the end, students are still administered a letter grade for the semester, based on how well students worked on these aims and not due to aggregate point values converted to percentages and letters. …show more content…

On one hand, the traditional grading system is universally recognized; its simplistic nature allows teachers, students, and parents to easily interpret, understand, and directly compare others in the same class. But on the other hand, there also significant cons, such as its subjectivity, lack of explanation, and cultivation of testing culture. This is exactly what non-letter grading is intended to

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