Proficiency or Alphabetical?

    

By: Brianna B.

For the past 9 years in stoller middle school we have been using grading systems using the A, B, C, D, and F grading. Suddenly the Beaverton school district (including Stoller Middle School) has changed their way of grading things. They started doing something called proficiency grading.  That is when you use things as PNV, PWT, PNP, PRO and PHP.

            Since they changed the grading system students and some teachers have been complaining about how this works. Some people think it's confusing and an unfair system. Me and my crew wanted to do a little Reaserch on how this grading system works so we decided to interview some students in stoller. We interviewed 6^th and 7^th graders.

We first started interviewing 6^th graders from green hall. We interviewed one girl and one boy. We asked them questions like " Do you like the Proficiency grading?" and "Is the proficiency grading easier or is the Alphabetical grading easier?" and even asked them questions about why they didn’t like the proficiency grading. Both of the 6^th grade green hall students disliked the proficiency grading. The girl mentioned that the A, B, C grading was a lot easier to understand and that to get a PHP, you can only miss one question. The boy thought that the proficiency grading was really confusing; He even mentioned that he once got all PRO's but still got a B on his progress report.

 Some of the 6^th graders in red hall thought that the proficiency grading wasn’t all that bad. "Proficiency grading is good in some classes but over all I pretty much like it." One of the boys in 6th grade said. "Pro is easier." He mentioned. The 6^th grade girl in red hall disagreed with him. Normal is way easier and you can't get a PHP without getting more than one question wrong. The 6^th grade girl said. "The normal grading is easier."

After talking to a few 6^th graders in a few halls we diced to interview some 7^th graders in blue hall.

They mentioned that they disliked the proficiency a little more than the normal grading but there wasn’t that much of a difference. "Most of the proficiency is hard to understand." They also mentioned. While the interview an 8^th grader walking past the interview yelled, "Proficiency grading is the worse."

While we were collecting the data we realized that a lot more people thought that the proficiency grading is worse than the alphabetical grading. Some people thought it was "ok" but there wasn’t anyone who strongly disliked like the alphabetical. Stoller Middle School Students don’t like the proficiency grading and we think that we should change it back to the alphabetical grading,