Pueblo's 'no-zero' grade scale to award half-credit for cheating

but I understand the 50% basement. I would imagine there are other repercussions for the cheating.

The current scale (0% to 100% with 60% being the cut-off for passing) over-weights the zero. Using 50% as the bottom, puts each grade category as 10%.

The justification is to prevent students from digging a hole too deep to climb out, so they give up and become problems. Principals really don't like teachers to fail students. They make it a pain in the ass to do it. I fail maybe one or two a year when i could do 10 - 15 a year. Why bother when the principal will promote them anyway.

you've given up and are part of the problem.

Now, before you go ballistic... as I stated, I am the son of two educators. They fought these battles for over 40 years in public and private schools, in the U.S. and overseas. I don't think they ever had to deal with a culture-of-failure, but I've never really discussed it with them. I'm going to email this to them tonight and talk with them about it.

I don't have any pat solutions, or really even any suggestions, but simply allowing failure to pass can't be the answer. I've been in the USAF for 22 years. I've worked in aircraft maintenance and trained new kids in it. We're not allowed to let people fail. If I said a kid who consistently failed to perform her/his job correctly was acceptable, I'd go to jail. I will grant that there are considerable differences between my situation and yours, so the analogy isn't exactly parallel.

At the school I subbed in last year for first quarter, the teachers were in danger of not passing their evals if they had a higher than 8% failure rate in any one of their classes. The kids had figured this out and just started refusing doing work. I had a 30% failure rate (can't make zeros add up to anything), and since I was a sub, there wasn't anything anyone could do about it. I stayed late (when I wasn't supposed to by law), I talked with kids, I called home, I had them meet with me during lunch--nothing worked. I had a kid tell me he wasn't going to do the big essay because, as he said, I had bills and needed the job, so I'd find a way to pass him without it.

Disgusting to me.

I'd say there was a good case to be made that those kids were trying to commit a crime (by getting teachers unjustly fired).

At the least, if the school won't take action, you go to the press.

Heck, there was a big group of seniors my second year of teaching who came awfully close to getting me fired just because they didn't like that I assigned homework and had high standards.

It's not even news. Kids do this all the time, and some of the time, they're successful. Teachers know this, and in the environment we're teaching in these days, we have to be careful if we want to keep our jobs. It's taken me three years to get a full-time teaching job (up against 800-1000 per teaching job posting, and I didn't even get one interview this summer when my resume was even stronger), and now I'll be evaluated every year by a capricious principal, so all I can hope is that I don't make too many waves and can jump through all the hoops just right.

they accuse the teacher of hitting them.

Happens a LOT. And again, depending on the principal, sometimes the accusation works, sometimes it does not. Doesn't matter if it's true or not.

Grades should be given at teacher's discretion.