▶ Your Answer :
As far as I know, giving students ‘D’ is to let them down. They won't try as hard as they can anymore. From my experience, it was an essay that made me sad once. I thought that I’ve tried my best to write a good essay for my language art class. I just did not know what to write and I was lack of vocabularies. So, I got ‘C’ for being so messed up with the form of essay and for repeating the same vocabularies. So to get better grades on my next essay, I went to see the subject teacher to ask the form she wants. Also, for the better vocabularies, I tried to memorize some or went through the dictionary to find a word that matches the meaning and the nuance of what I tried to say. Since she knew that I have been trying to use different but appropriate words, she gave me a grade ‘C+’ which is higher than ‘C’ what I got before, and she wrote me a note saying “By knowing that you’ve tried hard to look up for vocabularies and tried to complete the form I wanted, but not really completed yet, it affected your score to rise. So, keep trying on then, your grade is gonna rise consistently,” I really thanked this teacher who tried to keep me encouraged to make sure I don’t stop trying on my essay.
What I am trying to say by telling my experience is that giving grade ‘D’ to the students just because their skills are low is telling them to give up on writing an essay. It’s like to tell them “You are terrible with your essay.” So I suggest the teachers to rather help them by not giving ‘D’ but ‘C-’ with a note telling what they need to improve on that they can be cheered up and try even harder the next time instead of giving up on everything related to it, because grading them as ‘D’ makes them feel like their efforts are being ignored. And the students with good achievement, they are qualified enough to get good grades since they’ve tried hard as much as they can. Also they know what points they’ve got to improve.
To sum up, giving ‘C-’ at least rather than ‘D’ to the students who have low skills, and rating the other students (who are better skilled) high is the solution I am suggesting. |