Home-schooling gets another unintended boost:
In most math problems, zero would never be confused with 50, but a handful of schools nationwide have set off an emotional academic debate by giving minimum scores of 50 for students who fail.
Officials in schools from Las Vegas to Dallas to Port Byron, N.Y., have proposed or implemented versions of such a policy, with varying results.
Their argument: Other letter grades — A, B, C and D — are broken down in increments of 10 from 60 to 100, but there is a 59-point spread between D and F, a gap that can often make it mathematically impossible for some failing students to ever catch up.
[. . .]
But opponents say the larger gap between D and F exists because passing requires a minimum competency of understanding at least 60% of the material. Handing out more credit than a student has earned is grade inflation, says Ed Fields, founder of HotChalk.com, a site for teachers and parents: "I certainly don't want to teach my children that no effort is going to get them half the way there."
This will, of course, have the same effect as other experiments in grade inflation. If it is known that a student had to master not 80 percent of the material to get that B but only 30 percent, the B isn't worth nearly as much, is it? And how are we to know which students mastered 80 percent and which mastered only 30? We can't, can we? That's the damn purpose of giving out F's, ya nitwits.
