A couple of interesting changes my senior year

The new school year in the fall of 1981 saw a couple of drastic adjustments to school policies. These were things that I wish had been put into effect years earlier.

The first one was kind of peculiar. After years of seeing students humiliated for this violation, it was now okay to chew gum in class. The only restriction was that we could not loudly smack the the gum in our mouths.

It was around this time that there was a particular study making its way around the schools. It showed the top three complaints teachers had about school in the 1950s. They were

1. Students talking in the class
2. Students chewing gum in class
3. Running in the halls

More problems had surmounted for teachers in the previous 25 years and these slid down the list. I guess the thought was to get rid of one of these problems and maybe some of the other newer ones would follow. That didn't happen, but I did enjoy chewing gum without having to worry about getting in trouble.

The other major change was the grading scale. Ever since I was in the fourth grade, the percentage went like this:

94 - 100: A
85 - 93: B
78 - 84: C
71 - 77: D
0 - 70: F

Starting the fall of 1981, the new grading scale went like this:

90 - 100: A
80 - 89: B
70 - 79: C
60 - 69: D
0 - 59: F

This really solved a lot of problems. For starters, pop quizzes typically had 10 questions on them. On the old scale, if you missed ONLY one question, you got a B and that counted toward your class average. Enough of those incidents of not being perfect could bring down your score, and it was even worse if you missed two questions and wound up with a C or three questions and get an F. The new scale allowed you to make one mistake and still have an A, or two mistakes for a B. It also made it a lot easier to figure out what letter grade you got on an assignment. A 92 would look like a good score, but it only rated a B. One other issue was that, in the law of averages, you had a 70 percent chance of failing a test or assignment, but only a 7 percent chance of getting an A.

It should be noted that a number of my teachers were already using the new scale because they saw these same problems with the old one. The main difference with the implementation was that if you scored between a 89.6 and 89.9, the teacher was not permitted to round it up to an A.

While I was happy to see this change, I was upset because they would not make it retroactive. I wondered how many classes in which I got a B would be changed to an A and increase my GPA. (In the end, I figured out my GPA didn't really amount to anything in the real world.)

Of course, making it retroactive for me would have meant making it retroactive for everyone, including people who flunked out of school in previous years. I wonder how many students would have benefitted from having 60 as a passing grade and would have been able to get diplomas. I guess the key thing here is that report cards usually only showed the letter grade and not the percentage. This probably prevents tons of lawsuits against the schools in the 1980s.