THIRD TERM FAILURE

I have noticed that my students' grades for the third term are dismal. I know that not using partial credit is a contributing factor, but there is something going on beyond that. (Many of the students would have failed the tests anyway - partial credit or not.) I cannot quite figure out what the problem is. Is it the fact that all of the information builds on itself, and that if the students never truly mastered the first semester information, it is very difficult to be successful the first semester? Is it just the fact that the concepts we are covering are much more complex? Is it the fact that the students can smell the end of the year coming and are simply slacking off? Is it the fact that very few of my students are actually in class and on task every day? Are they neglecting my classes in favor of spending more time on state tested subjects? Is my instruction worse than it was the first semester? I would like to know what is causing such a dramatic drop in performance so that I can attempt to address it. (I am willing to take some responsibility for my students' lack of success, but definitely not all of it.)

Last semester I was willing to drop the lowest test grade for either one or both of the first two terms while the students were still getting used to me. This semester, I told them that I would not drop a grade and that they should retake any tests that they fail because the grade would otherwise count. If I stick to this, I am afraid that the percentage of my students failing for the term will be more than twice what it has been. Most of my students either do not take the time to come after school to take a retest, or if they do, they don't take advantage of the fact that I am willing to tutor them to better prepare them for a retest. They instead come in and ask to take the test right away, and often perform worse on the retest than on the original test.

I can now see why grade inflation exists. If I fail a large percentage of my students, I will likely have to justify the large failure rate to an administrator. I don't really want to deal with that. Then there are the parents who might decide to come up to the school ranting and raving. I do not want to be in a position of having to deal with a hostile parent because, frankly, I don't know how I will handle myself. I am typically able to hold my emotion until after a meeting and not just go off on somebody in the heat of anger, but there are those moments when the anger runs over. My students keep telling me that my class is messing up their GPA or that my class is the only class that they're not doing well in. I don't pay much attention to this, however, because often when I ask them how have they done previously in similar classes, they will admit that they barely squeaked by.

Before I become too alarmed, I will see how things shake out next week. There is still hope since the students have two test grades remaining - a test and a paper - that will give them the opportunity to bring up their grades. I hope that they are taking these seriously.