From the Science wing to Mr. Mahany’s classroom, teachers have the availability to show grades or hide them on the portal. This angers so many students at Parker. What’s the point in acing all those hard tests or failing that math quiz if you can’t see how it impacts your grade?
Most teachers say they don’t want students looking at an assignment differently based on their overall grade. They don’t want the effort a student puts into an assignment to fluctuate depending on the overall grade that student has.
High schoolers 100% overthink grades, but how can we not? Grades are the point of us showing up to school each day. If we wake up sick, we still come to school because we don’t want to miss out. We do late night studies after practice so we don’t fail. We do school so we can hopefully have a good life, and grades are the key to that door. Simply guessing our grade doesn’t give us enough motivation. I know for many students it’s not that big of a deal, but you can’t tell me you’ve never thought about your grade or cared. At the end of the day we all have that little voice in the back of our minds when we are studying that tells us we have to get a good grade.
As well, without portal grades, you have no idea what classes you aren’t doing well in and what areas you need to improve in. This can be so frustrating because the last thing that students need is to be surprised when report cards come out. Knowing your grade ahead of time can urge students to go talk to teachers about how they can improve and know where they need to focus their energy on in their academics.
Freshman Ayla Pressman, along with many others who were asked, feels strongly about being able to see grades on the portal. Pressman feels that, “seeing your grade on the portal makes it easier to see where you’re at and where you need to improve. In some classes, not knowing is stressful because you don’t know if you need to ask for extra credit or put more effort in to raise your grade.”
Teachers think that students will put in a different amount of effort on assignments based on their overall grade, and of course they will. But that’s a good thing. It teaches students to prioritize things and know where to put in more effort based on how it will benefit them in the long run. Teachers want to see their students succeed and want to give them all the tools that they need to do so. Some teachers just don’t realize that the “see grade detail” button on the portal can be a bigger tool for students than it seems.
Moral of the story, by the time we start our freshman year, grades become everything. Your grades are what get you into college. They are what determine your future. Not being able to see if your grades aren’t where you want them to be can add so much extra stress on students. For all the teachers reading this, reconsider how much a grade might mean to your students and take a hint. Please.
