100% accurate. I see students who think they’re doing just fine because they “got an A…” in a class they probably should have failed. Extra credit, endless test retakes or test corrections, bonus points for anything and everything NOT related to mastering the material: We’re finding any way to improve grades… as long as it doesn’t require demonstrating that they’ve learned anything. We’re lying to our kids and it will catch up to them at some point. Maybe in their next high school class, maybe in a 1st year college class, or maybe in their first job… but they will have to pay the price eventually. 3 years ago I had a student struggling with math. Her grades were great, but she had a low ACT score. That’s a big red flag that she hadn’t actually learned much. I was seeing her for weekly tutoring and we were making progress. Slow progress, because she was so far behind, but progress none the less. After months of work on prior years material, her current class, and her ACT, she was beginning to understand how the A’s she had “earned” weren’t an accurate reflection of what she knew… and she wanted to fix it. But the lure of easy ways to improve her grade was too strong. She emailed one morning, to cancel her tutoring session scheduled later that afternoon. Her exam in “honors algebra II” was the next day. She canceled her MATH tutoring session, the day before a big test, because her MATH teacher was offering extra credit for attending the schools SOCCER game that evening. She could get 10 extra points on her exam by showing up to an afterschool event. She believed that made more sense than coming to tutoring…. And i can’t say she was wrong. We might have found her an extra 5 points with one final hour of tutoring before her midterm. Or she could get 10 points by hanging out with her friends that night. She chose to go to the game and I don’t really blame her. At 17 years old I would have probably made the same decision. If she chose differently, and came to tutoring, that girl would have gone into the test with a better understanding of the material, and probably ended up with a lower grade. The incentive structure was broken. Her math teacher gave her a choice that involved no learning. He sabotaged her opportunity with the promise of an easier path. I don’t blame her for taking it. It’s maddening and it needs to stop.

Does it fly? Barrel roll? No?!? How embarrassing…

Same beef with so many writing assignments I see. Every prompt students bring in is full of “how do YOU feel…” “explain how this impacts YOU…” “What would YOU do…” and every paper they write is full of I’s, me’s, and mine’s. It’s narcissistic navel gazing at its finest. Just once I’d like to see a prompt that asks students to step outside themselves and consider the thoughts, opinions, values, positions of others…🤷‍♂️

Agreed. There’s a reason Hemingway is considered great. He could convey deep meaning and complex emotion with simple, direct writing. That’s a gift. My personal pet peeve is reading a “letter from the principal” or other district communication to parents, and it sounds like they pulled it straight from their doctoral dissertation. So many of those could be re-written at a 5th grade level, with no loss meaning, and be much more accessible to their audience. There’s a time and place for complex language, and a letter home to mom and dad, or an informational post on a district website, isn’t it.

Tina is getting a lot of pushback on this post… but she isn’t wrong. There’s a reason metro Nashville is about to receive a colonoscopy from the TN dept of ed, who has announced a full scale investigation into the districts grading policies. It’s morally wrong to give a child a higher grade than they’ve earned. A handful of teachers and administrators in Nashville had the courage to step forward and raise the issue, often at great personal cost. We need more of that courage nationwide. Raising a students grades to keep parents or anyone else happy and silent is an ethical violation. It might make life easier for the adults in the moment, but it’s a a disservice to children and should be seen as wholly unacceptable, if not shameful.

Absolutely. After working with over a thousand students at our tutoring center in the past 12 years, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen TWO students who have what I would agree is “test anxiety”. Hundreds more who claim it. The two students had a few things in common. They were anxious about the test WEEKS or even months in advance, almost to the point of being non-functioning. They also over-prepared, asking for extra practice materials and constantly feeling like they weren’t doing enough to be ready. They would study for hours, 7 days a week. And they did this because of internal pressures, not because I or their parents were pressuring them to do better. Often just the opposite, where everyone was telling them it wasn’t THAT important. On test day, those students are experiencing physical reactions like breaking out in a rash or hyperventilating on the drive to the test. They’re a wreck, even though they’ve over prepared. The vast majority of the other students claiming test anxiety are waking up the morning of the test fully aware they didn’t do what they needed to do to be prepared. Now they’re anxious about the inevitable. They are NERVOUS because they know a bill is about to come due and realize they can’t avoid it anymore. I wouldn’t call that test anxiety🤷‍♂️

Every time someone is dismissing poor test scores and they say “we shouldn’t test a fish on its ability to climb a tree…”, I want them to define the fish and tree in their scenario: Are you talking about poor rural white kids and reading? Inner city minorities and basic math? Who is the fish in your scenario and what’s this “tree” you think is too difficult for them to climb?

Kids don’t do well on the graduation test? Abolish the test requirement. This reminds me of a conversation i had a few years ago with a district administrator. He said his students were unable to read an analog clock, but it was ok because they figured out a solution: replace them all, so each classroom had a digital clock.🤦‍♂️ A certain tech company had such horrible working conditions at a plant in China, the workers were climbing to the roof and jumping off to their deaths. They made sure to inform the press that the problem was fixed: by installing “suicide nets” to catch anyone who tried it again. These aren’t solutions. It’s abdicating responsibility for the problem and giving up, admitting there’s no willingness (or ability?) to fix the underlying issue. It’s cowardly. Whatever problem you face today, don’t be a coward.

Said it before and will say it again, but the most difficult thing we have to say to parents is: “Your child’s grades tell me nothing about what they know and what they can do.” We see kids with A’s in Alg I, Geometry, and Alg II who are fundamentally performing math at the 4th-6th grade level. You can’t trust the grades coming home. We see juniors and seniors with A’s in English class who can’t recognize complete and incomplete sentences or understand what they read in a 5 paragraph passage written at a 9th grade level. For many, their vocabulary is atrocious. Students have told us in the past 30 days they don’t know these words( yes, we keep a list): Anecdote Ascertain Cordial Wary Dignified Redundant Speculate Benign Exasperating (I feel this one, deeply) Stimuli Innocuous Paucity Buttress Reciprocate Ambitious That list is much longer. Students are unable to understand 800 word passages and answer basic questions about it because they don’t have basic knowledge about the world and don’t know the language being used. Their grades are a lie. Work that would have gotten me a C or a D 35 years ago is routinely marked as an A today. And many parents have no idea. They see an A come home and assume it’s the same A they earned 20-30 years ago. And who are our students I’m talking about? Their parents are almost exclusively college graduates with upper middle class earnings. Most come from two parent households where education is a top priority. Mom and dad have the means, and are willing, to pay for outside help. Their parents are doctors, nurses, lawyers, business owners, corporate executives, and yes, teachers and college professors. The most common statement they make in our first phone call or visit is, “I don’t understand. They get all A’s, but it’s not showing on their ACT/SAT” They say things like, “they just don’t test well,” or “they just need some test taking strategies.” After working with the child over a couple of weeks it’s very difficult to come back and tell them, “I’m sorry, but they haven’t learned much in the last few years. They’re way behind what they need to get a top tier score on this test” Naysayers shout, “your teaching to the test,” or “You show them strategies that increases their score.” While we do the latter, it’s a TINY portion of what we do. And as for the former, you’re darn right we teach to the test. We’re teaching kids how to add, subtract, multiply and divide fractions. We’re teaching them what 3/5 is as a percentage. We’re showing them how to solve single variable equations that involve 1-3 steps. We’re teaching them basic angle relationships and how to find area of basic shapes like rectangles, triangles and circles, while also explaining what “area” actually means. We’re teaching them basic math word problems involving simple arithmetic, like how to calculate weekly pay If you make $15 an hour, you work 45 hours, and you get paid time and a half for any time over 40 hours. We’re teaching them basic science and social studies knowledge I would expect an upper elementary student to have, so they can comprehend a text discussing the topic… And we’re doing it with 16-18 year olds. They walk in the door and don’t know what D-Day was, don’t know that “resistance” inhibits the flow of electricity, don’t understand how our federal government works, and can’t tell us what 15% of 200 is. We’re absolutely teaching to the test. We’re teaching what they haven’t learned. We’re teaching high school juniors and seniors who are listed on every honor roll. We’re teaching them these things because the schools have had them for 11 years and they just didn’t get it. If we’re lucky, we get them for 11 hours, and they’re walking away with a much stronger understanding of the basic skills they need to not just do well on a single test, but to navigate life. The grades are lying to you. It takes a measure of courage to face that truth. Be courageous and we can fix this

Another university drops their ”test optional” policy: Notre Dame to start requiring ACT, SAT test scores again for admissions wndu.com/2026/09/09/notre-da…