There’s a new educational notion floating around called “Minimum 50 grading,” the gist of which is that any numerical grade lower than a 50 is “rounded up” to 50. This is so stupid it makes my head hurt; John Gruber has more. From the story:

“It’s a classic mathematical dilemma: that the students have a six times greater chance of getting an F,” says Douglas Reeves, founder of The Leadership and Learning Center, a Colorado-based educational think tank who has written on the topic. “The statistical tweak of saying the F is now 50 instead of zero is a tiny part of how we can have better grading practices to encourage student performance.”

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.”

Reeves, as Gruber points out, is either incredibly stupid or incredibly craven here, especially with his line about students having a “six times greater chance of getting an F.” Um, no. Grades aren’t random; they reflect classroom work, pedagogy, and effort. Students are not six times more likely to get an F than some other grade (obviously! in a class with 10 students passing, do 60 students fail, on average?).

I’m not insane. I understand that, with sufficiently low grades, a student may be doomed to failure by mid-semester. But a grade is supposed to show, roughly speaking, percentage mastery of the subject. What sort of lesson are we teaching if showing up, literally, guarantees half credit? The only reason for policies like this seems to be improving passing rates — but, like the post title says, it’s not real. It’s juking the stats — a methodological hip-check to the pinball machine of education that results in shiny numbers with no corresponding increase in actual education.