Alaina-+Do+Zeroes+Have+a+Place+on+a+100+Pt+Scale?

Most of my students have a basic motivation to participate in school. When I hand out an activity to complete in class, they write their name on the top and listen for instructions. When I tell them to start, they begin working on the activity. And when the end of the class comes and I give them a homework assignment, most students come to class the next day with something. It may not be accurate, but they know we’ll go over all the answers, so it’s simply an attempt. My homework policy is that I give 5 daily points just for trying (after all, the point of homework is more practice) and it’s the students’ responsibility to check their work as we go over it and ask questions if they don’t understand something. But what grade do I put into Powerschool when a student refuses to do anything? How do I communicate with a number that instead of participating in a class activity, a student turned the paper over and drew a robot? Or when I walk around the room to check homework a student tells me, “I didn’t do it.” There are a lot of educators who claim that recording a zero for that student harms them both psychologically and mathematically with their grades, and that the better alternative is to make them do the work. But teachers who know the type of student I’m talking about know that you can give a million detentions in the world, but there’s no guarantee the student will show up, even less that they’ll have a pencil and notebook with them! So, we arrive at the dilemma of zero. Even the ancient Greeks hated zero philosophically, ranting, “How can nothing be something?” As educators, we ask ourselves, “Do zeros have a place on a 100 point grade scale?

No Zeros Allowed viewpoint || Say No to No Zeros viewpoint || Administrators feel pressure to produce a student body with high grade point averages. || Having a policy against zeros takes the autonomy away from teachers to set their own grading policies. || Some teachers use zeros to punish poor behavior, not to measure academic achievement. || How can academic achievement be measured if a student makes no attempt at an assignment? Doesn’t behavior count? || Students are supposed to //earn// grades. If a student doesn’t complete an assignment, he should be required to do it rather than receive a zero for it. || Teachers can’t track down every missing assignment. Staff limitations make in-house suspensions, homework lunches or mandatory after school sessions impossible. || Mathematically, a zero can wreak havoc on a grade average and is not fair on a 100 point scale. If 10 points separate each grade (90=A, 80=B, 70=C, 60=D), than the grade assigned for not completing work should be a 50. || Giving students a 50 on an assignment they didn’t do doesn’t set them up for future success. How will they learn to be responsible if they’re not held accountable for their actions? And what about the student who tries and gets a 45? Won’t he learn it’s better not to try at all? || Psychologically, the effects of a zero on a student can be confusing and discouraging. || A zero doesn’t mean a student tried and failed, it means they failed to try. ||

In “Teachers should just say no to no-zero grade policy”, Alice Armstrong gives the following example to demonstrate the senselessness of no zero grade policies. Suppose you go to the doctor for an annual physical and he tells you that you need to lose 50 pounds. He designs a weight loss plan for you to follow, complete with diet modifications and added physical activity, and sends you on your way. But, when you leave the doctor’s office and head home, you decide to ignore the plan. You just aren’t interested in changing your habits to lose weight. So, when you return for your follow up appointment, it’s no surprise to you that you haven’t lost a pound. Your doctor, however, is concerned by how a change of zero pounds will look on your chart, so he writes down that you lost 25 pounds. Soon after this visit, you develop diabetes. Who’s at fault for your health problems? Your doctor did all he could for you, but you chose to do nothing. Then, out of concern for how your lack of effort would reflect on him, your doctor inaccurately reported your results.

As teachers, we do all that we can for our students. We work hard to offer them an educational experience both in and out of the classroom that caters to their individual strengths and keeps pushing them towards their performance goals. But what happens when they turn in a test with nothing written on it but their name? We can work through it with them, question by question. We can provide them extra tutoring before and after school and during lunch and assign them an “incomplete” until the work is done. But what if the work never gets done? Those who argue against using zeros say that it’s mathematically unfair to give students a grade so far below the failing mark. But to fail implies that you must have tried. When a student refuses to work, our only option is to assign their work the only number that isn’t really a number, but an absence, a void that represents the paper I DON’T have with their name on top.

Opponents of using zeros in 100 point grade scales often cite the misuse of zeros for behavioral punishment rather than academic achievement. While I don’t assign grades for behavior, I’m not convinced that I shouldn’t. In the work world, we’re graded for behavior all the time. Let’s say you work as a salesperson and are one of your firm’s top performers. You consistently reach and often exceed your sales goals for the month. As far as selling things is concerned, you’re one of the best. Your behavior, however, is less than professional. You’ve recently been written up for inappropriate comments made to a co-worker and there’s an investigation into a claim that you’ve accepted kickbacks from a client that break your company’s ethics policy. Do these behavioral mishaps not come into play in your annual performance review? Of course they do! And depending on the nature and extent of your unacceptable behavior, you may be terminated, notwithstanding all the sales you’ve made. Behavior counts, and not just at school. Our job as educators encompasses more than academic training, but moral and social responsibility as well. If we send the message that behavior and academics are separate, we are not setting our students up for a lifetime of success.

Lastly, there’s a lot of talk about whether a zero affects a students’ motivation positively or negatively. Seeing a zero on their grade report makes some students think, “Oh my God! I never turned that in!” and they rush to their teacher to ask if it could still be done for some credit. Other students look at a grade report with several zeros, and therefore an extremely low average, and think, “Well, what’s the point now? My grade’s too low to raise.” For each student the zero has a different effect on their motivation to work, but for all students the zero is universally understood as, “I didn’t do the work.” It’s not a sign that a student tried and failed. I’ve never graded a single test where a student tried and received NO credit whatsoever. Maybe they got a 20%, but not a 0. Students, parents, and teachers alike know that a grade of zero does not mean a student tried and failed, but failed to try. In these cases, I think recording a zero is the only measure we have to communicate that no work was done. To assign a grade like 50 would not only be dishonest, it would set that student up for future life failures, like the diabetes example given by Armstrong. Maybe worse is the devastation it would have on the motivation of students who tried but got less than 50. They would learn that if they’re going to fail, they might as well shoot the moon and not try at all. At the end of the day, when we’ve done all we can to offer our students a million chances to succeed, a zero is our way of recording that they didn’t give back. We can give them a pencil, but we can’t make them write.

**Works Cited**

“Remaking the Grade, From A to D” by Douglas B. Reeves []

“We’re told to go easy on students, B.C. teachers say” by Janet Steffenhagen []

“Is Giving Zeros as an Academic Measurement Ethical?” by Elderine Wyrick []

“Teachers should just say no to no-zero grade policy” by Alice Armstrong []

“Are Zeros Justifiable as Real Grades?” by Harvey Craft []

0 (number) on Wikipedia [|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0_(number)]