Fairfax Co. updates grading policy for students who don’t turn in assignments - WTOP News

The problem with no zero grades and accepting late submissions is that employers won't.

One of the nebulous factors that schools try to instill is a viable work ethic. I had a teacher who graded assignments. He also turned back quizzes and tests to the students and required them to re-submit until they had provided the correct answer and the text, page and paragraph where the found the correct answer. Until re-submissions reached acceptable answers, the test or quiz remained an "incomplete" until the end of the semester. If not corrected, the tests and quizzes were "zeroes."

He-spot checked re-submissions with verbal quizzes to ensure that the students new the material even if there were collaborative efforts on the re-submissions.

His justification was that student should learn to put forth their best effort NOW, instead of when their poor performance meant that they, their spouse and children had to go through the financial insecurity caused by a bad work ethic.

Totally agree that zeros should be required for work that is not turned in or if there was no obvious attempt to do the work and is scored accordingly. That said, late submissions, worked through the teach in advance is absolutely something employees will find in the real world. It can't be a trend or used liberally but as a manager I have understood extenuating circumstances causing projects to be late. But I expect my folks to keep me informed as things happen.

Regardless, these antics I see in the public-school systems are exactly why my kids are enrolled in a faith based private school. One that is highly rated, widely sought after by colleges (and the Academies), and incredibly challenging. In fact, those that apply to the Academies from this school are not required to have a congressional recommendation because of their high ranking within the Junior ROTC program. That said, virtually all of my kid's teachers offer the chance to improve grades to recover 25-33% (depending on the teacher) of the points missed from assignments and exams. As an example, after scoring a 90% on a 10 question quiz, the student can redo the missed question and have the score revised to 92.5% if they manage to answer the question correctly (with a 25% recovery standard). Or better yet, if 5 questions are missed and the student corrects all of them, they can recoup 12.5% of the points (turning an F to a D). This encourages the student to continue learning from their mistakes and to help them not fall behind if they don't understand the material well enough. But it's not too much of a change to encourage complacency for the first attempt at the test. It also requires the student to give up their time to retest or resubmit the work, demonstrating a level of commitment to do better and understand the material (which is the point).