(7+5)/2 = ?

There was an odd quirk on one of the girls’ school reports last year: For a particular subject, she got a 7 for Quarter 1. That’s the top mark: Great. Due mainly to enforced absence she went down to a 5 for Quarter 2. Now, Semester 1 = Quarter 1 + Quarter 2, so what do you think the grade for the first semester was? Hmmmm… (7+5)/2 = 6 I would have thought, but she got given a 5. A clerical error perhaps? But no, the school stuck by the grade: “It’s a 5”. “So the first quarter doesn’t really count?” “No, no, it counts, it’s just that there are different criteria being evaluated and there is no averaging and people often misunderstand”. Where to begin? “You are taking the mean of Quarters 1 & 2 and there is no averaging going on?!?!” “No. The grade for the second quarter is automatically the grade for the whole semester”. “Aha, so the first quarter doesn’t count then?” “No, it counts.” And so on…

I have approached several people within the school who you might suppose would be able to explain, but no relief. Acknowledgement that yes, parents do get confused by this, but no account of why the school has rewritten the laws of arithmetic (that stretch back 4000 years to the Babylonians, so it says on the Google).

To be fair, I didn’t want to be a nuisance when in another subject she went up two grades between quarters and got given the second quarter grade for the semester, so I let that one pass without comment 🙂

Keep your marking system simple or it looks like you’re making it up as you go along. Personally I would give the current system a 5 for this quarter (but only a 3 next).