When core teachers reported to school this year, they learned that the district was moving to a standardized grading policy across all campuses.
Teachers and students around the district are being expected to step it up in their classrooms.
Chemistry teacher Stacey Martin said she wasn’t completely thrown off by the new changes that occurred this year. According to her, the science department grading system was pretty similar already. The big issue for her and a lot of the science teachers at Rider is that they had to change their grading policy to match the other WFISD campuses’ grading policies. For Rider, that meant changing how they graded both the regular and AP classes.
Martin said that the department individually did not make this change.
“The decision came from the curriculum coordinator and Dr. Powers,” Martin said. “From there it was the teachers from three different campuses that chose where the changes needed to be done.”
From the old grading policy to the new,  Martin doesn’t feel like the new system is all bad.
“I do like to have my own freedom when it pertains to grades,” Martin said. “But this way as a science team for the entire district we created a grading category system that will work for all of our classes giving us some freedoms, but also kind of keeping us in line to where a test counts as a test.”
Martin said the change would be especially helpful to those students who switch from campus to campus.
The regulating of the curriculum was enacted to make grading fair across all the campuses. Controversy did occur throughout the campuses, but the debate really occurred in the junior highs.
“Four different campuses who are used to making their own decision had to come together, and find something that worked,” Martin said. “There definitely had to be a team effort going on.”