Are Your Grading Policies Legally Sound?

How to avoid court entanglements when student grades are challenged

Virtual learning has given parents a much closer look into the classroom. Parents in many school communities over the past year have had direct, online access into their child’s day-to-day learning with the chance to monitor teachers’ lessons and to provide home support with assignments.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, parents have been able to observe instruction firsthand, in real time or asynchronously, and to see how and when assessments are administered to students. The unprecedented parental access has been an essential bridge for many children who have struggled with remote learning.

While often helpful, such access also enables parents to encounter what’s not happening in the classroom. Parents have front-row seats into assignments that may lack clear communication or criteria for success, assignments given without teacher feedback to correct learning errors, assessments not aligned to instruction — and grades continuing to be allocated, nonetheless. Dissatisfied and more informed, parents are better equipped to challenge their child’s grades.

That’s been the experience for one of us (Laura). As a parent of a student learning virtually, I did not need a parent-teacher conference to figure out why my daughter had failing grades in her AP Government course. Instead, her direct course log-in provided sufficient evidence.

Online, my daughter received assignments without teacher lessons or directions. I found projects assigned with no rubrics and activities that required materials that students couldn’t access at home. One class announcement revealed a test retake opportunity but only for those students with two or fewer absences. Even then, eligible students should expect 15 points off their grade, per school policy. According to the principal, this automatic point reduction is exacted out of fairness to those students who took the test just once.

Unsatisfied with this rationale and what I had observed online, I challenged the accuracy of my daughter’s final course grade be-yond the school level — and won.