Advantages And Disadvantages Of Pass Fail System

Suppose a child instantly runs home to tell his parents about his hard work paying off throughout the semester and he is positive that he will receive an A+. However, to his dismay, the school has adopted a pass-fail system. This means he probably passes, but so does the careless boy, who sits next to him on his phone the whole period. To explain even more, a pass-fail grading system is where there are only two types of grades: either a pass or a fail. A passing grade is usually determined by receiving a 60% or higher in a class to pass that class. Hence, this new pass-fail grading system would be harmful to the child that tries in class, whereas being beneficial to the boy who barely scrapes by. However, advocates of the pass-fail grading …show more content…
In addition to this, teachers will no longer know exactly how well their students are doing because all of their students are all just clumped together, in two large groups. This is emphasized in Kori Morgan’s article, The Disadvantages of School Without Grades, in which she has similar findings in the schools she has observed and states “Pass/fail systems provide only two options for evaluation, while a letter grade system offers five levels of achievement to pinpoint a student 's work ethic and comprehension” (Morgan 3). A pass-fail grading system would lead to teacher remaining lost on their students’ progress due to no idea of their abilities. Hence, teachers are unable to properly challenge or engage their students, resulting with the faster learners stuck with the slow ones, reducing their potential as well. At the same time it will speed up the slower learners to a pace that is quite beyond their capability level, as they are now stuck in large group with other students that work much more quickly than they do. These students will therefore become even more lost and even further beyond, causing them to not receive the education they deserve. Likewise, Asia-Pacific Economics makes similar observations in their article Pass-Fail Grading System Pros and Cons and states “Letter grades help to communicate how specific someone’s field of knowledge happens to be in a subject area. The pass fail grading system simply communicates that a student understands both of study in some way” (Asia-Pacific Economics 6). A pass-fail grading system also makes school more difficult for teachers as they would now have to spend more time trying to figure out each student’s proficiency level in each