Flexibility in the promotion of students is an educational policy that has been established in some countries worldwide. These regulations have demanded that the qualification of “outstanding” be eliminated from the most outstanding students and the word “failed” in those who do not pass the tests. They have also implemented that as many evaluations are carried out as necessary for students to level up, the problem is that many teachers, to achieve this, reduce the difficulty of the tests so that the student does not repeat the course.
These measures were considered necessary at the time to protect the self-esteem of the students, mainly with respect to those with greater learning difficulties , and in order to avoid that they were not stigmatized. However, several years later, this technique seems not to have given all the good results that many experts believed it would have long ago.
Approving an unprepared student is an educational scam
According to María Eugenia Vidal, governor of the Province of Buenos Aires in Argentina, promoting students without being really prepared to face the next level is an educational scam. Not only are children harmed in their self-esteem, since the difficulties will be increasing and the children will not have enough tools to face the challenges , but also the educational quality will decrease accordingly for the country, mainly in matters like language or mathematics.
The evaluation should be seen as an orientation
With the previously implemented system, an assessment is seen almost more as a punishment for the student than anything else, but in reality this is not or should not be the case. An evaluation should be viewed at all times as an orientation of the abilities that the student has or has not acquired throughout the course, and not as something harmful or embarrassing.
In addition, evaluations are also a way to measure the teacher and detect possible failures, because if the student has not learned a new skill or knowledge, the cause of said lack could also be in the type of teaching applied by the teacher or in their didactic methods, that is to say, that the badly considered “failure” of many students can also be the consequence of multiple variables, such as certain structural errors of the educational system .
State pacts for education are sought
To achieve an educational policy like the one proposed by the expert María Eugenia Vidal, it is necessary to know the reality of the students, but also that of the society of each country. That is why new rules of the game have been established in many centers and everything begins with getting to know the students better, their possible life situations, etc.
In the case of Argentina, specifically, it was intended to carry out tests in language and mathematics to 700 students from Buenos Aires schools with evaluations that could qualify the students as “insufficient”, “fair”, “good”, “very good” and ” outstanding”. It was expected that the statistics were not in favor of the educational quality of that country, but the governor affirmed that this would be the first step for an educational reform in Argentina.
And we could talk about Argentina like any other place, because the important thing in this specific case is to realize how essential it is to have a memory when establishing educational policies in a country, and that this memory is not erased when it is time to change political parties, etc., as is often the case. State agreements at the educational level are necessary , so there is still a long way to go, showing that perhaps it is adults who also need, from time to time, to “repeat the grade.”
