Grades

Grades

There has long been a discussion about when to start grading the students in swedish public schools. It was a burning issue 30 years ago, and so it is now. Since the 1970Ò's swedish pupils have not been graded until the eighth grade. In rescent time the question about when to start getting grades has increased in importance. With the election coming up in a near future some of the political parties have made it one of their most important issues. With the liberal "folkpartiet" leading the way, a gathering of the biggest center to right-wing parties called "Alliansen", demands grades from the sixth grade, or earlier, as one of the ways to improve the quality of Swedish schools and education. Furthermore they claim that earlier grading would help identifying the weakest students earlier (Skola och utbildning). In that way the schools would also be able to take the suitable meassures to help those studentÒ's earlier. To me this raises the question if earlier grading will bring these positive effects? My thesis is that earlier grading could help in identifying pupils in need of extra support at a sooner stage, but there are other and better ways to do this, therefore earlier grading is not necessary.

I recall when I started school in 1st grade, I was full of expectations and had a big hunger for learning. Me and my class mates quickly started to learn basic reading and writing. Some of us learned faster and others had a bit more problems. This was almost 20 years ago and we did not receive

any grades on our performances until the eighth grade. Still me and my class mates receive

d just the help and extra support of different forms that we needed. Since then the awareness of different kinds of reading/writing dissabilities has improved a lot. Still pupils with these problems are identified and receive

help.

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A great deal of the responsibility to do this lies on the teachers. By keeping thorough journals of the pupils progress they can see what their individual problems are and see to it that they are helped. The parents of the pupil are informed about their childÒ's progress, strenghts and weeknesses in teacher-parent diskussions that are kept regulary. The only thing that a grade would bring to this is an empty digit or a letter, depending on what kind of grades you use. A grade canÒ't tell parents what the teacher has observed while teaching their child. Neighther can it tell anything