The COVID 19 outbreak has impacted the last quarter of the 2019-2020 school year tremendously. CCSD has changed to virtual school for the rest of the school year. With school being online, the district policy has made it so students’ grades cannot drop- assignments still go into the grade book, but will be exempt if not complete or done poorly. Only positive things can happen to grades for the rest of the semester. 

Having grades be frozen could easily help students’ mental health because we don’t know what every student is going through at home during this time. Most students right now are not just stressed out about school itself. Not having the pressure to keep their grades up and also not being overwhelmed with tons of work, will give a sense of relief to them, hopefully. 

I think that having frozen grades for the rest of the year will benefit everyone’s grades because the students that were not doing very well in their classes have the chance to improve their grades before the end of the year. Seniors will have an easy opportunity to raise their grades if needed to get their last credits of the year. Even the students that have good grades as is, they have the chance to get an even higher grade. 

Downfalls of having frozen grades are that students might lose motivation to do work. If a student knows that their grade can’t be negatively impacted, then they might not do their work, or their best work and take advantage of the exempt option. I have noticed in my classes that students aren’t coming to online meetings or participating in online discussion boards.  

Our grades that will be shown at the end of the year aren’t exactly represented by what we will learn in the last 3 months of school due to the fact that we get a good grade whether we do our work well, poorly, or not at all. Seniors or students of any grade level that are happy with where their grade is, might not want to do the work with the knowledge that their grade cannot drop. 

Since the work teachers are assigning are still relevant to the class, students that aren’t keeping up with their work could be impacted in the future when they move on to upper-level classes and they will have missed a whole lesson or two from this time. I know the motivation for doing school work is at an all-time low right now, it could benefit you, in the long run, to finish off strong, its only two more months.