Students across the country know the agonizing feeling of receiving their final semester grade and realizing they were within a few tenths of a percent of the next highest grade up. Many put a lot of effort into different assignments, but just have a difficult time grasping the subject matter.

In the foreign language department at OHS, the homework category was worth 10% of a student’s final grade. Often, this 10% would be earned by the student’s legitimate effort on homework assignments and would provide a well deserved boost if learning a foreign language was difficult for them.

The key being homework “was” worth 10%.

Beginning this year, the OHS foreign language department no longer credits any homework assignments in a student’s final grade.

Robin Naylor, department chair of the OHS foreign language department, said this change was brought because homework is practice, and practice should not be graded for correctness. As this is my third year taking a foreign language, I have never noticed a problem with how the grading was weighted, and homework was nearly always graded for completion. Fair credit was given for effort on homework, quizzes and tests were heavily weighted in importance and then there was your final exam.

The department appears to be taking a step towards fixing something that was never broken. While I am not devastated by this change by any stretch, I have never been a fan of change for the sake of change.

I understand that in order to be able to retake quizzes, you must have an 80% homework average. Regardless, homework just turns into a safety net. Should you never need this safety net, all the work you completed over the semester counts for nothing.

This change also provides students who come into the course fluent in the language with an even more unfair advantage.

These students are able to never participate in class, avoid the homework, and put in overall minimal effort, yet breeze through the tests. Before, their grade would suffer from lack of effort, but now it makes no difference.

In the overall scheme of things, this change to the weighted grading system is irrelevant. Homework was only 10% of the final grade, but it is still frustrating that this change seems to come out of nowhere.

My only wish is that when a system like this is working well enough, leave it be. Continuous change without real value will only weaken the impact these changes have on students.