When my daughters come home with 20/20 on a test or assignment, I think of it as 100%. And that's a fine comparison, but it stops there. Because when they come back with a 19/20, it is not the same as a 95%, and when they come back with a 10/20, it is not a 50% failing grade, either.
Throughout France, at all levels of schooling, a perfect grade starts at 20. For each mistake made, a point is taken off. At the teacher's discretion, minor errors (such as a forgotten accent on a word) might only merit half of a point deduction. So a 14 on my daughter's test means that she has made six errors, and it might be well above average, despite the fact that it looks like a C-. And in case you're wondering, the circled words are not errors, but rather conjugated verbs.
Gigi comes home the other day and informs me very excitedly that the class clown got a 3 on a test. The teacher was so proud of him, she gave him a candy reward. She tells me the whole class was excited for him when the scores were read out, because he normally gets a zero. I know: this introduces a few new concepts. Yes, scores can get down to zero. No matter how many things he gets right, he gets enough wrong to get down to nothing, and he's not the only one. Grades in the single digits are not at all uncommon. Sometimes, kids are allowed to correct their mistakes and earn back half the points lost.
The other thing about this that is very foreign, of course, is the reading out of scores. This would be so taboo in the US, but here it's just par for the course. Almost always, all of the children know what all of the other children receive as grades, in just about everything.
Throughout France, at all levels of schooling, a perfect grade starts at 20. For each mistake made, a point is taken off. At the teacher's discretion, minor errors (such as a forgotten accent on a word) might only merit half of a point deduction. So a 14 on my daughter's test means that she has made six errors, and it might be well above average, despite the fact that it looks like a C-. And in case you're wondering, the circled words are not errors, but rather conjugated verbs.
Gigi comes home the other day and informs me very excitedly that the class clown got a 3 on a test. The teacher was so proud of him, she gave him a candy reward. She tells me the whole class was excited for him when the scores were read out, because he normally gets a zero. I know: this introduces a few new concepts. Yes, scores can get down to zero. No matter how many things he gets right, he gets enough wrong to get down to nothing, and he's not the only one. Grades in the single digits are not at all uncommon. Sometimes, kids are allowed to correct their mistakes and earn back half the points lost.
The other thing about this that is very foreign, of course, is the reading out of scores. This would be so taboo in the US, but here it's just par for the course. Almost always, all of the children know what all of the other children receive as grades, in just about everything.
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