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Comment by SonOfKyuss | Hacker News Reader

> From what I have read online...

Don't believe everything you read online.

My experience from actually having 2 kids currently in high school is that failing is damn near impossible, but GPA absolutely does mean something for most kids. There is definitely a group of kids at the bottom that in decades past would have been held back or dropped out and those kids are now just passed along. Is that better or worse than having them drop out? I don't really know, but the reality is that those kids likely wouldn't have been cut out for these jobs anyway. At the other end of the spectrum, the competition at the top can be fierce. My kids and their peers stress way more about their GPA than I ever did because competition for colleges has gotten tougher. The education is there for those who want to take advantage of it.

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> Is that better or worse than having them drop out? I don't really know

It's worse. If they'd been held back earlier, they might have graduated high school prepared for the sorts of trades jobs this article discusses. Instead, they're processed through the system as a number. Best case, they aren't constantly disrupting their classrooms.

Again, from my personal experience of having kids in school, they do hold kids back in elementary and even middle school, but less so in high school. From what I have seen, they will strongly recommend it if they feel that a student is not ready for the next grade, but won't force it if the parents disagree. There’s not a whole lot else they can do. There’s no other place in society to support these kids at the bottom and the schools aren’t funded well enough to give them the one on one attention to catch them up.

what happens to GPA if a kid is failed/held back a year? does it keep accumulating across the extra years?

in my opinion, if you fail a year that whole year should be excluded from GPA and you just get a clean 'do over' on the repeat grade.

> what happens to GPA if a kid is failed/held back a year?

For a kid who is held back a year, what good is any GPA? Genuine question.

I’m sure that one could construct some sort of edge case or corner case in which a college-bound kid has a bad year. That said, for each of those cases, I’m pretty sure I could come up with a perfectly good way for that person to find a reasonable path to a very good university.

That said, in most cases, the folks who are held back will have significant issues that will marginalize them anyway: social, psychological, cognitive, etc.

i could envision a situation where there's a kid that has a bad home-life situation that gets resolved or a stretch of bad mental health that could really turn things around from one year to the next.

> i could envision a situation where there's a kid that has a bad home-life situation that gets resolved or a stretch of bad mental health that could really turn things around from one year to the next.

This happens.

Usually they will not get held back. Usually the teachers will know what’s going on. A passing C (or even B) can be manufactured in these spots. This assumes that they are normally good students.

Also note that most schools that reject people have a spot on their application where an applicant can explain any sort of extenuating circumstances (e.g., parents divorce, etc.), and a bad year will be overlooked as long as it’s clear that they are back on track and can perform.

If someone has consistent performance issues and just happens to be smart, then they need to fix the performance issues. This is usually best done at a junior college and then a transfer to a four-year school (e.g., State U).

There is definitely a group of kids at the bottom that in decades past would have been held back or dropped out and those kids are now just passed along.

This is literally my point. What difference does it make if I heard it online

Is that better or worse than having them drop out?

it is worse given that it gives false signals for the job market and devalues the credential

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