What to do when half your students are failing
Teachers are experiencing massive failure rates of 40 to 80 percent because many students are simply not doing the work. Offering extra credit, retests, and bending over backwards to provide opportunities fails to help when students refuse to try. This leaves educators at a complete loss for what else they can reasonably do to improve student grades.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
What to do when half your students are failing
- 1Providing extra credit opportunities and test correctionsDid this help you?
- 2Sending parent emails to check grades and missing assignmentsDid this help you?
- 3Having students write down missing assignments, desired test retakes, and improvement plans on sticky notesDid this help you?
- 4Documenting all opportunities, reminders, and missing workDid this help you?
- 5Allowing students to fail to let them experience natural consequencesDid this help you?
- 6Documenting all parent contact and student reminders to prove you did your part.Did this help you?
- 7Checking students' past transcripts or current grades in other classes to see if the issue is isolated.Did this help you?
- 8Curving grades or providing makeup grade boosters.Did this help you?
- 9Slowing down the curriculum to remediate basic skills instead of sticking to the calendar.Did this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I have about 140 students and as I mentioned in the title, about 40% of them failed this grading cycle.”source ↗
“I’m a first year teacher. I am 9th grade biology, and it has been a hectic first year. I am teaching freshman, I am teaching a tested subject, and I’m teaching at a newly built campus.”source ↗
“The end of the 1st 9 weeks is coming up in my district, so I tallied up how many students are currently failing my classes. 47 out of ~120 students are failing.”source ↗
“At this point, I feel like I’m at a loss for what else to do.”source ↗
“I feel like I’ve done everything that I reasonably can do to give them opportunities to improve their grades.”source ↗
“So I had about 30-40% fail rates the first 9 weeks.”source ↗
“Why not tell this to them? Students, I am bending over backwards to help you. 47/120 of you are failing yet so few of you tried the extra credit or retested. This tells me you wanting a better grade is the problem.”source ↗
“Up until about three years ago I had one or two students fail my class over the course of 8 or so years, last year I had 80 percent of my freshmen fail.”source ↗
“In my 11th grade class about 1/2 are failing. My other classes are much better but that 11th grade class is the lowest performing junior class I’ve ever had. I’m not doing anything differently. There are just many kids not doing much at all.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 4Why can't I retain anything from McGraw Hill?
- 3Why do I fail exams despite studying for months?
- 2How to grade trash student work without sugarcoating it
- 8Why won't students do the reading assignments?
- 6Why do schools blame teachers for student absenteeism?
- 2How to comfort a high schooler who tries hard but gets bad results