The Sunny Elementary School Cancelled the Grades of the Perfect Score of 100

Focusing on WHAT, is being learned, instead of what grades you’d scored, from the Front Page Sections, translated…

The Teachers Gave Out Perfect Scores to the Students, in the Lower Grade Levels, There are, No Mid-Terms, or End-of-Year Examinations

For the students of Sunny Elementary in Hsinchu, “scoring a hundred” is NOT their primary concerns, because the school’s grading system is not on the hundred point scale, the perfect scores could be thirty, or a hundred fifty, the school hoped, that the parents, instead of caring about what grades their children are making, they should, care more about what their kids had learned.

I’m AMAZING, I Made a Fifty-Five

“I’m so wonderful, I’d scored a 55, on my math exam”, in other elementary schools, the parents may frown, as the kids come home, with a flunking grade, but for the parents of the students in Sunny Elementary, they knew, that “grades are merely, a form, of standardization”, it doesn’t matter what grades were being made, the more important matter is to help the kids, understand the problems they’d gotten wrong.

The founder, principal of Sunny Elementary, Bi-Hsia Lin stated, that back in 2001, when she’d started the school, she’d believed, that education should put the children’s learning processes as its top priorities, and decided, to dump the 100 point scoring systems.  This hadn’t been an easy road to take at all, at first, when parents saw, that the kids made a fifty, they were very shocked, and some of the parents had, even transferred their young away too because of this.

After the school explained the methods of teaching, as well as the scoring of the exams, taught the parents how to decipher the test papers, and use a brand new perspective, to look at the learning processes of children, this system is slowly, gaining the acceptance of the parents now.

The current principal, Wu pointed out, the school trained the students to validate themselves at a young age, instead of instilling that competitiveness in them.  Making a ninety-five is the same as getting a perfect score, but because of the hundred-point system, the parents and the students would still get bogged down by “why didn’t you make a hundred?”

She said, that the Sunny Elementary School had also dropped the mid-terms, as well as the final exams for the first, second, third and fourth grade level students, that the teacher would give out quizzes and evaluations, to get to know if the students are understanding the materials, this allowed more flexibility in the instructions, and made the learning process more fun.

The parent, Peng said because her child told her that he “didn’t want to take the exams”, she’d decided to transfer her child to Sunny Elementary School.  Once on a quiz at school, her child had gotten one problem wrong and scored a nine, the child told her, that he must understand how to do the problem he’d gotten wrong, she saw how her son was, motivated on his own, to learn, instead of being forced to learn, because of the competitiveness of his peers, or the teachers are pushing him, she’d felt, relieved.

But, not all the parents can open their minds to this brand new concept of way of instruction, for instance, the father of the student, Tseng would recalculate his grades based off of the hundred-point systems, making Tseng feel insurmountable pressures.

And so, this, would be a NEW concept, that this school is trying to implement, but, because we’d lived under the methods of the older ways of teaching, learning, making the grades, etc., etc., etc., that it would be, hard, for some of the parents, to snap out of the old ways of life to embrace this brand new way of learning and teaching, but the school is on the right track, in trying to make learning more fun, shifting the focus from the grades, to what is, actually, being learned!