Hrihaan Bhutani is already thinking about college. The Dublin High freshman is taking four Advanced Placement classes next year and has crammed his schedule with extracurricular activities to better his chances of getting into an Ivy League school.
But a change at the high school designed to get students less focused on grades has done the opposite. Suddenly, in some classes, A’s are almost unachievable, unless you score 100%. And F’s don’t exist. For high-achieving students like Bhutani, the pressure to be perfect is even more of a burden.
“I feel more stressed … now with this new system,” said Bhutani, who is especially sweating his biology class, one of dozens trying a variety of new grading scales under a two-year experiment. “Even if you’re at a 99, you would get moved down to an 85,” he explained, which translates to a world-ending B.
Comrades! All will be made equal via government schooling.
