Life at MA

By Tillie Solomon '27 in Winter 2025

It’s no secret that the students of Marin Academy are all too familiar with the grading scale. Many students will be quick to tell you that an A- is not an A, nor is a B- a B, and they will not be silenced when you tell them that the UCs discount pluses and minuses in college applications. Therefore, it’s no surprise that come the end of a semester, teachers find their tutorials full of desperate students asking if there’s any way they can possibly do extra credit to get their grade up, or begging for their 89.57 to be considered an A- rather than a B+. Students with an 89.67 will be pleased with Kevin Rees’s willingness to round up, while their peers are eternally frustrated when Taylor Tan states simply that he “does whatever Canvas tells him to do,” and their 89.94s remain a B+. These cutoffs are arbitrary and fail to represent the intellectual merit of a student who is often limited by just one assignment bringing down their average.

MA is known for its progressive education, which comes with a lot of accommodations. In accordance with MA’s competencies, which emphasize interdisciplinary learning, MA rejects traditional grading systems based solely on test scores, allowing students to show their intelligence in other ways, such as class projects and guaranteed revisions. So, if MA is eager to give their students some help, why does that not come in the form of a schoolwide rounding policy? The letters assigned to academic achievement and the current grading scale does not reflect the competency based learning system that Marin Academy strives to follow.

While this may sound like the words of a student bitter over an unrounded 92.67, I do truly believe that MA’s grading policy currently fails to match the values of the school. If we can agree that not all students can learn the same way, is it so far of a stretch to assert that not all students can be evaluated by the same dated grading scale?