08/26/2026
What do you think? This is something that we have in Appo and I think we need to change it. Students should be graded on completed work, not given points for assignments that they never even started.
South Carolina students went back to class this week under a very different grading system than the one many of their teachers have used for the past decade. A new state law bans districts from requiring a minimum "grade floor" — a policy, common in some districts since 2015 and 2016, that automatically bumped any score below a certain threshold, often 50%, up to that number, even for work a student never turned in. Under the new law, teachers can now assign grades that reflect what a student actually earned, including a zero.
The law carries real teeth: districts that continue using grade floor practices risk losing 10% of their state funding, effective with the 2026-27 school year. A 2025 report from the Palmetto Promise Institute found six of the state's 80 school districts had posted formal minimum-grade policies, with a survey of administrators identifying a dozen more districts using some version of a grade floor at the high school level.
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