The state Board of Education last week updated its policy so students can no longer take core classes pass or fail.
The new state policy explicitly states that “pass” grades can’t be assigned to non-elective classes required for graduation, like math and English. Some school districts had been granting passes for non-elective classes as part of credit recovery programs, when a student is trying to make up a class they had failed.
Sneha Shah Coltrane, the N.C. Department of Public Instruction's director of advanced learning and gifted education, told the board in October that the existing policy made it technically possible for a student to graduate with only “pass” grades on core courses.
She said it's not clear if such an incident has actually occurred, but changing the policy was important for clarification.
“We want to make sure, if we find something out when a student potentially could graduate with a 1.6 [GPA], we want to help our districts see that, especially, non-elective graduation requirements can’t be given a pass," Shah Coltrane said.
She noted credit recovery programs should only be used to help students revisit parts of a course curriculum — not the whole course. The board voted on it without any new discussion. The new policy will take effect next school year.
