I'm not a fan of the latest trend in self-esteem education, as anyone who has read my posts here can easily tell. Now, from what I remember of my pre-college school days, individual teachers enacted kind of an unwritten rule that the final grade for a grading period wouldn't be lower than 50% as long as every assignment was complete, because the math truly does work against you if you tank just one grading period. So, to me, that kind of makes sense. However, within a grading period, your percentage was your percentage. If you got a 10% on a test, that's what you got. So, you might or might not make it to a passing grade for that particular period. You just wouldn't receive lower than a 50% on your report card.

Before anyone calls me hypocritical, consider that before most schools adopted the overall percentage system of grading on report cards, grades were only recorded as A through F, receiving "GPA" points (4,3,2,1,0) for each respective grade. Your final grade was based on the average of the quality points earned for each grade. You could get an "F" in one period, and a "C" the next and average to a "D," which is passing. If you got a 20% and followed it up with a 100%, your average is 60%, and in most schools, that's still failing. Note that colleges and universities still use the old "GPA" system.

I think the assessment of the Pittsburgh policy, though, is correct because there is a reason why you have separate grading periods. These are kids, after all, and they will notoriously screw up at some point. So, taking a straight percentage all around for the whole year negates the point of having 4 to 6 separate grades for the year. But, setting a minimum assignment/test grade at 50% devalues each individual assignment. I'm OK with giving kids a clean slate in a new grading period and giving them a shot at coming back from an "F." I do think, though, that the "F" should stand if your assignments in total average less than the designated passing grade.