At least not in high school in DC.

http://shine.yahoo.com/event/momentsofm … y-2410739/

What's the point of even having kids go to school? Why not just hand them a diploma. I'm curious how many teachers are in favor of this policy? If I had to guess, I would imagine few teachers would agree to this. Also, I love how they try to compare failing high school students with law students at Stanford, Yale, and Berkeley. I wonder if they realize that to get into any of those law schools you have to have very high grades. My guess, you're not getting into a top law school if you fail high school, or even if you incomplete high school.

The important part is the learning process.

Is it really necessary for someone to be penalized, essentially being shot in the leg figuratively, and carrying that failure for the rest of their life to make that point?

I'm not talking about this from some pansy, "Bad grades give students poor self-esteem!" argument; no, I'm thinking about this more practically:

Me, I was a 3.7 GPA student in high school.

There was one class...ONE CLASS, and only ONE class that I ever failed in college, and that's because my academic advisor advised me to take a certain intermediate level course, even though there was a pre-requisite for it. Not a required pre-requisite, but it would've been helpful taking that class beforehand. "But don't you think I should take the pre-requisite for it first...?" "No, I believe you're already beyond that level; you'll be bored out of your mind."

But that one class busted me down below a 3.0 - I was pulling a good 3.5 up until then; I disclose it on my resume, seeing as how prospective employers are going to find out anyway, but one way or another, I can't help feeling that's why they disqualify me, especially when there's so many other students who have better GPAs; employers have the pick of whoever they want, these days.

As a high school teacher who lives pretty darn close to Alexandria, this was a big discussion in the teacher work room today.  All the teachers strongly opposed.  We already see students slacking off.  Homework completion rates in my classes are at an average of approximately 30-35%.  Since we pretty much abolished our attendance policy 3 years ago, attendance rates have dropped as have grades.
Students wait until one week before the end of the quarter and just ask me for extra credit, having done very few of the normal credit assignments.  They want one worksheet to bring their 49% up to a C.
The students that do work on time and study get very annoyed when I give extra chances to those who they see slacking off all the time.

If this grading system were put in place in my school I'm guessing it would actually be successful for 10-15% of students, and would actually do harm to a large portion of the remaining 85-90%.