Grade retention or grade repetition is the process of having a student repeat an educational course, usually one previously failed. Students who repeat a course are referred as "repeaters". Repeaters can be referred to as having been "held back".
The primary alternative to grade retention (for those who have failed) is a policy of social promotion, under the ideological principle that staying with their same-age peers is important. Social promotion is the promotion of all students, regardless of achievement, from one class to the next. Social promotion is somewhat more accepted in countries which use tracking to group students according to academic ability. Regardless of whether a failing student is retained or promoted, academic scholars believe that underperformance must be addressed with intensive remedial help, such as summer school programs.
In most countries, grade retention has been banned or strongly discouraged. In Canada and the United States, grade retention can be used from Kindergarten through twelfth grade. However, with older students, retention is usually restricted to the specific classes that the student failed, so that a student can be, for example, promoted in a math class but retained in a language class.
Where it is permitted, grade retention is most common among students in early elementary school. Most schools refuse to retain a student more than once in a single grade, or more than two or three years across all grades. Students with intellectual disabilities are only retained when parents and school officials agree to do so.
Famous quotes containing the words grade and/or retention:
“Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around, and nearly every book represents what my son’s third grade teacher refers to as a “teachable moment.””
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“Unless a group of workers know their work is under surveillance, that they are being rated as fairly as human beings, with the fallibility that goes with human judgment, can rate them, and that at least an attempt is made to measure their worth to an organization in relative terms, they are likely to sink back on length of service as the sole reason for retention and promotion.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)