Social Promotion

Social promotion is the practice of promoting a student (usually a general education student, rather than a special education student) to the next grade only at the end of the current school year, regardless of when or whether they learned the necessary material, in order to keep them with their peers by age, that being the intended social grouping. It is sometimes referred to as promotion based on seat time, or the amount of time the child spent sitting in school.

Advocates of social promotion argue that promotion is done in order to not harm the students' or their classmates' self-esteem, to encourage socialization by age (together with their age cohort), to facilitate student involvement in sports teams, or to promote a student who is weak in one subject on the basis of strength in the other areas.

In Canada and the United States, social promotion is normally limited to Kindergarten through the end of eighth grade, because comprehensive high schools (grades nine through twelve) are more flexible about determining which level of students take which classes due to the graduation requirements, which makes the concept of social promotion much less meaningful.

The exception to the general rule of annual promotion in the social promotion system, namely to "hold back" a student with poor academic achievement, is called grade retention. Other options include after-school tutoring or summer school.

The opposite of social promotion would be to promote students when they learned the necessary material. This might be called "merit promotion", similar to the concept of a "merit civil service". The scope of the promotion might then be either to the next grade or to the next course in the same field. In a curriculum based on grades, this is usually called "mid-term promotion". In a curriculum based on courses rather than grades, the promotion is open-ended and is better understood as satisfying a prerequisite for the next course.