“It’s Soul-Sucking”: Credit Recovery Program Presents Graduation Barriers

Since the pandemic, the district has offered the online credit recovery program, Edgenuity, for students who aren’t on track to graduate. While the option to take these courses helps many students graduate on time, Edgenuity’s course design makes it very easy for some students to cheat and near-impossible for other students to even access the material. Edgenuity’s poorly written questions and lack of translation options make it difficult for some hard-working students to pass their classes.

Athletic Director Paul Snow, who oversees several Edgenuity classes, said, “They do offer a lot more classes than the program we used previously, but it’s pretty easy to cheat, especially on tests.”

Senior Mia Fitzhugh, who took Modern European History and English III through Edgenuity, said, “It would definitely be super easy to cheat because I don’t think they even monitor tabs. I think the likelihood that other people in my classes were cheating is very high.”

The answer keys for multiple Edgenuity classes can easily be found on Quizlet with a quick Google search and TikTok is full of videos explaining how to cheat in various courses.

Even if students aren’t actively looking up the answers, they are rewarded for trying to game the system. Fitzhugh said, “Part of it is online learning in general, but Edgenuity definitely has its problems with super bland teaching styles and being really easy to fudge. For the reading portions, you develop a sense of what they will test you on so you just skip around. I know many students find that a plus, but personally I wish there was more of a motivator to take it seriously.”

“I learned way less than I have in any class I’ve taken at M-A. If your teacher allows it, you can also access all assignments at once as opposed to going in order, so it’s very easy to skip around the actual work and just watch the videos and do the quick and easy questions and quizzes because the minimum completion percentage is only 70%,” she continued.

On the other hand, Edgenuity’s lack of translations and poorly written questions make it difficult for many students who are actually trying to complete their assignments honestly to do so.

Edgenuity’s ELL class has students read The Odyssey and Shakespeare which both use language that is outdated and doesn’t actually help them learn English. Many questions also have multiple correct answers or are too vague for students to properly answer them.

English Language Learners (ELL) teacher Lisa Otsuka, who has several students who are enrolled in Edgenuity, said, “One of my former students reread The Odyssey at Yale this semester and she was like, ‘A lot of these questions are unanswerable.’ It was really the luck of the draw because my former student worked so religiously with one of the students in the program—she came in during first period, second period, and fifth period for weeks to help make the content comprehensible. Really the student wouldn’t be graduating without the help of my former student because she could not access the work. She was in an Edgenuity class since August, and by May, she had only gotten to 11%.”

“It shouldn’t be that hard for students to graduate. It becomes an equity issue. There are cases where students don’t have to work very hard and can just fail a class and take an online class and then there are other situations where you have a very diligent student—who’s getting As in all her classes and getting all these awards for ELD and for P.E.—who can’t access their work,” she added.

One of the main reasons these classes are so inaccessible is that Edgenuity doesn’t offer versions of popular classes in Spanish like its predecessor, Cyber High, did. “They say you can use a translating software, but it’s not always accurate and there are tons of videos that aren’t translated,” Snow said.

Senior Luis Licea Fuerte, who took Life Skills and freshman English through Edgenuity, said, “It wasn’t that difficult for me, but, there was a girl who didn’t understand English in my class. There was a translate option for some stuff, but there wasn’t a translate option for a lot of the explanations that were given to her, so she couldn’t answer some questions.”

There usually isn’t anyone in the class who can help translate either. Fuerte said, “There’s a teacher there to help check assignments off, but he isn’t really there to answer questions or anything, so we just all sit there in silence and work on the computers.”

Snow added, “For Cyber High, they had lots of classes with a Spanish version, so that would be a big starting point because that’s about a third of our students. Some kids have extra help because they have a case manager for their IEP, but I think that the district could probably look at fixing that big flaw in their system because the translation services are just not there.”

Even students who didn’t cheat and who were able to access the material reported not learning much from the class. Fitzhugh said, “It was mostly videos, quizzes, and some questions with the occasional written assignment, project, or presentation, so on paper, it’s pretty easy but it really drags on. The content is really dry and it’s presented like we’re grades below where we are, which is a weird contrast to the grade-appropriate content––they’ll be super nitpicky about some things, but then they’ll define words like ‘comprehend’ while we’re reading Ayn Rand.”

“It was an opportunity to read good, substantial texts like Freakonomics, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King Jr., and learn about important events in history, but some of the history particularly is just memorizing battles, which is soul-sucking. All in all, there wasn’t much offered besides the texts and facts themselves, which you can totally read and learn about by yourself,” she added.

The two students interviewed also said they felt like the online format wasn’t very conducive to learning. “I was able to learn more in my classes at M-A because they are teaching in-person and you can actually have a teacher there to explain everything,” Fuerte said.

“Even with some of my not-so-fun teachers, having people around you learning the same things makes it better so it could not compare to any of my in-person classes,” Fitzhugh said.

Some students are able to take courses for credit recovery in summer school, but, even during the summer, Snow said lots of kids take courses through Edgenuity. 

Academic counselor Silvia Torres-Garza said, “Since the pandemic, it has been difficult to get teachers for summer school. This means that we have fewer course offerings in summer school.”

She said students could also make up credits through a community college, but added, “In general, I present the Edgenuity or in-person summer school to students. Community college courses are a good option as well, but it requires the student to be independent and navigate the enrollment process for the community college.”

Edgenuity does help many students graduate on time. “It was my only option to graduate on time. If I hadn’t taken the classes through Edgenuity I would have had to take an extra year. I’m glad it was an option at all and that I didn’t have to take an extra year, even if it was excruciatingly boring––like, how do you even make MLK Jr. boring?” said Fitzhugh.

However, she also wishes the district offered better options. “I think in-person summer school with teachers teaching would have been great even if I had to drive somewhere else in the district, but I understand that takes a lot of resources,” Fitzhugh said.

Snow added, “The district should think about having other teachers who could help the students with Edgenuity if they don’t come up with a better solution. Students are taking classes in every single discipline and I’m a history teacher by trade, so I can help with history stuff, but I don’t know how to help with physics or lots of other subjects.” 

“The conversation sparks a lot of debate because you want to have equity and access, so having something seems like a good idea, but there are glitches with the system which have become very apparent to me this year,” Otsuka said.