Mass promotion: Reward for nonperformance and incompetence

The 2025 to 2026 academic year ends this March for all Philippine schools, and many, if not most, graduates of our public schools will be experiencing what may be once in a blue moon, a high-water mark event in their lives. But the relevant questions are: What are they graduating from, and what will they be graduating to?

Mass promotion has long been a well-guarded open secret of Philippine public schools—a deceitful and dastardly practice of automatically passing students to the next grade level, even when they have not provided credible proof of having learned anything.

DepEd Order No. 8, s. 2015 lays down the policy for the grading system in public schools, where a “transmutation table” artificially adjusts scores on report cards. This practice of grade inflation, regardless of actual learning aptitude or skills, puts the credibility, reliability, and integrity of the grading system in question. It fools students and their parents into thinking that they graduated when they cannot read beyond ABC or count above 1, 2, and 3. Many graduates cannot even write a single coherent paragraph nor understand what they might have expressed in writing. “Because DepEd provides incentives and punishments based on outcomes such as grade promotion, and fearing loss of performance-based bonuses and decreases in school regional rankings also contribute to encouraging the culture of mass promotion. Quality public education doesn’t yet really exist in this country and very few public schools stand out for their academic excellence.” (See “Mass promotion is not mass learning,” 6/1/23).

A bonus is a gift to reward performance. Mass promotion is a reward for nonperformance and incompetence. What is there to motivate a public school student to study and attend his classes when he knows that he will pass without exerting even an iota of effort? Mass promotion rewards nonperformance!

Graduation gives graduates a false sense of achievement even when they are not truly up to grade. Graduates of this malpractice leave their alma maters miseducated and maleducated, half-baked cakes that failed to rise to their full potential and possibility.

Do teachers not have a responsibility to see to it that their students learn something before being promoted to the next rung of the academic ladder? Is it not their duty to gradually fill the water in their students’ half-full glass? Shouldn’t teachers be teaching because it is their reason for being?

Mass promotion is a high crime against the most important human resource we have—our children. Deprived of a complete and proper education, these children of a lesser god are consigned to lives of unrelieved ignorance and poverty. This diabolical practice should be condemned for shortchanging those who are the last remaining hope of our motherland, now fast sinking into the West Philippine Sea, flushed down the drain by its own traitorous political leaders.

Promotion, just like respect, must be earned and must be deserved. Stop the practice of mass promotion forthwith!

Antonio Calipjo Go, [email protected]

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