middle school grades do count. They don’t count towards high school/ college credits, but they count in other ways. Our friends at Attendance Works share why middle schoolers should care about their grades.
Students’ middle school grades are a crucial point of intervention. Students show considerable growth and declines in grades between fifth and eighth grade, and these changes can have strong implications for high school grades.
Students need very high grades in middle school to be on course to earn high grades in high school. In fact, only those students who leave eighth grade with GPAs of at least 3.0 have even a moderate chance of earning a 3.0 GPA in high school, the threshold for being considered college-bound. A 3.5 middle school GPA was found to give students about a 50 percent chance of college success. But grades can and do improve in middle school—with real payoffs. For example, a one point difference in GPAs in eighth grade corresponds to a 20 percentage point difference in the likelihood of passing ninth-grade math.