South Carolina's Act No. 204, signed by Governor Henry McMaster on May 18, 2026, took effect July 1, 2026. The law adds Section 59-29-250 to the state code, prohibiting any public school district or school from adopting a grading system that requires a teacher to assign a minimum grade or score above a student's actual performance on required assignments. The law is the first statutory ban on no-zero grading policies in the nation, according to an analysis by The Conversation.
Districts that violate the ban face a penalty of 10 percent of their State Aid to Classroom funding. The fiscal impact statement for the bill estimates that the amount withheld would range from roughly $237,000 for smaller districts to $41,466,000 for larger ones, based on the 2025-2026 fiscal year.
Patchwork of policies before the ban
A 2025 report from the Palmetto Promise Institute, a conservative think tank that advocated for the ban, identified six South Carolina school districts with posted minimum-grade policies. Those districts include Richland One, Greenville County, Oconee County, Dillon Four, Dorchester Two, and McCormick County, each with a 50 percent floor applied to various grading periods or grade levels. A subsequent survey of school administrators by the South Carolina School Board Association found 12 additional districts with grade-floor practices at the high school level, including Darlington, Dorchester 4, Lee, Lexington, Marlboro, Newberry, Orangeburg, Saluda, Spartanburg 2, Spartanburg 7, Union, and York 4. Some individual schools, such as Spring Hill High School in Lexington-Richland 5, also had floor policies, with a floor of 25 percent there and 50 percent in several middle schools.
The Palmetto Promise Institute report noted that practices varied widely. Some districts applied floors only to quarterly report cards, others to individual assignments, and some enforced floors informally without a board policy. In Kershaw County, for example, no grades below 50 percent appeared on report cards even though no official policy existed.
Local and national context
The Sumter County School District voted to remove its 50 percent grading floor in 2024 after a teacher survey found 82 percent opposed it. An effort to reinstate the floor failed on a 4-4 board vote in April 2025, providing a local precedent that informed the statewide legislation, according to the Post and Courier.
No other state has enacted a statutory ban on minimum-grading policies, making South Carolina the first. The practice of setting a minimum grade, often 50 percent, grew from the equitable grading movement that surged in the mid-2010s, and individual districts and schools in multiple states have adopted it, but no state legislature had prohibited it before South Carolina, The Conversation reported.
What the evidence says
The research base on grade floors is contested. The Palmetto Promise Institute, which advocates for the ban, assessed that the evidence supporting the use of grade floors is weak. The institute argued that floors give half credit for uncompleted work, skew district-level data, and fail to teach students the value of timely submission. That assessment comes from an advocacy organization, not a peer-reviewed study.
Districts that adopted grade floors, including Greenville County in 2016, argued that a single zero can mathematically destroy a student's average and that the 0-100 scale is imprecise. They cited the equitable grading research to support the idea that higher minimum scores help maintain student motivation and make it possible to recover a grade after a poor performance, according to the Post and Courier. An EdWeek analysis noted that proponents of floors say they help students stay motivated, while opponents say they allow students to pass classes while skipping assignments. The article did not cite a peer-reviewed study resolving the disagreement.
Task force and future changes
The law directs the State Board of Education to establish a task force before the 2026-2027 school year. The task force will include three superintendents, three principals, three teachers, three representatives of public school boards, and three high school students. It must report recommended revisions to the state's Uniform Grading Policy to the board before June 1, 2027. The task force is charged with evaluating term weighting, methods for awarding quality points based on numeric final course averages, and the use of a 100-point grading scale. The State Board must adopt updates, and districts must implement them by no later than the 2028-2029 school year.
The law also imposes conditions on credit recovery and content recovery, requiring that students have submitted all required assignments in a timely manner before they can use those programs. Additionally, districts may not require inclusion of formative or district-selected benchmark assessment results in final grade calculations, though end-of-course assessments are exempted.