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 after the current school year, regardless of when or whether they didn't learn the necessary materials or they are often absent, 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. This is based on the requirements on how to enroll for Kindergarten normally at 4 or 5 years old (5 or 6 years old for 1st graders) at the beginning of the school year so a student can graduate from the high school level at either 17 or 18 years old and before the student's 19th birthday.

Advocates of social promotion argue that promotion is done in order not to 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 in primary education, because comprehensive secondary education 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.

In some countries, the grade retention is allowed when students, they didn't learn the necessary material or they are often absent.

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.

Supporters of social promotion policies do not defend social promotion so much as say that retention is even worse. They argue that retention is not a cost-effective response to poor performance when compared to cheaper or more effective interventions, such as additional tutoring and summer school. They point to a wide range of research findings that show no advantage to, or even harm from, retention, and the tendency for gains from retention to wash out.

...
Wikipedia