Student asks teacher to give his bonus test points to classmate with lowest score

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published 19 March 2020

This was a request that Winston Lee had never heard before in his 12 years of teaching.

Lee is a history teacher at Letcher County Central High School in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Last month, scrawled on the bottom of a test about World War II, was a note from one of his top students asking, "If you could, can you give my bonus points to whoever scores the lowest?"

  The student had earned five bonus points by participating in an exam review. He received a 94 percent on the test, and instead of bumping him up to an A+, Lee gave those points to a classmate who needed them to pass. Not all students are "great test takers or in a comfortable situation at home that allows them to focus on studying," Lee told Good Morning America. "I feel really great that it helped this student from 58 points to passing."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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