RALEIGH, N.C. -- The academic alphabet has been abandoned at Carroll Magnet Middle School.

• The school will no longer grade students on a scale of A to F
• The school is moving to a "competency based model", which is more subjective than letter grades and focuses on how each student progresses in the classroom
• Carroll's new grades are progressing, meeting, and exceeding competency

The school will no longer grade students on a scale of A to F, and a vote from the Wake County School Board made the change official on Tuesday.

"It's a challenge," said Carroll assistant principal James Aldridge. "We're now going to have to work against decades of old grading practices."

The school is moving to a "competency based model" in the upcoming school year. The new method is more subjective than letter grades and focuses on how each student progresses in the classroom.

"It brings the teaching and learning closer together," said Aldridge. "It gets rid of this artifice of grading that we're used to and gets us to a point where we're looking at what individual students are learning."

Wake County School Board chair Monika Johnson Hostler says she is a fan of the competency based model. She says she hopes it will allow more students to learn for the love of it instead of memorizing facts for a letter grade.

"That's the cornerstone of the work that we do," said Johnson Hostler. "Unfortunately with testing and the pressures we have placed on students, we've really taken that away."

Instead of A through F, Carroll's new grades are progressing, meeting, and exceeding competency.