School grades are hopelessly broken
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School grades are hopelessly broken
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Re: School grades are hopelessly broken
#2Great, I wouldn't hire you. I don't care how smart you are. Just on the basis of effort you're willing to put forward on tasks you deem unimportant to you means that I can't trust you to perform tasks that I deem important to me. I need someone willing to work through "bullshit" tasks just as much as I need someone to work on "gee-whiz-wow" tasks.
Re: School grades are hopelessly broken
#3So.. you did nothing in school to approach the paltry standards you were given in school.. but yet this is the secret to your success?
Really?
Re: School grades are hopelessly broken
#4Great, I wouldn't hire you. I don't care how smart you are. Just on the basis of effort you're willing to put forward on tasks you deem unimportant to you means that I can't trust you to perform tasks that I deem important to me. I need someone willing to work through "bullshit" tasks just as much as I need someone to work on "gee-whiz-wow" tasks.
This type is not the get-hired type. It's the do-things-different-and-change-the-world type.
Re: School grades are hopelessly broken
#5Great, I wouldn't hire you. I don't care how smart you are. Just on the basis of effort you're willing to put forward on tasks you deem unimportant to you means that I can't trust you to perform tasks that I deem important to me. I need someone willing to work through "bullshit" tasks just as much as I need someone to work on "gee-whiz-wow" tasks.
I agree. A guy who says "I just didn’t do my homework because I knew it was bullshit" just doesn't deserve any help.
Re: School grades are hopelessly broken
#6On the topic of grade inflation:
In 1966, 22% of Harvard undergraduate students earned A's. By 1996, that figure rose to 46%. That same year, 82% of Harvard seniors graduated with honors.
In 1973, 31% of all grades at Princeton were A's. By 1997 that rose to 43%. In 1997, only 12% of all grades given at Princeton were below the B range.
(source: Source: American Academy of Arts & Sciences)
One of the best things about MIT is that they have not succumbed to the this trend. There is no such thing as "honors"— An MIT degree is an honor by itself. That attitude is a fundamental basis of the student culture.
Re: School grades are hopelessly broken
#7 Grades don’t reflect your aptitude, intelligence, or
understanding of the subject matter.
However this type of complaint requires some suggestion of a viable alternative.
Re: School grades are hopelessly broken
#8Between my junior and senior years of high school, I did a paid internship along with a few dozen other high schoolers working on CanDo, a module for SchoolTool (an OSS school management platform built on Zope). It was all paid for by a combination of state funds, local school district money, and $10,000 from Mark Shuttleworth.
CanDo is grading software that tracks competency instead of percentages. Each student has a rating on various skills that the class is supposed to teach, something like "Familiar with basics." The top level is being able to teach the skill to others.
Though that project is now stagnating, there's still a mandate to explore that type of grading software from the state of Virginia.
(Incidentally, paying high schoolers to work on something practical is a great way to get them to learn.)
Re: School grades are hopelessly broken
#9Great, I wouldn't hire you. I don't care how smart you are. Just on the basis of effort you're willing to put forward on tasks you deem unimportant to you means that I can't trust you to perform tasks that I deem important to me. I need someone willing to work through "bullshit" tasks just as much as I need someone to work on "gee-whiz-wow" tasks.
Secondary education isn't really comparable to working in a capitalist society. It's more like the old Soviet system, where the expectations were arbitrary and meaningless, and the rewards meaningless and worthless--and everyone of sufficient intelligence knew it, even the bureaucrats. Especially the bureaucrats. The same is true of the typical high school, where either you know how stupid everything is or you're drinking the Kool-aid.
Fortunately I went to a school where there were enough good classes and teachers to make up for it, but apparently this guy didn't.
Anyway, at my job at a big important corporation, busy work and meaningless stuff happens--but it's not common, and the higher ups usually think they have a good reason for it. They're not just going through the motions of "assign work, evaluate performance". And if they are, you are free to--and should--find a job elsewhere.
Re: School grades are hopelessly broken
#10Great, I wouldn't hire you. I don't care how smart you are. Just on the basis of effort you're willing to put forward on tasks you deem unimportant to you means that I can't trust you to perform tasks that I deem important to me. I need someone willing to work through "bullshit" tasks just as much as I need someone to work on "gee-whiz-wow" tasks.
As an employer if you are handing out bullshit tasks then no one competent would want to to work for you.
If the tasks actually aren't bullshit, it is up to you to convey the importance of the task to your employees. Same goes with teachers and assignments.