I've long believed that standardized tests are a better measure of what people know than grades.
Many teachers...grading...for compliance - not for mastering course material
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Re: Many teachers...grading...for compliance - not for mastering course material
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my school, any grade in an "Honors" or "AP" class got a ten-point boost (equivalent to a full letter grade) for GPA calculations. My graduating class had at least three kids with GPAs over 100, which would be impossible to match without taking honors classes. An A in an honors class always beats an A in a non-honors class, so it's hard to beat a kid who takes more honors classes than you.
For us, a A in an Honors course got 5 grade points (rather than the 4 standard), so doing really well in Honors courses put you above someone who did really well in non-Honors courses. The amount of work required, however, for a B in an Honors course was far more than for an A in a non-Honors, so for anyone who wasn't going to be getting top grades, their GPA would suffer. Of course, they are the ones who were more s…
I think the honors kids at my school were mostly headed toward college, so they made their decisions based on what would impress admissions officers. It might be different now, because Texas now has a 10% rule that grants a scholarship to students who graduate in the top ten percent of their class. (For a couple of years you got automatic admission to the state school of your choice for graduating in the top ten percent, but that resulted in half of UT's admissions going to 10% students, many of whom were very poorly prepared, so they changed the rule.) There were probably a few kids in my class -- very hard-working and curious but not as bright -- whose GPAs were hurt by taking honors classes, and they probably fell out of the top 10% because of it. There's no way anyone could crack the top 1% or 2% without taking lots of honors classes, though.
It's possible our honors classes were less rigorous than yours, too. As I pointed out in a recent thread, AP classes at my school were noticeably more rigorous than honors classes, because our normal honors classes wouldn't have been sufficient preparation for an AP test.
Re: Many teachers...grading...for compliance - not for mastering course material
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
"In addition to an academic grade, the 950 students at the school will get a separate “life skills” grade for each class that reflects their work habits and other, more subjective, measures like attitude, effort and citizenship." page 2
This doesn't really address the problem; the "life skills" grade isn't standardized and will be meaningless for just about anything beyond the report card. Its value is as a signal to parents. So why not have a comments section? Is it too much to ask that a subjective assessment be spelled out in a written sentence or two?
Had an ex-gf who was a teacher and had to do just that - comments on every single student in addition to their grades. It was incredibly time consuming, but, I'm guessing incredibly useful for parents and students.
The problem is that, in our increasingly data driven world, comments are very hard to deal with on the large scale. I'm actually working on trying to define goodness around teaching interactions, and one of the big wildcards is how we structure feedback such that we get the depth of comments, and the processability of numbers. It's tough.
Re: Many teachers...grading...for compliance - not for mastering course material
#64The job of schooling isn't to teach skills and knowledge, it's to teach deference and compliance. I can prove this quite straightforwardly. Imagine how our system would treat a student who aced every test, completed every assignment perfectly, but who habitually truanted and generally refused to toe the line. If schools were simply a place of teaching and learning, such a student should face no problems, but in most…
I dunno. I took second semester Chemistry when I was a senior in college... I never showed up at class except to take the weekly quiz. The professor was not at all offended that I got the highest score in the class.
Re: Many teachers...grading...for compliance - not for mastering course material
#65I teach mathematics at a community college. Every year the administration sends to my department statistics on how many people pass our classes. We're told to come up with strategies to increase the passing rate. I haven't had a pay raise in over two years. My strategy for increasing the passing rate is to give points for things a well trained monkey could do. I give points for coming to my office. I give points for…
We're told to come up with strategies to increase the passing rate.
This may be a valid request, but it's impossible to know without more information. If we take your total pool of students we can probably break them down into 4 groups
1) Intelligent and motivated 2) Intelligent and unmotivated 3) Not intelligent and motivated 4) Not intelligent and not motivated
Nearly all students in 1) should be passing while nearly all students in 4) should be failing. It's the students in groups 2) and 3) where the teacher can really make a difference. This is where teaching styles, more/less work, etc... come into play.
If a large percentage of students from groups 2) and 3) are failing then there may be some teaching issues that need to be addressed. Group 4) simply needs to not be let in the class in the first place.
Re: Many teachers...grading...for compliance - not for mastering course material
#66I have failed a course in college because I forgot to do the homework. 100% on midterm, B on final, fail on the course. Whoops!
Which is just ridiculous.
Not necessarily. Do you think most programs for a programming classes are written during the exams? What if a student passed every programming exam with an A, but never wrote a complete program and turned it in during the class?
Re: Many teachers...grading...for compliance - not for mastering course material
#67One of my favorite memories from high school was from my AP physics class. One of the junior class valedictorians (there were at least 3 girls, all very liberal arts focused, tied for the position at the time) got a C on a test that accounted for a major portion of our grade. After class on the day we got our tests back, she approached the teacher and explained to him that she had never gotten a C before and was gene…
One of the junior class valedictorians (there were at least 3 girls, all very liberal arts focused
I wasn't aware that a student could even focus on liberal arts in HS. When I was in HS there was some class choice at the high end, but every student had to take some sort of math, english, and social studies every year.
Re: Many teachers...grading...for compliance - not for mastering course material
#68The job of schooling isn't to teach skills and knowledge, it's to teach deference and compliance. I can prove this quite straightforwardly. Imagine how our system would treat a student who aced every test, completed every assignment perfectly, but who habitually truanted and generally refused to toe the line. If schools were simply a place of teaching and learning, such a student should face no problems, but in most…
While I agree with this sentiment to an extent, I hate when people bring it up like this. There's a lot of good reasons for schools to have rigid rules other than the cynical idea that schools are purely there to teach kids to conform so that they'll make good, obedient workers.
For one, parents expect that schools are, at least to some extent, keeping their kids safe and out of trouble during school hours. It may not always work out that way, but when the rule is that they have to be in class, at least the school isn't endorsing them leaving, so there's a lot less liability.
Also, there's a lot of gray area that arises if you start making exceptions. How old is old enough for high achievers to skip school? Obviously, you're not going to let a first grader skip school, but when does it start becoming ok? And how high achieving do they have to be? If a kid has a B+ in one class, is he still allowed to skip school? And when do you tell a straight-A student whose grades start to slip that he has to start coming to class again? If he gets one B on one test, that's probably just a fluke, but where do you draw the line and tell him he's not doing well enough?
Plus the lower-achieving kids would complain of unfairness. And it's a lot harder to enforce rules against truancy when some people are allowed to leave. People would see kids leaving school, but might assume that they're just approved truants.
It also raises the incentive to cheat. A student could cheat on every assignment and test to keep up his A averages so that he can keep skipping school, and then he'd really be learning absolutely nothing. That's an extreme case, and he'd probably get caught eventually, but when you reward high marks on tests, people will go to great lengths to do better, but they might not be the lengths you want.
Re: Many teachers...grading...for compliance - not for mastering course material
#69I once again wish to suggest that teaching and grading are two separate jobs and should not be done by the same people. The conflict of interest should be obvious.
Please explain further.
I think that only makes sense if the output of the evaluation is the end state and not the learning of the student. Ideally teaching and evaluating (not grading) is baked into one action. A teacher works closely with a student, assists them in their studies, judges the amount they've learned (evaluates) and where they're struggling, and helps them with their weak points. Done. The standardized tests are then given (if they must), and the teacher is allowed to look over the results to judge from an external evaluation how well the student did and learn from it.
Is this different from what you're saying?
Re: Many teachers...grading...for compliance - not for mastering course material
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm surprised that they were taking AP physics. In Wisconsin, the valedictorian gets a full-ride to anywhere in the UW system. Due to this, many valedictorians I've seen take easy classes and graduate with a 4.1, whereas many of those with lower GPAs--due to difficult classes--end up going to better schools. One year the valedictorian went to UW-Whitewater, and the Salutatorian went to Yale.
In my school, any grade in an "Honors" or "AP" class got a ten-point boost (equivalent to a full letter grade) for GPA calculations. My graduating class had at least three kids with GPAs over 100, which would be impossible to match without taking honors classes. An A in an honors class always beats an A in a non-honors class, so it's hard to beat a kid who takes more honors classes than you.
That's all well and good, but the fact is "Honors" and "AP" classes are not well-defined as more difficult than the other classes.
Also, it still penalizes students taking larger course loads. I had a friend who was robbed of Valedictorian basically because their A in Choir was pulling down their GPA, while they was taking all of the same courses as the Valedictorian in addition to choir, and outperforming the Valedictorian.
So you need to somehow penalize students who take weaker course loads, possibly by multiplying GPA by number of graded credits.