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Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

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Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#321

Post by WalterBright »

toast0 wrote: post #219
WalterBright wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The value of homework has little to do with learning. I learned the hard way that skipping the homework means bombing the test. You don't learn problem solving skills by listening to a lecture or watching TV. It's easy to imagine you've learned it, till you're confronted by the test.

Depends on the class and the student. I remember my highschool chem teacher harping on the class after every test "I'd like to tell you all that if you don't do the homework, you won't pass the test, but toast0 didn't do the homework and did the best on the test so do the work" (or something like that). To be fair, I'd look at the homework, I just didn't feel like writing it down and turning it in, most of the time,…

There were a (very small) handful of students at Caltech who would do well on the tests without doing the homework (or even attending lectures). Hal Finney (yes, that guy!) was one of them.

I certainly was not.

> for kids like me, we'll succeed im school as long as there aren't active roadblocks from staff

I did get some roadblocks from some the staff. I did well in spite of the staff's efforts :-) My biology teacher disliked me (for good reason, I was a jerk), and told me he was going to be very hard on my grades. If an assignment was subjective, he'd give me a bad grade. If it was objective, he was forced to give me As. Fortunately for me, nearly all the assignments and tests were simple checkboxes.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#322

Post by btheshoe »

lmm wrote: post #28
btheshoe wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I fucked up in middle/high school, it wasn't because I was lazy. It was because I had no idea how to deal with stress/anxiety/deadlines. I had teachers who luckily were empathetic and I grew up eventually. I was lucky - I have fantastic parents in a loving, stable marriage and my mental health on the whole was not extraordinarily bad. Many kids are not that lucky. In my experience, the kids (my peers) who were d…

Dealing with stress/anxiety/deadlines is a vital life skill. At some point people have to face failures and consequences (even if the failure was "not their fault"!) and learn to handle them; if they don't do it in school they'll be doing it for the first time in college, or in the workplace, or with governmental requirements.

It comes with age.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#323

Post by tzs »

WalterBright wrote: post #317
tzs wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A slight variation of that balloon question (it asked what happens to the balloon when the car starts moving) was on a Ph 1 homework at Caltech in 1977. I don't know if I'd call it a trick question, but there were large contingents supporting both "it moves toward the back" and "it moves toward the front", and a few going with "it stays where it is". Back in those days there was an annual organized bus trip to Disney…

> annual organized bus trip to Disneyland for Caltech students Huh, I was in Page House in 1977, and never heard of that. I do recall the whole House trooping off to see the premier of Star Wars :-)

Star Wars came out the summer before I got to Caltech. I don't remember how many years ahead of me you were--were you still there when The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980? Someone on Caltech's board was also high up at the studio and arranged for two free showings at Caltech a week before release. One showing was for undergraduates, and one was for faculty and board members. I think there were only a few undergraduates who did not sign up their tickets to that.

Now that I think about it I'm not sure if the ASCIT Disneyland trips were actually annually. I know that ASCIT did one in my frosh year, which was 1977-78, and I'm sure they did one in my junior year because I took advantage of a lot of people being away on that trip to try magic mushrooms. I didn't want to have to deal with a lot of people while tripping.

That didn't quite go as expected. As I wandered around campus enjoying the hallucinogenic effects of the psilocybin, I kept running into Chinese people I did not recognize, many of whom were speaking Chinese.

Walter of course knows this, but for the rest of you Caltech is small enough (under 1000 undergrads) that one should be able to recognize most of the other students on sight. Also, the percentage of Asian students at Caltech was a lot lower back then, so I could tell most of these people weren't Caltech students just by the shear number of them.

I was starting to freak out a little bit because I'd read up on the effects of psilocybin before trying it and highly realistic full sensory interactive hallucinations of Chinese people was way outside the bounds of anything I expected, so I thought something might be going really wrong like the 'shrooms I bought were laced with something else.

It turned out that I was in fact seeing real Chinese undergraduates--but not from Caltech. I was not the only one who decided to take advantage of the campus being a little less crowded that night. The Chinese Students Association had decided to throw a party and invite all the Chinese students from all the other schools in the Los Angeles area including UCLA and USC.

They (ASCIT, not CSA!) were still at least occasionally doing this at least up to the mid '80s. There's an article in an '84 issue of the Tech [1] that mentioned Disneyland trips as one of the things that wouldn't be happening if not for ASCIT.

[1] https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/1221/1/1984_11_02_86_...

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#324

Post by dorchadas »

brightball wrote: post #320
dorchadas wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, it only expands the choice to those who are borderline on that group already. It doesn't magically make the choice be available to everyone. For instance, say you're a single parent household and you have to rely on buses. You don't really have 'choice' even within a voucher system. All it does it allow those who can transport their kids to take them elsewhere, making the school that's left behind worse…

The system would be different, but it can be done. Most people hear vouchers and they think "the other large public school across town or the existing private school". The real goal is many more small schools. Enabling "educational entrepreneurship" so somebody who has an idea that thinks will work really well for certain types of kids can start a school teaching exactly that way...and parents can sign up if they thi…

> The real goal is many more small schools.

That's not what will happen, though. What'll happen is you'll get big players owning most the schools, all teaching the same way and same stuff (and if there's no oversight, they can also teach anything, even creationism). Capitalism won't allow this to happen.

> Even with larger schools and bus routes, the solution is to create hubs where you can get off one one bus and hop on the one that goes to your school.

This sounds awful, and absolutely won't work for rural areas. I worked at a school where we already had kids on the bus for two hours each way. They had to wake up before 5 sometimes to prep for school. Imagine expanding this so kids can get to their hub and then to another school. That sounds awful.

Really, the only ones who benefit from this system, still, are those who's parents are already borderline being able to send them to private schools or move. It doesn't help the lower socioeconomic groups at all, and, again, will make things worse for them.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#325

Post by mlyle »

WalterBright wrote: post #318
mlyle wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your example is a curious one, because obviously we want the student to know 10 * 10 by rote. Indeed, arithmetic is one area where (almost) everyone favors rote. To be more general: if you're giving an 8th-9th grade kinematics test, there's two or three families of easy inclined plane problems, and hopefully your students have seen a few of all types. They shouldn't know the answer is "3.5 m/s", but they shou…

> obviously we want the student to know 10 * 10 by rote Let's clear that up, make it: 1289 * 689 > they should be able to select a procedure they've used before and employ it. And if they've already seen the question they know which procedure to use, and you're no longer testing "should be able to select".

> Let's clear that up, make it: 1289 * 689

And if my goal is to figure out if a student has mastery of standard multiplication algorithms, I can take that 1289 * 689 question and flip the digits around have have an equivalent question -- 1688 * 986 will serve just fine. The algorithms aren't secret, and multiplication being on the test shouldn't be a secret.

> And if they've already seen the question they know which procedure to use, and you're no longer testing "should be able to select".

If you teach 8th grade physics, you pretty quickly build a library of all the standard inclined plane problems. If you need to give someone a make-up or repeat test, you grab some from tests that you've given in past years that have not been problematic, and switch a number or two.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#326

Post by bedobi »

DeathArrow wrote: post #230
bedobi wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you and people like you say it superficially true ("just grade on objective performance!") ...but also completely disingenuous. Student X is an only child, has educated and well paid parents who instill work ethic and have the means, time and ability to commit to helping X get the best grades, including hiring tutors for things they can't or don't have time to teach. X lives in a safe, affluent area and associat…

Life is competition. Life isn't fair. No one will hire you because you are a good person or you endured hardships. They will hire you if they think you are capable to get the job done. Would you rather undergo surgery by a doctor who learned his craft well or by a someone who has a kind soul and has endured hardships in his childhood?

Life is unfair and realistically we may never be able to fix that. But we can stop doing this that are making it blatantly more unfair than it has to be.

Analogies with surgeons are nonsensical. With surgeons and surgeries we're talking about people who consensually opt in to a field where there's very good reason to have extreme filters in place to screen out anyone who isn't the best of the best.

But we're not talking about surgeons entrusted with peoples lives on a daily basis, ffs, we're talking about school children who are subjected to (whether they want to be in it or not) an unjust "grading" system that only highlights and perpetuates their "underperformance"...

It also raises the question, how many kids who would otherwise have made excellent surgeons never get a chance because they're filtered out from an early age?

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#327

Post by bedobi »

cbozeman wrote: post #239
dls2016 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is full if the “homework doers” who scored well and got nice professional jobs. Hence the downvotes.

Yeah, because in life you have to put in the work. Using math as an example, you can't master it without a lot of practice, and that practice is homework. Albert Einstein wrote that he was practicing mathematics often and at length from an early age.

> because in life you have to put in the work

what about the kids who, instead of doing the homework, have to do actual minimum wage work and house chores and help raise their siblings? They probably put in a lot more work than you, but it doesn't show in their grades.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#328

Post by bedobi »

mrjangles wrote: post #263
bedobi wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you and people like you say it superficially true ("just grade on objective performance!") ...but also completely disingenuous. Student X is an only child, has educated and well paid parents who instill work ethic and have the means, time and ability to commit to helping X get the best grades, including hiring tutors for things they can't or don't have time to teach. X lives in a safe, affluent area and associat…

The purpose of school is train children to function in the real world. I don't understand how you can see a child from a disadvantaged background and say "let's help them by teaching them less"? If you wanted to help kids from a disadvantaged background, probably the best way would be to make it harder for them to get good grades. Make them work twice as hard as the other kids for the same grade, that will really mak…

> I don't understand how you can see a child from a disadvantaged background and say "let's help them by teaching them less"?

No one is saying "let's teach them less".

> If you wanted to help kids from a disadvantaged background, probably the best way would be to make it harder for them to get good grades

Oh wow I see now there's no point even trying to reply

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#329

Post by angelzen »

mlyle wrote: post #305
angelzen wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Research increasingly implies..." Which research?

There's a mountain of research. I'll cite the classic pro-homework paper by Cooper which synthesizes a whole bunch of moderate to low quality studies. https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Does-Homewor... , because I think it shows how lacking the optimistic case is and lets you get to a whole lot of the rest of the research both ways. A small (effectively zero) positive correlation was found between the am…

"Research increasingly implies that homework is probably harmful in elementary; of dubious value in early middle school"

You are citing research that apparently is stating the obvious, namely that good students are faster at completing homework than poor students. Not sure how that supports the statement that homework is harmful for either group.

Skimming the lit review you linked, homework appears to have a moderate positive effect on the immediate measures of achievement, e.g. grades. Though the effects of lifelong habit of completing one's homework are more interesting than short term grade improvements, and a quick skim of the 60 page lit review you quoted doesn't seem to attempt to quantify this effect.

Food for thought: attempts to scientize every aspect of life, even if the measures used are obviously limited and shortsighted, is perhaps not a good way to steer an entire society forward.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#330

Post by endominus »

danaris wrote: post #292
endominus wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Public schools work. You can’t deny that. Per the GP, in their area "the high school math and reading proficiency rate are 8% and 44% respectively, while the graduation rate is >95%". That sounds like an absolute denial that public schools are working, unless your definition of a working school includes ones that don't teach the majority to read and comprehend mathematics at an adult level. Spending on schools is h…

Some public schools that we have right now aren't working well (ie, the implementation is a problem, not the idea), because we have, for decades, been siphoning money away from them to fund private schools, refusing to provide funding for necessary materials (textbooks, classroom supplies, building maintenance, desks & chairs that don't break when you sit in them), underpaying and under-hiring teachers so that many p…

>we have, for decades, been siphoning money away from them to fund private schools

The link I provided shows a 375% increase in funding to public schools between 1970-2010, adjusted for inflation. Spending rose from $2.9 billion for ~46 million students (per https://nces.ed.gov/pubs98/98018/#chap2a) to $73.3 billion for ~50 million students - per-student spending actually rose, even after adjusting for inflation. Where are you getting the idea that money is being siphoned away from public schools to fund private schools?

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