Our Grading System is Broken
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Our Grading System is Broken
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Re: Our Grading System is Broken
#2These are interesting suggestions. There is much more about the arbitrariness of grading systems in a book I read in high school, Wad-Ja-Get? The Grading Game in American Education.
http://www.amazon.com/Wad-Ja-Get-Grading-Game-American-Educa...
That book makes the excellent point that EVERYTHING about grades is arbitrary. Having a uniform system of accumulating scores on class work to set a course grade, as the author of the submitted article suggests, leaves a lot of important improvements undone. How does any outside observer know whether, for example, Podunk High School or Elite Prep Academy has a chemistry class that really covers the fundamental principles of secondary-education-level chemistry? How does an outside observer know whether an English teacher grades mostly on the basis of thoughtful argumentation and carefully chosen content, or on neatness and spelling only?
Any reform of school grading will be hard put to eliminate the role of standardized testing for precisely this reason. Harvard's dean of admission recently commented on this:
"Q: You recently lead a high-profile commission that recommended de-emphasizing the SAT and ACT from admission requirements. A number of colleges have already made the tests optional. Do you see this ever happening at Harvard?
"A: We do not foresee a time that Harvard would be test optional. Only a few years ago we were receiving applications from about 5,000 high schools each year and now the number has grown to over 8,000. We need some common yardsticks that enable us to gauge in a rough way what is being learned in an ever-increasing and diverse high school context, not to mention the increasing number of students who are home-schooled.
"We continue to believe that the College Board's Subject Tests, along with either the SAT or ACT with the writing tests, allow students the best opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned thus far. Advanced placement and international baccalaureate results are also helpful."
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2009/02...
Re: Our Grading System is Broken
#3"Making the tenth of a percent from 89.4 to 89.5 worth immensely more than the 9.4 percent from 80 to 89.4 is idiotic."
I got an 89.4% in a CS class and asked the professor, whose office hours I frequented, if he could bump me up to an A since I was so close.
His response was: "If you truly understood the material and deserved an A, you would have earned an A by a large margin rather than missing it by a small one."
Re: Our Grading System is Broken
#4It seems to me that learning material over a long period of time is better than just "crashing" for exams, which this author's proposed system would encourage.
It is easy to imagine that a student will skip an assignment at one point, then stop doing homework altogether. The student will realize he should have done the homework toward the end when he realizes his grade, but by then it will be too late -- his homework average will be too low to make a difference.
Re: Our Grading System is Broken
#5It seems to me that learning material over a long period of time is better than just "crashing" for exams, which this author's proposed system would encourage. It is easy to imagine that a student will skip an assignment at one point, then stop doing homework altogether. The student will realize he should have done the homework toward the end when he realizes his grade, but by then it will be too late -- his homework…
His suggestion just saves the people who already know the material or who learn in other ways than homework from being penalized by having to do a ton of pointless busy work. If a person who thinks they can learn the material without doing the homework ends up trying to cram and then failing the test, that's his/her own problem. That person should just do the homework unless they're sure that they can learn the material without the homework.
Re: Our Grading System is Broken
#6"Making the tenth of a percent from 89.4 to 89.5 worth immensely more than the 9.4 percent from 80 to 89.4 is idiotic." I got an 89.4% in a CS class and asked the professor, whose office hours I frequented, if he could bump me up to an A since I was so close. His response was: "If you truly understood the material and deserved an A, you would have earned an A by a large margin rather than missing it by a small one."
And what of the person who correctly guessed, or perhaps had a program misgraded slightly in his favor and made the A?
I agree with the sentiment, which is why I liked some of my professors who graded in statistical clusters (of course, economic professors). They graded on a curve, so everyone's grade was bumped up by the process, never down - and the clusters of A's, B's and C's were usually obvious. If you were in between a cluster (an outlier case) most gave you the benefit of the doubt and bumped you up.
Of course, I may have liked it less if I wasn't always in (or above) the top cluster =P
Re: Our Grading System is Broken
#7Of course, the assumption here is that grades should represent how well a student knows the material, not how hard they worked in the class. I know a number of teachers I had used that philosophy, despite the clamoring of the kids at the top of the class.
Now that I'm not there anymore, I actually agree with them. Classes don't exist simply to teach course material - there is a lot of stuff you learn simply by doing all the work. Consider a lit course. The stated goal of the course might be reading and analysis of the course texts, but you also get better at writing simply because you did the "busywork".
The same holds for quantitative classes. There's only so much you can test in an hour, even if there are tests every week. Longer problem sets cater to a different skill set that tests, and they are both worth learning. A class that lets you skate by on pure test-taking ability misses a large chunk of the education.
Re: Our Grading System is Broken
#8There's no sense in prescribing a change to "our grading system" without even referring to the content of the class that's being graded, based on the assumption that all the work a teacher gives out to students can be classified as "homework", which is for the purpose of practice, and "test", which is for the purpose of comprehensively measuring one's performance.
For example: If the teacher assigns a 10-page research paper or critical essay, most people wouldn't classify the paper as a "test", so under this schema it must be "homework". But I don't see how the skills that one could demonstrate by writing such a paper could also be demonstrated in an exam.
Re: Our Grading System is Broken
#9Making homework optional across the board (e.g. you can get an A if you ace the exams) is silly. It makes sense for a few courses (e.g. freshman writing, calculus sequence, intro language) which exist to train a specific mastery that can be objectively tested in a short period of time. It doesn't make sense, though, to pass a CS major based on exams alone (as opposed to programs), an English major without papers, or a math major without take-home proof assignments. He could argue that such assignments are tests, but then the distinction between tests and homework becomes so blurry as to be useless.
Making the tenth of a percent from 89.4 to 89.5 worth immensely more than the 9.4 percent from 80 to 89.4 is idiotic.
I'd argue that the problem is inherent in the fact that different grading scales (0-100 vs. A-F) are appropriate for numerically-graded exams and subjective assignments like papers. Converting a 0-100 scale to A/B/C/D/F has the problem the OP mentioned. But when it comes to papers, most people can only judge 4-5 levels of quality before inconsistencies pop up. This is one reason why the "E" (high fail) level of the original A-F grading system almost immediately dropped away, and D is rarely used. A/B/C/(D)/F exist, in effect, to mirror those separable levels of quality.
In fact, I'd argue that innate this 4-level limitation is one of the reasons many colleges (esp. Ivies) have such grade inflation in qualitative courses: with plus/minus grades, the three discernible levels of respectable work are mapped to A, A-, and B+/B, the one of mediocrity to B-/C+/C, depending on the professor's proclivities, and the truly awful work to C-/D/F... whereas a solid B (85%) in an intro science or language course is still a respectable grade.
Re: Our Grading System is Broken
#10"Making the tenth of a percent from 89.4 to 89.5 worth immensely more than the 9.4 percent from 80 to 89.4 is idiotic." I got an 89.4% in a CS class and asked the professor, whose office hours I frequented, if he could bump me up to an A since I was so close. His response was: "If you truly understood the material and deserved an A, you would have earned an A by a large margin rather than missing it by a small one."
Then your teacher is admitting that my design only the few tenths of percents surrounding the letter grade cutoffs are worth anything. I suppose it's just a matter of opinion, but I find this system remarkably arbitrary.