Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Our Grading System is Broken

tshaddox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 38 posts

Re: Our Grading System is Broken

#21

Post by jibiki »

decode wrote: post #17

I was a full-time student for about 20 years, all said. I was never assigned a homework assignment that did not benefit me in some way. Whether by teaching me something new, honing a skill, or reinforcing and deepening knowledge I already had, each homework assignment I did was helpful. It seems like the author wants to cut out all of this beneficial work just because he can do well on tests. I don't think that's a g…

Your null hypothesis (or whatever it's called) is very pessimistic. Even if you benefited from those assignments, you might have benefited more from doing something else instead. Shouldn't it be your choice, as long as you can demonstrate command of the material?

Re: Our Grading System is Broken

#22

Post by katz »

sgupta wrote: post #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."

Higher percentages should count a lot more than lower percentages. It is more difficult to go from 94-98 than it is to go from 54 to 58.

Re: Our Grading System is Broken

#23

Post by baddox »

sgupta wrote: post #19
baddox wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even if the grading system is arbitrary, it's usually fully transparent and disclosed ahead of time. I knew that the cutoff for an A was 90%, and I also knew that the grade would be calculated based on my projects and exams. I knew the exact weight of each project and exam too, all within the first few days of class. I knew what was expected of me in this situation and didn't deliver, so it was my fault for not getti…

For college, which is voluntary, full disclosure would excuse the practice, although I still think it's foolish. However, in high school, which isn't voluntary, and where grades can affect your ability to get into college, it's worse.

I think the point isn't whether or not it's ethical (full disclosure in college would make it so), but whether it's a smart way to do things. I claim it isn't.

Re: Our Grading System is Broken

#24

Post by antiform »

time_management wrote: post #20
baddox wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your statement about only being able to judge 4 or 5 quality levels. This of course only applies to subjective work, not to things like math, grammar, etc. Subjective classes like Composition usually don't feature such an emphasis on daily or otherwise regular homework assignments, therefore the large assignments would be the tests. But I would also argue that 4-5 levels of quality is too much, because i…

But I would also argue that 4-5 levels of quality is too much, because is the grader comparing papers to other papers, or to some ideal paper that exists in his mind? I think, in general, the grades A, B, and C map to the following standards of acceptable work: A: That of a student intending graduate study in the field. B: That at a major. C: That of an ordinary student, e.g. a non-major. Hence, C is failure in gradu…

Some schools already do something like this. For instance, I know that Brown does not have pluses or minuses, and they only have grades of A, B, C, and NC (no credit). Furthermore, the NC grades do not appear on official transcripts. On top of that, you can take almost any course Pass/No-Credit with an option of a written evaluation instead of a grade.

Re: Our Grading System is Broken

#25

Post by sethg »

baddox wrote: post #13
sethg wrote: post #8

There'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 researc…

Actually, I would consider the large research projects to be the tests of that course. Besides, the English/lit/composition courses I've taken don't really give small daily or regularly assigned "homework" assignments anyway, so this plan wouldn't really apply to those.

What if the teacher feels that ten homework assignments can cover more breadth than two or three tests, and therefore can give a more accurate picture of the student's abilities? Would you also redefine those homework assignments as "tests"?

Re: Our Grading System is Broken

#26

Post by theotherjimmy »

jibiki wrote: post #21
decode wrote: post #17

I was a full-time student for about 20 years, all said. I was never assigned a homework assignment that did not benefit me in some way. Whether by teaching me something new, honing a skill, or reinforcing and deepening knowledge I already had, each homework assignment I did was helpful. It seems like the author wants to cut out all of this beneficial work just because he can do well on tests. I don't think that's a g…

Your null hypothesis (or whatever it's called) is very pessimistic. Even if you benefited from those assignments, you might have benefited more from doing something else instead. Shouldn't it be your choice, as long as you can demonstrate command of the material?

In that case it would be a pre-testing strategy, not a post-testing strategy. If you have these pre-tests, you can then put more people in the right classes anyway, which would allow them to use their time well. you could then do something else which benifits you more, like a higher level, or faster class.

Re: Our Grading System is Broken

#27

Post by sethg »

baddox wrote: post #23
sgupta wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the grading system is arbitrary, it's usually fully transparent and disclosed ahead of time. I knew that the cutoff for an A was 90%, and I also knew that the grade would be calculated based on my projects and exams. I knew the exact weight of each project and exam too, all within the first few days of class. I knew what was expected of me in this situation and didn't deliver, so it was my fault for not getti…

For college, which is voluntary, full disclosure would excuse the practice, although I still think it's foolish. However, in high school, which isn't voluntary, and where grades can affect your ability to get into college, it's worse. I think the point isn't whether or not it's ethical (full disclosure in college would make it so), but whether it's a smart way to do things. I claim it isn't.

Well colleges use a combination of factors--grades, class rank, standardized-test scores, extracurricular activities, football talent--to decide who they are going to admit, and the practical difference between a first-tier and second-tier college degree is much less than most people are willing to admit. So one flukey B is not going to doom you for life.

Re: Our Grading System is Broken

#29

Post by decode »

jibiki wrote: post #21
decode wrote: post #17

I was a full-time student for about 20 years, all said. I was never assigned a homework assignment that did not benefit me in some way. Whether by teaching me something new, honing a skill, or reinforcing and deepening knowledge I already had, each homework assignment I did was helpful. It seems like the author wants to cut out all of this beneficial work just because he can do well on tests. I don't think that's a g…

Your null hypothesis (or whatever it's called) is very pessimistic. Even if you benefited from those assignments, you might have benefited more from doing something else instead. Shouldn't it be your choice, as long as you can demonstrate command of the material?

My assumption is that the teacher should optimize the class on the amount of the course material the students learn, and how well they retain that knowledge. As far as I can tell, the goal of all of the teachers I know is to get the students to learn the material the best they can, so they structure the class around that ideal. I fully understand that some students just want the credit, or to just get by with whatever they deem to be sufficient knowledge, but I don't think it would be generally beneficial to structure the class to give them incentives to do so.

Re: Our Grading System is Broken

#30

Post by gommm »

I strongly believe that having a grading system where a number of people need to have A for the grading system to be considered fair is harmful. In the university I went to in France, exams are made so that the gaussian curve of results in centered around 60% (12/20 in the french way of counting) with grades under 40% considered to be failing grades. Once you start having this kind of grading system, it forces the examinator to make the test hard and for that the best way is to have long tests (around 3-4 hours) where you have to apply the knowledge you gained on small projects (example a compilation exam where you have to work on a simplified subset of a natural language). Added to this, there was a healthy distrust of multiple choice questions and teachers who asked too much of them were considered by everyone as being lazy.

Contrast this with tests I took in the US at RIT where the questions were "When was the OpenGL committee founded?" (for a computer graphics class) or other such useless questions.

Homework was also different between both universities... In France, the graded homework were mostly medium to large size projects that took quite a few weeks to complete. In the Us, there was a much a higher number of busy work with small simple to do exercise that didn't really make student learn a lot (although I did have a few interesting homework projects so not everything was bad)...

Post reply on HN