[HN Gopher] I no longer grade my students' work, and I wish I ha...
___________________________________________________________________
I no longer grade my students' work, and I wish I had stopped
sooner
Author : CapitalistCartr
Score : 157 points
Date : 2022-03-29 13:57 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theconversation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com)
| Dayshine wrote:
| Does anybody have any background on why US Universities seem to
| universally focus on continuous summative assessment rather than
| formative assessment followed by summative assessment at the
| conclusion of a course?
|
| Surely the knowledge a student can demonstrate at the end of the
| course is what they should be measured on?
|
| The only justification I can think of is some patronising attempt
| to force attendance.
|
| Here in the UK there are courses I went to because I wanted to
| learn about the subject but chose not to answer questions on in
| the exam because I couldn't quite get a solid grip on. And there
| are courses I didn't intend to master that I ended up realising I
| was more suited to so revised/studied to a high standard for the
| exam.
|
| Why should I be forced to learn in a very specific way if I can
| reach the same level of knowledge in my preferred learning style?
| asdff wrote:
| Having some sort of regular feedback keeps students focused on
| whats happening in class and gives feedback to the educator if
| they need to do a better job explaining something in the next
| lecture. A lot of students have a bad time pacing out their
| studies or keeping up with lectures on their own, as if they
| have nothing in the near term to study for they just won't
| bother to spend time on that class over others with more
| pressing deadlines. Then when its deadline time and shit is
| hitting the fan, then they will flood the inboxes and office
| hours asking things that could have been clarified weeks ago
| when the topics were covered in class.
|
| Having assignments broken out in regular intervals is pedantic,
| but there's often not really a better way to get these sorts of
| students engaged without a threat to their GPA basically.
| kqr wrote:
| I have taken classes that combine both. Work during the course
| count as points on the final exam and/or let you skip parts of
| the final exam.
|
| I think it's because different people have different learning
| styles.
| pavon wrote:
| In the schools I've attended it was mostly because they didn't
| want to weigh final exams too heavily (due to test anxiety),
| and putting too much weight on a final project doesn't scale
| well when every class you are taking does so - too much crunch
| time. Over the past few decades most have moved to allowing you
| to drop your N lowest homework scores which helps a lot with
| students entering the course with varying preparedness levels.
| sjg007 wrote:
| If everything is contingent on a final exam you find a lot of
| folks fail. You need the continuous feedback. That doesn't mean
| you have to grade assignments, but rather provide that
| feedback..
| bsder wrote:
| > Does anybody have any background on why US Universities seem
| to universally focus on continuous summative assessment rather
| than formative assessment followed by summative assessment at
| the conclusion of a course?
|
| Because a single summative assessment is worse?
|
| Honestly, a single 3 hour exam is a horrible way to assess your
| mastery of practially any material.
|
| There are few "good" ways to assess large classes of students
| for mastery. Small classess of students have a lot more
| flexibility. However, you can also get the problem that if the
| professor simply doesn't like you, you have no recourse--
| hopefully that class wasn't a requirement for your major.
|
| I have been on both sides of this argument (lecturer and
| student). I had a Computer Arithmetic and an Analog Filters
| classes that were _ferocious_ about grading--you had to be 100%
| correct or you got zero. That is _really_ rough--if you blew an
| exam you dropped.
|
| When lecturing in CS, I tended to be a little different--exams
| got a lot of partial credit, homework got some partial credit,
| but the 5 or 6 projects were 100% or nothing. Of course, the
| difference there was that I had automated testing running and
| you could resubmit your project as often as you wanted over
| about 2 weeks.
|
| This was probably the best compromise I've come up with. It
| drives the students without pounding them, and it limits the
| destruction if you're just kind of "off" on a day when there is
| an exam.
| schimmy_changa wrote:
| I've experienced both styles (studied abroad from the US to the
| UK) and the final exam counting as everything in the course
| tended to encourage cramming and a lack of learning during the
| rest of the course.
|
| Learning happens well when you are able to revisit and review
| content over time (see Anki repetition patterns). Most people
| need some structure to help them with this! Some people do not,
| and for those people they will be annoyed but will still learn
| the material over time! So this is sort of a lowest-common-
| denominator situation I think.
| gadders wrote:
| >>Second, I was concerned with equity. For almost 10 years I have
| been studying inclusive pedagogy, which focuses on ensuring that
| all students have the resources they need to learn. My studies
| confirmed my sense that sometimes what I was really grading was a
| student's background. Students with educational privilege came
| into my classroom already prepared to write A or B papers, while
| others often had not had the instruction that would enable them
| to do so. The 14 weeks they spent in my class could not make up
| for the years of educational privilege their peers had enjoyed.
|
| I guess if you're just doing English as a supplemental course or
| something. It seems a bit daft if you're doing an actual English
| degree.
| marcusverus wrote:
| There is a trend in which policies and actions are more and
| more being optimized to maximize the _apparent empathy_ of the
| policy or action. There seems to be more concern with having
| good intentions than with achieving good outcomes.
|
| This is great for the policy-maker. After all, the goal of
| _appearing empathetic_ is easily achieved and requires little
| effort. Just shoot off your blog post (season well with
| progressive buzz-words), stop grading papers and accept
| incoming congratulations at your convenience.
|
| Achieving good outcomes, on the other hand, requires actually
| _doing something_. It requires an understanding of a real,
| measurable problem. It requires careful planning, execution,
| observation of outcomes, and iterative improvement. It requires
| risk--risk of looking silly, risk of failure, risk of wasted
| time.
|
| Nobody writes articles about teachers whose methods erase the
| performance gap between the privileged and underprivileged. Why
| do the hard, thankless work of actually solve the problems? Why
| not be an empathy zombie?
| jgwil2 wrote:
| Very cool concept, but doesn't the institution still require you
| to evaluate students in the end?
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| I gathered from the article that basically the state of the
| work at the end of the semester (or whatever) is what will be
| graded, so students can submit work, get feedback, revise, etc.
|
| I think I like that. The notion that education is purely
| transactional - put kids through school, pay X dollars, get
| educated kids - is not how things really work.
|
| With this method, no one can say the kid didn't have a chance
| to turn in his/her best work possible.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Won't students end up with the same grade for significantly
| different levels of understanding?
|
| Wouldn't that affect their future coursework? How would a
| 'behind' student be incentivized to catch up?
| jgwil2 wrote:
| I understand that, but the reason that you get grades on
| assignments throughout the semester is so that you can get an
| understanding of where your level is and how you should
| expect to be evaluated at the end. If you get a bunch of
| subjective feedback throughout the semester, but no grades,
| then you seemingly have no idea what to expect when you
| receive your final grade.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I homeschool my children, and I don't grade their work. Instead,
| I use the errors they make to guide my teaching; what they can't
| do successfully obviously needs more of my attention and theirs.
|
| What's interesting is the difference that makes in what feels
| like an accomplishment to them. Whereas I would be proud, in the
| public schools, to have the highest test score, my kids are
| proudest when they manage to excel _after_ failing. If they excel
| the first time around, their response is, "Well, okay, but that
| section was easy."
|
| I think that's a more beneficial attitude to carry into their
| futures.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| I think this would be the best way to teach, but it doesn't
| seem practical with the class sizes in most school. I
| frequently had 40 people in my classes and I know other schools
| in my district had similar class sizes.
| 30367286 wrote:
| You are you are absolutely right that this will be a more
| beneficial attitude to carry into their futures because it is
| exactly what has allowed me to succeed, but only after
| unlearning some terrible internalized anxiety about failure
| caused by being told I was smart.
|
| Please keep it up. I hope I run into your kids in the workplace
| and they are running circles around me with their productivity
| and goal setting.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| aaomidi wrote:
| The entire point of school was for me to experiment and learn and
| make mistakes. But when am I supposed to do that when literally
| everything and anything is graded?
|
| Human brains don't go at "oh but look at the weight of this one
| lab" they go "fuck I got a C, I'm pathetic and shouldn't be
| here".
|
| At most the grading should be "attempted something" vs "did
| literally nothing". And even that is useless imo.
|
| But yeah I didn't feel like I'm studying to learn and get better
| in school. I felt like I have a limited amount of time and I'm
| gonna have to just do what I can do increase my grades.
|
| I hate higher education. This is just one of the reasons.
| bob2222 wrote:
| redleader55 wrote:
| Grades are not about equality. Grades are a model of what life
| will be.
|
| At your job you will be graded based on how well you are able to
| do the work that is required from you. When you apply for a loan
| you will be graded and receive a higher or lower interest rate
| based on how much of a risk you represent. It's imperfect, it's
| unequal, it discriminates. If you follow the rules you get better
| outcomes.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| >you will be graded based on how well you are able to do the
| work that is required from you
|
| I can assure you, very few jobs actually promote people this
| way.
| 1shooner wrote:
| If a student is evaluated on individual growth relative to their
| potential rather than an (imperfect) objective scale of mastery
| of a topic, this requires the teacher to have a comprehensive
| understanding of the student's potential. This seems like a wide-
| open opportunity to subject the student to the biases of the
| evaluator.
|
| In the US public university system, students (and their parents)
| are increasingly taking the mentality of a customer that is owed
| a grade. Throwing out objective evaluation knocks out the one
| remaining leg instructors have to stand on against this
| entitlement, and defend against accusations of bias.
| uberman wrote:
| This 1000%.
|
| Not only would this effectively turn the class into a 100%
| final, there is also no chain of evidence to support a grade at
| all.
|
| We already see parents of university students coming to defend
| their children's grades. It is already hard enough for
| professors at private schools to defend incremental assignment
| grades from the melding of helicopter parents with high placed
| friends.
|
| This would make it impossible.
| kqr wrote:
| Grades are some of the dumbest things in modern education.
| Besides the reasons listed in TFA, they suffer from several other
| problems:
|
| - They are generally highly subjective and really measure how
| well the student manages to say what the teacher wants to hear.
|
| - The above leads to a further problem: they discourage critical
| thinking, by rewarding students that don't even attempt to step
| out of line.
|
| - On the subject of stepping out of line, how does one learn,
| again? Oh, right, by trying difficult things and failing at them.
| Grades discourage this.
|
| - Grades further emphasise a strict hierarchy of authority that
| is an outdated way to organise thinking. (Some schools are
| improving this by allowing students to grade teachers, but I'm
| not sure adding more bureaucracy is worth it.)
|
| - External motivation (bonuses, grades, gold stars, ranking) etc.
| generally leads to short bursts of effort but are surprisingly
| bad motivators for continual effort.
|
| - External motivators like grades often lead to competitive
| behaviour as well, rather than collaborative. We need less
| competition and more collaboration in society and particularly in
| the workplace. (Though this is bordering on another criticism of
| how education is set up: why in the hell would it be considered
| cheating to collaborate?!)
|
| - All of the above was great when we needed to "educate" non-
| thinking factory workers for whom showing up and obeying is the
| number one priority. We know better by now, and our schools ought
| to reflect that.
| kqr wrote:
| And, perhaps most critically,
|
| Grades are generally just statistical noise. Yes, there are
| some three-sigma outliers who are consistently better or worse
| than the group, and these deserve special attention -- but
| productive attention, not just letter grades!
|
| For the vast majority of students, there is little to no signal
| in the grades. The grades people get are generally better
| attributed to the abilities of the teacher than the students.
|
| As Deming would say, grades (like "employee of the month" type
| things) are a pure lottery disguised as merit, which is an
| awful thing to subject humans to.
|
| ----
|
| If I were a teacher, I would do what Deming did: give everyone
| a passing grade on sight.
|
| Then I would randomly sample assignments to see what the
| general quality of them is. If someone is performing
| significantly worse or better than the group, that requires a
| root cause analysis to see what's up.
|
| If the entire group is performing worse than desired, that's
| not the student's faults, but mine. So then I'd root cause
| myself.
|
| ----
|
| My children are not yet of school age, but I sincerely hope I
| can strike a deal with their teachers about grades when it's
| time for that. I feel awful thinking about the fact that I
| might have to subject them to grading. Not because they are
| special snowflakes, but because it kills the human spirit.
| Traster wrote:
| The thing that really spins my head about this, is that since you
| never get concrete feedback on whether you're meeting the goals
| you need to meet, this system forces you into over-committing to
| the course. You can _always_ go back and revise that essay one
| more time, and you _need_ that A in the course for your GPA etc.
| Students have a limited amount of time to dedicate to their work,
| and giving them clear feedback when they 've met that target
| means they can focus the rest of their time on other things -
| whether that's other classes or simply having more social time so
| they can be well rounded humans.
|
| If you look at the 3 reasons the author did this - 1, the
| students don't pay attention to the feedback, that is easily
| solved, you hand them the feedback and hold back the grade for 1
| week. - 2, they don't like grading students based on their
| incoming skills? That's easy to solve, you weight their grades by
| time in the course. Hell, you can grade their first 3 peices of
| work and not use them at all in the final grade. - 3, You don't
| like grading. Well that's fine, but the cost of doing this is
| that you're taking away the single most important indicator that
| the student is meeting expectations in your class.
|
| Some students will cruise through, seeing the feedback comments,
| assuming it's good enough, only to come to the end of your course
| with a lower grade than expected. Their first concrete indication
| that they're not on track is when it's too late. Some students
| will submit work and then continually revise it, continually
| under the threat that they won't get that perfect grade they need
| for the next step in their career seriously impacting all the
| other things that are expected of them.
| etataetaet wrote:
| > this system forces you into over-committing to the course.
|
| This is a good point! This is why I always say getting a 4.0
| doesn't mean you understand the material more than the person
| with a 3.8 but means you put more _time_ into the class.
| Getting 4.0 's is less about understanding the material and
| more about jumping through the teachers hoops and doing
| everything you can to get every small bit of credit. I've spent
| ~2 hours to get a few extra points on one small assignment just
| because you _cannot_ miss a single thing if you want a 4.0. Did
| that extra 2 hours give me a great understanding of the
| material proportional to the time spent? No, not at all!
| kqr wrote:
| Let's look at how this works in real life. How do you know you
| have, e.g., implemented a feature in a way that helps the
| business?
|
| Is your product manager saying, "I give this implementation a
| C" the point where you go, "whew, I met the goals I needed to
| meet!" and then you move on to the next feature?
|
| Does that sound like a helpful, healthy interaction?
|
| Does it teach you anything about your users?
|
| When I work on a feature, I collaborate with other developers,
| product people, and occasionally customers to try to figure out
| what problems they need solved, and where my work can
| efficiently fit into that. It's a dynamic, nuanced discussion
| with no clear right or wrong answer.
|
| That's what we need to teach our children.
|
| The obsession in school with getting the "right" answer stymies
| critical thinking, exploration, and, well, learning -- which
| can only happen when you get things wrong and figure out why on
| your own.
| Traster wrote:
| That is absolutely how performance management works in every
| large corporation. You set "SMART" goals, and then you
| periodically review how you're progressing to those goals.
|
| You have a point that in life sometimes, particularly in
| creative tasks, goals are unclear. But goals aren't unclear
| in a college class that hundreds of students take per year.
| In fact the goals generally should be listed on a website
| before you even apply for the course.
| skeptikal wrote:
| " The thing that really spins my head about this, is that since
| you never get concrete feedback on whether you're meeting the
| goals you need to meet, this system forces you into over-
| committing to the course."
|
| I think this is a problem in educaion in the N. America. What
| are these "goals" that your are potentially "overcommitting"
| to?
|
| Nothing you produce in undergrad is of any value except to
| advance your knowledge. The grade isn't the teacher's payment
| for good work, its an assessment of how well you've mastered
| the topic.
|
| Seen this way, you know how well you've mastered a subject even
| if you get nothing back.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > Nothing you produce in undergrad is of any value except to
| advance your knowledge.
|
| Tell that to the job recruiters that require a 3.6 minimum
| GPA and verbally berate someone for wasting their time for
| handing them a resume with a 3.5 GPA on it.
|
| Okay most recruiters won't verbally berate you[1], but GPA is
| regularly used to winnow resumes for college graduates.
|
| 1: The one time I witnessed this was at a college job fair.
| To this day it was the most unprofessional public behavior I
| have witnessed by a recruiter; he had 3 coworkers next to him
| at the booth and they seemed neither perturbed nor surprised.
| As long as I have the luxury of choosing who I work for I
| will not work for that company.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| skeptikal wrote:
| Well thats the decay, aint it?
|
| GPA is a great predictor of ones ability to work hard,
| finish the stated goals, etc. Basically its great at
| predicting a good busy bee.
|
| But I think its perhaps poor at predicting orthogonal
| people; people that will create things that weren't
| envisioned by those who built the thought tracks.
|
| Some thoughts:
|
| 1. A company that treats you with disdain for a 3.5 is not
| a company to work for. 2. GPA inflation is real. In a
| healthy education system no company could hope to attract
| only >3.5 GPA hires.
| jmbwell wrote:
| > never get concrete feedback on whether you're meeting the
| goals you need to meet
|
| ... but you do get concrete feedback. What more concrete,
| detailed, specific feedback could there be than comments on
| what's good and where you need to improve in your work?
|
| Meet all the goals you need to meet, and the teacher's comments
| will reflect that. Fall short of the goals, and the comments
| will show you where and how to improve.
|
| See also the passages in the post about students who are there
| to get the grade more than to learn the material. One approach
| is about meeting someone else's goals, while the other is
| perhaps more about meeting your own goals for yourself.
| pavon wrote:
| Feedback about what you can improve doesn't necessarily
| provide you any feedback about how well you are meeting
| expectations. This is especially true of writing and other
| work that doesn't have a right or wrong answer. There are
| always ways to improve, there are always other aspects to
| consider. As a teacher, the author likely delights in finding
| students that are gifted, and finding ways to develop them
| even further, so she will always have some feedback to
| provide.
|
| Also, there is nothing wrong with a student simply wanting to
| learn material well enough to get a decent grade. All
| students have to take classes that go beyond their interests
| or even needs; it should be their choice as to which classes
| they want to be merely competent at and which they want to
| master.
| Traster wrote:
| How are you supposed to know whether a comment is "this is a
| standard good for a B, improve for an A" or it's a "this is
| good enough for a C, improve for a B".
|
| Grades don't prevent students who are there to learn the
| material, but they do harm students there to get the grade,
| and since the corses we are talking about are prerequisites
| to graduate it's reasonable to expert at least some people to
| be there for the grade.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I don't know if I'm agreeing or disagreeing with you, but I
| once got a paper back graded 56/100. The _only_ written
| comment on it was "Good job! Almost an A paper"
|
| I guess assigning or not assigning a grade doesn't matter
| if the teacher can't provide constructive feedback.
| Traster wrote:
| It matters in that the 56 is what's going on your
| transcript and the feedback isn't.
| matt321 wrote:
| An interesting question arises from my reading of the article.
| Should geniuses be better off socially or economically because
| they are geniuses? If the answer is no, then the only solution is
| to handicap them. If the answer is yes, then don't do anything
| and that's how it will play out.
| visarga wrote:
| People need motivation, if there is no advantage from achieving
| more, why bother?
|
| Look at the general apathy in the old communist block, where
| rewards are based on who you know, not what you accomplished.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| I've had courses that allow your grade on the final to replace
| your overall grade, if it ends up being higher.
|
| This sounds like a fair compromise to me, if you know the
| material by the end of the course, then you've earned a good
| grade, regardless of how long it took you to get there.
|
| At least in my experience, if the teacher wasn't grading at all
| the students would quickly pick up on it. It's easier to write a
| C paper than an A paper, and we would definitely have taken
| advantage of this. This was in a STEM major though where the
| majority of us are just looking to get the piece of paper that we
| can exchange for a 100k+ a year job, and not really looking to
| learn.
| a_shovel wrote:
| > _For example, students who come into a course with little prior
| knowledge earn lower grades at the start, which means they get a
| lower final average, even if they ultimately master the
| material._
|
| I'm not sure this is the _worst_ flaw with grading (the equity
| issues may be worse), but it 's certainly the _dumbest_ flaw. A
| scoring system for scholastic ability that disadvantages those
| that _start off_ with little knowledge, even when they do well by
| the end of the course, is ridiculous on its face.
| choeger wrote:
| But how do you measure progress, then? If you are already on
| the backfoot, don't you want some kind of concrete measurement
| of how you improve?
|
| Admitted, this would require to use grades slightly differently
| (not as aggregation towards an end result) and it would require
| the teachers to repeat tests multiple times. But shouldn't that
| be how learning is organized?
| jimbokun wrote:
| She said she gave lots of detailed feedback on all the
| assignments, and opportunities for revision.
| etataetaet wrote:
| I think most people can measure progress _without_ grades!
| For me at least, getting a 90% on a test is usually the same
| as a 100%. That 10% difference is almost always just silly
| math errors or simple misunderstanding and not a fundamental
| issue.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| I'm going to do the obligatory thing & cite the Dunning-
| Kruger Effect here :)
|
| Also, from personal experience as someone who's taught
| computer programming (US college 1st & 2nd year courses -
| listed as "computer science" but really mostly computer
| programming): I've seen a _lot_ of people tell me some
| variation on "My program won't compile, I'm totally stuck,
| but those are just (implied minor) details - I really do
| understand what's going on!". Bonus points for when their
| code indicates that they've missed huge concepts at both
| the language level ("What do you mean I can't do arrayName
| = arrayName + 1 in Java?") and/or algorithmic level ("The
| variable defined by the outer loop of the bubble sort was
| never used so clearly that loop was useless so I removed
| it").
|
| Ok, I'll stop ranting :)
|
| My point being that you may be able to measure your own
| progress but not everyone is.
|
| Plus, certification / credentializing is one of the
| services that education provides to the the rest of
| society.
| etataetaet wrote:
| Yeah I see what you're saying! However, for me
| specifically, I know the mistakes were not fundamental (
| Just gotta trust me on this one xD ).
|
| The other comment pointed out that if you fully
| understand the material its a lot easier to judge your
| own understanding. Now that someone said that it seems
| really obvious, but It wasn't something I ever thought
| about!
|
| Thanks for the insight
| choeger wrote:
| I don't think that most people can do that. In fact, I
| think only the ones that already understand a topic can
| realistically give an estimate of the percentage of their
| understanding. Someone who "got" 25% or 45% of some
| material will usually not see their progress.
| etataetaet wrote:
| Fair enough! If you don't understand the material it
| makes sense you wouldn't be able to properly judge how
| well you're doing.
|
| Thanks for the thoughtful response
| solarmist wrote:
| I think something like a moving average would be much better.
|
| Historical data without too much emphasis on the past.
|
| Then you can also adjust the way you grade.
| afiori wrote:
| Grades are averaged mostly because it is an obvious operation
| that sort of make sense, but the core issue to me is that
| what a grade _is_, how it is computed, and how it is then
| used are all nebulous concepts beyond "higher is better" _.
|
| _ unless you are in Germany
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Shouldn't the course be designed in a way where everything on
| the exam has been taught in the class?
|
| People with prior knowledge will still have an upper-hand in
| everything (even beyond school), so I'm not sure that it's even
| a solvable problem.
|
| I guess perhaps one could give a baseline exam on day 1 to
| qualify prior knowledge and give a handicap to people if
| they're coming in blind? Though if I knew that purpose I'd game
| the system, so it probably still isn't fair.
| mrosett wrote:
| The unwritten policy in many math departments is that if you
| get an A on the final you get an A in the class.
| Spivak wrote:
| It's explicitly written in basically all of my math classes.
| Your grade was always the better of your final or your
| coursework.
|
| I get the perverse incentive of fucking off and taking the
| final but nobody actually does that, shits hard yo. The game
| is actually trying to get your grade high enough that if you
| bomb the final you're still good.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| > A scoring system for scholastic ability that disadvantages
| those that start off with little knowledge, even when they do
| well by the end of the course, is ridiculous on its face.
|
| This is one reason I did poorly in school and eventually
| dropped out. Teachers chose (either independently or by
| arrangement) to weigh all grades equally, whether they were at
| the start of the class or the end. So if you did poorly at the
| start, you might as well give up, you'll never dig yourself out
| of that hole.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Recently someone on here suggested something like taking either
| the grade on the final test, or the weighted average grade of
| the coursework, whichever is higher.
|
| That seems like it would work to me.
| jkubicek wrote:
| Freshmen year of college, I was part of an experimental program
| that solved this exact problem.
|
| At the beginning of the semester we were given a large binder
| filled with competencies we were expected to master. Every
| question on every test was labeled with a competency that the
| question assessed. Once you demonstrated knowledge of the
| competency you no longer needed to demonstrate it again. You
| marked it as complete in your binder, attached the graded test
| as evidence, and turned it in to your advisor.
|
| Advanced students could go into the final, answer only the
| questions that tested competencies they hadn't previously
| mastered, then turn in their final after just a few minutes of
| work. Students who struggled early in the semester could rally
| through the last few tests, ace all the questions, and
| demonstrate enough of the required competencies to end the
| semester with a decent grade.
|
| It was an intensely _weird_ way to be graded and required a
| massive amount of overhead and bookkeeping from both students
| and faculty. I'm not sure it was a good idea, but I did do much
| better that year than any of the later years. My freshmen 4.0
| sustained my total GPA through some much more difficult times.
| noasaservice wrote:
| That actually sounds like the Diablo 2 skill tree. And that
| sounds awesome.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| If the university did it for all subjects, it would look
| like Path of Exile's skill graph [1]. In the game, when you
| graduate to high-level game play, you get a "whole-nuther"
| graph like the first to start populating.
|
| [1] https://poeskilltree.com/?v=3.17.0#AAAABAMAAA==
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| It's worth pointing out that the 'vision' for formal education
| is that you show up, the teacher teaches you what you need to
| know, and then the grades are supposed to assess how well you
| learned the material that the teacher taught you.
|
| I'm not claiming that it always works this way; a long-term
| transformative process isn't going to be as simple as "show up
| -> get taught -> git gud". There are substantial and structural
| issues with how formal education works - for example, it's well
| known amongst people who study education in the US that the
| single biggest predictor of your grades is the socio-economic
| level of your parents.
|
| But please let's not forget the "teaching" part of education :)
| zajio1am wrote:
| I do not know about US university customs, but on a university
| (in Europe) which i attend the only purpose of intermediate
| grades for a course (if they are used) was to assess whether a
| student is allowed to go for the final exam of the course, and
| then only the the grade from the final exam counted.
| pkaye wrote:
| In my experience at US universities, our course grades were
| determined by 2-3 midterm exams and a final exam. A common
| weighting scheme was 3 x 20% for the midterms and 40% for the
| final exams. Sometimes they had 10% weight for homework,
| labs, projects. There were some courses where there was a
| final exam but the rest as projects, papers and
| presentations.
| NWoodsman wrote:
| I failed Physics 101 in my first semester of college because in
| the first week the professor was covering everything to know
| about vectors, velocity, acceleration, etc. I never heard the
| word "vector" before, much less understood what a velocity
| vector is. Was I to blame for not knowing that? I certainly
| suffered the consequences, but it seemed like a failure on
| behalf of the teaching staff and curriculum.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| To be fair, a huge difference between school and uni is that
| at the university you're not just supposed to be taught, but
| you're also expected to spend some significant effort on
| researching the topics or catching up on basics by yourself.
| The ECTS system even lists an approximate amount of hours
| students are expected to spent entirely on their own for each
| course.
| gruez wrote:
| Presumably they thought it was already covered in high school
| physics/math?
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Yes. All college courses, even "100" (intro/freshman)
| level, have some expectations about what the students
| already know. Students who don't have that background
| should take remedial courses or go to junior college or
| just be prepared to do a lot more outside work on their
| own.
|
| It should not be a university's job to "fix" unprepared
| students, whether due to the student's prior indifference
| to his education, or because that eduction was provided
| poorly.
| larkost wrote:
| Did you raise your hand after a couple of mentions and ask
| what a velocity vector was? Or go see the professor either
| right after class, or at their next office hours? Or talk to
| a TA about this?
|
| Those all seem like appropriate solutions to the problem,
| whereas your response here, blaming the teaching staff and
| curriculum, seems to indicate you did not do what you should
| have.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Kinda off-topic, but as someone with social anxiety and
| (strongly suspected, but not confirmed yet) ADHD I'm a bit
| jealous of people for whom raising a hand to ask a question
| during a lecture or using professor's office hours is just
| a simple decision away (provided they care enough to
| actually do that). For me it's mostly like these options
| didn't exist at all even if I actually wanted to use them,
| for several reasons. I wonder what could be done there to
| better accommodate neurodiversive students.
| Aachen wrote:
| How so? If someone already knows the material or has a very
| solid framework to fit the extra knowledge into and needs zero
| catching up, of course they'll know the material better at the
| end of the course and/or will be able to apply it better. How
| should that not translate into a better grade? The only
| alternative I see is to let those less-prior-experienced
| students take a longer time and only then determine the final
| grade.
| etchalon wrote:
| Or you could grade for mastery of material, instead of the
| individual steps taken to get there.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| That presumes people learn at equal rates. People don't learn
| at equal rates though.
| octokatt wrote:
| Because the grading system _encourages_ students who already
| know the material, and _discourages_ students who don't know
| the material.
|
| If someone is discouraged from a subject, they are less
| likely to put in the effort to succeed in the subject. This
| creates a self-perpetuating cycle, which ideally education
| would fix.
|
| Similarly, this sets students up for a false idea of their
| "good subjects", when instead those are familiar subjects. A
| student who could be a polymath gets discouraged from
| pursuing multiple subjects because they're already far ahead
| of the game in math, so they pigeon-hole themselves to the
| subject where they receive positive reinforcement.
|
| Essentially, grades as a feedback system are less than ideal,
| and we can do better.
| Aachen wrote:
| > Similarly, this sets students up for a false idea of
| their "good subjects", when instead those are familiar
| subjects. A student who could be a polymath gets
| discouraged from pursuing multiple subjects
|
| I had never considered it that way, interesting
| perspective. Not yet sure how this will work in the grander
| scheme, I'm thinking of the impact on the value of a
| diploma when it's based on learning ability or broader
| knowledge as compared to being specialized in one thing.
| Something I'll be thinking about in the future.
| beej71 wrote:
| Let's push it to the extreme. Let's say there are 100
| students in a class, and one of them is an absolute ace due
| to knowing the material or having a very solid framework.
| Should the other 99 people in the class get relatively bad
| scores at the end of the term? Is that a working system?
|
| The underlying problem here is that people of different skill
| levels are being graded on the same criteria. They're in the
| same class.
|
| Classes should be far more granular and far shorter (e.g. two
| weeks) so that people of the same skill level can be so-
| grouped.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Consider thinking of early exams and assignments as
| requirements for participation and good faith effort. Doing
| poorly on them would result in a PIP(performance improvement
| plan) but poor performance in early tasks shouldn't doom you.
|
| I recall some classes in Uni that would have, say, three
| major exams. And if you had adequate participation and grades
| in smaller assignments, the score of the lowest exam would be
| replaced with the 2nd lowest, in order to smooth out a
| negative deviation. I think it achieves what is being
| discussed here: Either you did really well through the course
| but had a bad final, or you didn't grasp the material early
| on but ended up getting it in the end.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| That _is_ an equity issue. Those students who are disadvantaged
| at the start are often disadvantaged in several ways. And it
| perpetuates itself: those lower scores will be used to hold the
| same students back or otherwise decelerate learning, leaving
| them once again starting off disadvantaged the next term. It
| also shapes their perception of their ability to advance, and
| importantly it shapes that perception for their educators and
| their parents /guardians.
| specialp wrote:
| I had such a situation when I first entered college. I came
| from a disadvantaged background, and was not a good writer. My
| freshman composition class was taught by a woman who had us
| write synopses of what I thought of at the time as boring,
| long-winded New Yorker articles. She ruthlessly hammered me on
| grammatical errors. I ended up withdrawing from the course.
|
| Then next semester I had a the same class but a different
| professor. He was much different. He had us write about our
| life experiences and things that interested us. You would get
| the grammatical corrections as feedback but you would not get
| blasted for them. Over that one semester I used the literary
| handbook I was given, and got a lot better at it. It really
| helped me. In my future liberal arts classes I had to take, I
| got good grades on my papers and they were well received.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| I was required to take an art course in college, and I chose
| an intro level graphic design class. I'm terrible at all
| things art other than photography, but I thought graphic
| design made sense being a CS major an all.
|
| My experience was terrible. There was no real artistic
| instruction. For instance, during our first or second week we
| were told how to use the pen tool in Illustrator and or
| homework was to make a logo for a made up company. I, having
| absolutely no art background, did a bad job. She actually
| projected my work in front of the class and had me stand up
| in front to be ridiculed. I decided to drop the class.
|
| When I brought her the form to sign all she said was "thank
| you," which I very much took to mean "thank you for dropping
| out of my class."
|
| Heaven forbid you actually need to do your job, professor.
| sitkack wrote:
| I am sorry for your experience. Most college level art
| classes have a pretty strict entrance requirement where
| portfolios are judged pretty harshly from incoming high
| school students. Incoming students are basically already
| required to be good. This instructor was not prepared for
| you and treated you poorly. Another instructor might have
| handled it much better.
| navbaker wrote:
| There should also be some sort of option for "art for
| non-majors" since they indicated that an art class was
| required. That's usually the way colleges handle these
| type of required electives.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I fulfilled my requirements with Art History. No drawing
| required.
| GloriousKoji wrote:
| Back when I was in college it was only the math and
| science classes that offered dubbed down dumb versions to
| fill the general education requirements.
| [deleted]
| Romanulus wrote:
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| How does it disadvantage people that start from scratch though?
| Tests should be written in a way that everyone can pass them,
| with the knowledge thought in the course.
|
| If people that already have some related knowledge have an
| easier time studying, that's just life. How does it _unfairly_
| disadvantage you, if somebody else is already more skilled than
| you?
| asoneth wrote:
| The argument is that giving weight to the grades earned
| throughout the course may under-value students who made
| significant improvements. For example, take two students:
|
| Student A comes in barely meeting the prerequisites and
| struggles with low grades on initial tests and projects. They
| come to office hours, put in substantial effort, and
| eventually ace the final projects and tests.
|
| Student B comes in with substantial background experience and
| gets decent but not stellar grades on all tests and projects.
|
| Depending on how much weight is given to the final
| tests/projects student B may still end up with a higher grade
| despite the fact that they probably do not have as strong an
| understanding of the material as student A.
|
| I've had both kinds of students the handful of times I taught
| graduate-level seminars and it's one reason I weighted the
| final projects more heavily than initial projects. (Though I
| found grades on initial projects were still useful for other
| reasons.)
| enragedcacti wrote:
| Imagine a course as teaching the content along a linear
| function from 0 to N understanding. With traditional grading
| we are effectively determining the area under the line for
| the given class, even though the goal of the class is to
| leave with a mastery of the content.
|
| Consider two students, one whose education path in the course
| is exponential and the other whose path is logarithmic where
| both paths intersect at the end of the course. According to
| traditional grading the logarithmic student would score far
| better in the course despite their knowledge being equal to
| the other student by the end.
|
| Which student would you rather be? who has more potential?
|
| Should the body of a course be treated like a series of 100m
| sprints or a marathon, and what is the net positive outcome
| through each approach?
| matt321 wrote:
| >How does it disadvantage people that start from scratch
| though?
|
| In the same way that not being a genius is a disadvantage.
| Cant change it unless we handicap the smart people.
| jdkee wrote:
| " In the year 2081, the 211th, 212th, and 213th amendments
| to the Constitution dictate that all Americans are fully
| equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or
| more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper
| General's agents enforce the equality laws, forcing
| citizens to wear "handicaps": masks for those who are too
| beautiful, loud radios that disrupt thoughts inside the
| ears of intelligent people, and heavy weights for the
| strong or athletic."
|
| See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I think his point is that if Student A started with 50%
| knowledge and Student B started with 80% knowledge and by the
| end they both have 95% knowledge, Student A's grade for the
| course is penalized for the slow start even AFTER reaching
| mastery by the end.
|
| If Student A ends up only at 80% then so be it, but if they
| end up matched then they should end up with a similar grade.
| conradludgate wrote:
| > earn lower grades at the start, which means they get a
| lower final average
|
| They get graded from the very beginning, not from a single
| final exam
| mckeed wrote:
| They are talking about assignments, not tests. It applies
| more to skill-based courses than knowledge-based ones. If
| you're writing C papers at the beginning and A papers at the
| end, should you get an A or B?
| yboris wrote:
| In my math department many professors said that as long as we
| can do well on the final, that will be the heaviest-weighted of
| our grades.
|
| It seems sensible, at least at the college level, to have 90%
| of the grade depend on the (cumulative!) final.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| I guess the one big gotcha is that if you're having a bad day
| - you're sick or couldn't sleep the night before - that could
| really affect you negatively.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| I think this is one of the reasons why a lot of students
| prefer assessment models that reward 'effort over time' -
| taking 5 tests over 15 weeks helps reduce the downside of
| doing badly on a single exam/homework/etc. (Which is not to
| say that all students prefer this approach, but for those
| that do prefer it this is a common reason)
|
| Of course, this then leads us back to the problem of
| assessing people early on in the term before they've had a
| chance to build up some momentum in their knowledge &
| learning.
|
| But yeah - there's this sea-saw balancing act between a
| small number of higher-stakes assessment vs. spreading the
| assessment out & assessing earlier as well as later when
| designing assessments in formal education.
| sodality2 wrote:
| When I took my AP World History final, it was over five
| separate days, with no material overlapping (so you
| wouldn't get a benefit from seeing previous material). He
| told me grades more accurately reflected both perceived
| effort, and the grades from the last semester. (This was
| his internal final, not the AP test)
| lostcolony wrote:
| While we're in the land of hypotheticals, it also seems
| sensible to plan for a makeup test for people who can't
| make the main one, and not make it require a signed
| affidavit from a senator, a doctor, and a notable charity
| to take that one.
| bglazer wrote:
| It's also extremely anxiety inducing (for some people)
| Clubber wrote:
| > For example, students who come into a course with little
| prior knowledge earn lower grades at the start, which means
| they get a lower final average, even if they ultimately master
| the material.
|
| One of my strategies in college was to really study on the
| first exam. The logic being is it's just introductory material
| and therefore the easiest exam to make an A on. Subsequent
| exams tended to get into the nitty gritty and require a lot
| more information to be understood / retained. This held true on
| any course. In my experience, this negates the quoted point
| that people who had little prior knowledge would do poorly
| early on. Granted I went to college a long time ago. Things may
| have changed.
| lostcolony wrote:
| > One of my strategies in college was to really study on the
| first exam
|
| Why did you really have to study if it was so easy? Right,
| because you didn't know it. For others who came in knowing
| it, they didn't have to 'really study'. And this still holds
| true for every successive test.
|
| I feel like that kinda negates your negation.
|
| To speak of specifics, I took calc 1 twice. First time was
| due to inconsistencies in the teacher's grading, but
| whatever; the second time I took it, I was very familiar with
| the concepts, and made an easy A. Others struggled. It's fair
| to say I should have gotten the A at the end because I knew
| the material, and it's fair to say the people who got an A on
| every test (those 'easy' first ones you mention being
| included) should receive an A, but was it fair to say others,
| who by the end had the same understanding I and the other A
| students did, should have gotten a B even if they aced a
| cumulative final, because they struggled with the concepts
| initially and did less well on the earlier tests?
| Clubber wrote:
| > > For example, students who come into a course with
| little prior knowledge earn lower grades at the start,
| which means they get a lower final average, even if they
| ultimately master the material.
|
| >For others who came in knowing it, they didn't have to
| 'really study'. And this still holds true for every
| successive test.
|
| Ya I see your point. The first test was the easiest and the
| most likely to get an A assuming I didn't know it. Of
| course if you study for the first test and get an A because
| it's the easiest and someone who already knows the material
| doesn't study and gets an A, then one isn't lower than the
| other.
|
| In other words, this gap only seems to apply if both groups
| (familiar and unfamiliar) don't study much or at all on the
| first test.
| blodkorv wrote:
| How far should we strech this? there are students who come into
| courses with superior memory or iq and get a head start from
| that.
| jrgoff wrote:
| Not sure what your getting at here? The person you are
| commenting on wasn't talking about punishing people for
| having a head start they were saying that people's final
| grade should be based on what they are capable of at the end
| of the class, not at the start of it.
| blodkorv wrote:
| Why not, there will be for sure students who have the
| ability to grasp a course fast and effectily to compete
| with those with prior knowledge, why not grade and reward
| that ability.
| mech987 wrote:
| If you grade improvement rather than mastery, you
| incentivize feigning incompetence at the start of the
| course to game the system.
|
| The closest thing I ever saw to this was my high school
| weightlifting class. Your bench press single rep max was
| a high percentage of your overall grade, and was tested
| several times over the course of the semester. You were
| graded on improvement. The teacher made sure not to
| mention this before the first test, to keep people from
| cheating, but a few kids were in the know and faked a low
| max.
|
| From a philosophical/values point of view- what is more
| important for education- incentivize all students to try
| to achieve the mastery level expected, or incentivize all
| students that as long as it looks like they're making
| progress, that is enough? I'd go with mastery. The
| appearance of progress is too easy to game, too
| subjective, and not easily applicable to varying
| courseloads.
| lostcolony wrote:
| It is rewarded, simply by the fact that they then have to
| put less effort into the class.
|
| Why should it be graded? The point of the class is not to
| learn quickly and effortlessly, but to learn the material
| completely. If by the time the class is over the student
| has learned it well, they should get a grade that
| reflects that learning.
|
| I mean, by your logic, should we give extra credit to the
| students who never show up to office hours in college,
| since clearly they're learning it 'faster and (more)
| effectily(sic)'?
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Measuring IQ has an _extremely_ narrow utility in general,
| and is rife with problems of measurement, to the point that
| people struggle to see correlations when we are talking about
| primary education.
|
| But even disregarding that, it is philosophically problematic
| to think along these lines. People learn and know things in
| an absolute plurality of ways, and in ways that can only be
| measured with very limited means; there is more than one way
| for someone to skin the cat of learning.
|
| In general, an absolute Platonic ideal of intelligence, which
| IQ enthusiasts implicitly rely on, _is_ the thing that got us
| in this mess pedagogically.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Sounds like an intro CS class. Let's group people who played
| with this stuff for years with people who are here to get
| rich and people who have a theoretical aptitude, but never
| touched it.
| Spivak wrote:
| I _hated_ this. I literally had every advantage growing up,
| I 'd been seriously programming since I was like 8, I took
| the CS AP tests on a whim without even taking the class
| because "eh why not." Then my freshman year I watched some
| of my classmates get wrecked for no reason other than they
| made the mistake of not having a decade of real world
| programming experience under their belt day 1 and all they
| were taught in class was basically math and pseudocode. I
| partnered with our CS club on campus and held
| workshops/hackathons aimed at _actual_ beginners just
| because it made me so mad.
| a_shovel wrote:
| I don't understand your point. If a genius takes the class,
| then they'll get a good grade in any grading system. I'm
| talking about a student who starts off poorly and does badly
| on some early assignments, then improves dramatically during
| the course. Even if they get to the same level of knowledge
| as the genius, under the traditional grading system, the
| early poor grades will stand. That will influence their final
| average/GPA even though those early grades are no longer
| relevant.
| paulcole wrote:
| They don't even need to be at the same level of mastery as
| the "genius." Everyone in the class needs to get to a pre-
| defined level of mastery of the subject. The genius isn't
| rewarded (in terms of grade for this class) for being 10x
| beyond that -- everyone who gets over the bar of mastery
| gets the same grade.
| joeframbach wrote:
| I see this sub-thread is getting heated, so maybe it's a good
| chance to clear our differences in understanding.
|
| First - Are you coming from a system where a student's _rank_
| in class is ordered? In that situation, grades are a zero-sum
| game, where you may be fighting for Valedictorian status. In
| the US at least, such things have been a farce for at least
| 20 years, when I graduated we had 13 Salutatorians in a class
| of 200, what a joke. The weighted GPA is what matters, even
| if half the student body has a GPA over 3.5. Nobody here
| cares what your rank was.
|
| Second - As others have stated - the topic is about bringing
| the lower-graded students _up_ , not bringing the higher-
| graded students _down_. Could you explain why you are
| reframing the topic?
| asoneth wrote:
| The argument is not that we need to neutralize a student's
| head start.
|
| The argument is that students should be evaluated based on
| their mastery of the content at the end of the course.
|
| Giving too much weight to early grades and tests results in
| disproportionately penalizing those students who enter the
| course with the least prior knowledge. Those students are
| already going to have to work harder than their classmates to
| catch up. Averaging in their initial low grades just serves
| to penalize them further.
| blodkorv wrote:
| Even if every studen have zero prior knowledge in a course,
| there will be those who will perform better early on being
| able to understand the course faster than others, of course
| you should grade that ability.
| trevorboaconstr wrote:
| Why? Isn't the point mastery? Are we grading students
| ability to learn, now, too? I really don't understand
| what you're getting at.
| ryan93 wrote:
| Mastery obviously isn't the only point. Engineering firms
| probably to want people who Learn the material in 4-5
| years not 10
| asoneth wrote:
| If you want to measure improvement in addition to mastery
| that is yet another good argument for focusing more on
| the final scores than in the earlier grades.
|
| One student gets 30%, 60%, 90%, and 100% on a series of
| four cumulative projects throughout the semester while
| another student consistently gets 70% on all four.
|
| I would argue that the former likely has greater mastery
| and certainly has learned more during the semester. If
| you want to make sure those two things (mastery and
| learning ability) are measured by the final grade you
| need to use some method that de-emphasizes the earlier
| grades.
| olsonjeffery wrote:
| Grades don't capture the difference in learning ability
| you use as an absurd example. Furthermore, this
| "observation" is sufficiently vague so as to be a truism.
| "Businesses don't want to hire stupid people" is not
| novel or meaningful as a supporting argument to whatever
| your point is.
| ryan93 wrote:
| yes it is. part of the benefit of grades and semesters is
| to compare students. good students want that!
| lostcolony wrote:
| Speaking as a hiring manager, how long it's taken someone
| to learn something in the past has only ever figured into
| things when there wasn't a full fit between their skills
| (as interviewed) and what we're needing.
|
| I've never looked at how long someone was in college, and
| honestly don't care if it took them 4 years or 10. I
| assume there's a reason it took them 10, and that could
| be lighter class load, a change in major, or all manner
| of things. If it's because they took every class 2-3x,
| because the first time it didn't stick, it'll show up in
| the interview process that they can't pick things up
| quickly, and I can do what I want with that information.
|
| But to the grandparent's point, if I gave a leetcode
| problem (I don't), and someone immediately coded the
| ideal solution effortlessly, which tells me they have
| seen that problem recently, I'm not going to just be like
| "yep, hire this person, they're clearly a great
| engineer!" They're great and/or lucky at test prep, which
| is not the skill I care about.
| geoffjentry wrote:
| Universities aren't trade schools. You go there to learn,
| not to earn a job.
| hkt wrote:
| Tell that to the marketing departments of the
| universities, policymakers, and students..!
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| > Universities aren't trade schools. You go there to
| learn, not to earn a job.
|
| This hasn't been true for probably half a century,
| possibly longer. The number of people who go to
| university simply for the learning experience is almost
| certainly vanishingly small.
|
| If you look, for example, at the completion rates of non-
| college courses like you'd find on Udemy, etc. It's <10%.
|
| You would also expect audit rates to be much higher for
| people looking 'just to learn' - auditing classes is
| typically significantly cheaper than paying full price
| for the course.
|
| People go to school because they are looking for an edge
| in their long term earning potential (types of jobs,
| credentials leading to higher salaries, etc).
| brimble wrote:
| It hasn't been true since the job (and education) market
| adjusted to the GI Bill.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Maybe in an ideal world.
| noasaservice wrote:
| Not by the way they charge.
|
| If this is your viewpoint, I can only conclude that
| you're from an elte family born into money.
|
| The rest of us go to uni to get a higher paying job and
| avoid wage-slavery and/or poverty.
|
| And if this is you, ewww https://gfmsouthwest.org/
| Academics, work and "jesus" have no place together.
| asoneth wrote:
| If a student is a fast learner and can understand the
| material more quickly than their classmates for the first
| test it is reasonable to assume that the same would be
| true for the final test as well.
|
| In practice I've found that many of the students who are
| at the top of the bell curve after the first test are the
| ones who have the most prior familiarity with the subject
| matter. Whereas the fast learners are typically the ones
| who are at the top of the curve at the _end_ of the
| course.
|
| In this context, equally-weighting early grades has a
| higher probability of penalizing the fast learners than
| it does of rewarding them.
| olsonjeffery wrote:
| It's interesting that you focus on the positive upside of
| that, when really what you're saying is you want the
| student with poorer initial understanding to be punished
| with poorer grades.
|
| Are you seeking signal and view this change in grading
| style as noise? Do you really believe this style of
| grading captures merit? What does the grade represent?
| What is the point of this exercise for you? Are grades
| just for deciding which student to give the best spoils
| to?
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| But the goal isn't to catch up on knowledge that the
| student should've learned last year. That should've already
| been addressed through holding the student back, summer
| school, tutoring, etc. If the teacher has to not only teach
| this year's material but also reteach last year's, that's
| not fair the students who need to learn this year's
| material.
|
| Grading isn't just a feedback mechanism. It also is an
| incentive. When you say "only the final test matters", then
| young students (who probably haven't totally grasped long-
| term planning yet) have not as much reason to care about
| learning the early material until it's too late.
| vondur wrote:
| Some of my Chem professors would give you the grade of your
| final exam if it were higher than your grade at that point in
| time. They figured if you pulled off a better final exam score,
| then you deserve that as your final grade as it's a cumulative
| exam. They also mentioned it rarely happens.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I had a history professor unofficially do
| something like this. I got B's on the midterms and needed a
| 100 on the final to get an A. I knew I did better on the
| final and couldn't think of a question I missed, but 100
| still seemed unlikely. I suspect I got a ~98, and he ran with
| the logic that if you're demonstrating a very solid
| understanding of the material on the final and close to a
| cutoff, you earned the higher grade.
|
| Also, history. No one was getting 98% on my physics or math
| exams.
| Cpoll wrote:
| That might have just been a standard bell-curve. If you got
| the best score, you might have been bumped up to 100%.
| milesdyson_phd wrote:
| This was standard in the Chemistry department at my
| university. It also saved my ass twice.
| orforforof wrote:
| This sounds good in some niche cases, like an English class with
| a small class size and a highly experienced teacher. However of
| all the potential fads in higher education this one seems
| particularly risky to students. In the end the grade is given
| based on how the prof feels about you, and if they agree with
| your self assessment. Which can be easily gamed (e.g. student
| pretends to be a bad writer at first and has a seemingly
| miraculous transformation) and is subjective. The assessment will
| also be tainted by one's individual biases, by definition.
| Whether you agree or disagree about the importance of diversity
| equity and inclusion in higher ed, one useful principle of that
| movement is that of clearly defined evaluation, precisely to
| avoid effects of personal bias.
| Qw3r7 wrote:
| One of the best course structures I ever had was my Circuits
| Theory course. There were three total exams where the first two
| covered different material, and the third covered everything. On
| the third, we were able to 'correct' our score one of the first
| two exams if we did we better on the portions of third exam that
| covered the material. And the best part is that if you did worse
| on the third exam over the past material. It wouldn't
| retroactively degrade your score.
|
| It went something like:
|
| 1st Exam: Subject A 2nd Exam: Subject B 3rd/Final: Subject A/B/C
|
| I always wished this was the structure for every course. It
| allowed for those who didnt do well to stay in the course and
| encouraged them to understand the way the proffesor assigns work
| too!
| TedShiller wrote:
| Huh? Those stock photos
| skeptikal wrote:
| In high school in Italy (at least where I was from) your final
| grade was basically decided based on the teacher's belief of how
| well you mastered the class.
|
| For example:
|
| In Latin class (chronologically) I had a 6, a bunch of 5s, and a
| couple of 4s. Finally I put a bunch of effort and got a couple of
| 7s in an oral and a written exam.
|
| Pass was a 6, and the teacher gave me a 6. A 6 was really where I
| stood in the class (I _had_ learned the subject by the time I got
| the 7s). My average, though, was a 5 something - a fail.
|
| The system is open for abuse, but I always thought it made more
| sense than "earning" points towards an A. For starters the
| material can be made much more difficult since the kids wont blow
| their final grade in the first few months. I always liked classes
| with weighty exams.
| User23 wrote:
| This is well and good for a subject that's just accumulated
| opinion, like most of the humanities. It would be awful though to
| be the poor kid who went through an un-graded math program in
| secondary school and got dropped into calculus freshman year of
| college.
| joshvm wrote:
| During my physics degree we had relatively fine-grain
| evaluation - every module was examined and graded (e.g. /100)
| individually and the sum formed the basis of your degree. Some
| modules were compulsory, some you had one shot to pass (labs),
| some took an entire semester, some were half, etc. You could
| work out exactly how much of your degree an exam was worth, to
| the point that some people knew that they could sit out most of
| their final exams and still get a good degree.
|
| With the exception of the dissertation and occasional paper-
| writing exercises in labs, there was always a correct answer
| and marks were normalised using a formula that a previous
| professor had invented. It was expedient to take the hardest
| courses (e.g. _Gauge Theories of Particle Physics_ ) because
| you would almost certainly be boosted up from the low class
| average, rather than "simple" ones where everyone did well. By
| the third year, homework was optional. You also wouldn't flunk
| a degree if you bombed a course.
|
| Labs were universally hated for marking because it involved
| qualitative assessment (beyond "did you make the experiment
| work) and it was run by PhD students who each had wildly
| inconsistent criteria, despite presumably working from a
| rubric. I'm somewhat sympathetic because I've taught labs and a
| lot of students are just inept, but the grading system should
| really have been overhauled there.
|
| Compare that to the English students in my cohort who had what
| we'd call a "doss" 1st year (worth 0%) and then in their second
| and third years might sit four essay exams that were worth
| 12.5% of their degree. As far as I know, some courses were
| 50/50 assessed/invigilated, but many were 100% examined.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| You are still receiving feedback and more-so than a traditional
| grading system you have a reason to understand what went wrong
| since revisions to your work are reflected in the final grade.
|
| I don't see any reason this system doesn't work in the face of
| objective criteria. The professor is still determining your
| level of understanding and aptitude, they are just doing it
| across the entire course rather than in a series of small and
| irreversible steps.
| gotaquestion wrote:
| The toxicity on this site still amazes me. We have people here
| claiming, "It's only English, would never fly with engineering."
| How horrendously dismissive and arrogant an attitude. As if
| engineering is some god-like holy discipline that sorts the
| "real" students from the "fake" ones. This professor makes many
| valid points, and I think it would be entirely applicable to
| engineering. It's like you never analyzed an op-amp? That is a
| scalable demonstration of knowledge, that can be critiqued and
| revised.
|
| Circuit design is more an art than a science, that's why two of
| the most popular non-textbooks on the topic are called:
|
| "Analog Circuit Design: Art, Science, and Personalities" -
| Williams
|
| "The Art of Electronics" - Horowitz and Hill
|
| Get over yourselves.
|
| EDIT: If you read these two books, they focus on the highly
| subjective nature of analog design, and how multiple designs can
| still meet the design criteria, but have a certain elegance about
| them that is an expressive quality of personality. The same could
| be said about source code, in that an experienced programmer can
| deliver creative alternatives to the most naive solution that
| solves the problem. Sure, it is important to learn that 1+1=2 (or
| 11, depending on '+'), but the same can be said of English, where
| spelling and grammar matter, and mistakes can be just as deadly
| as Metric vs Imperial.
| jhbadger wrote:
| To some degree, but I think a lot of more objective fields like
| natural sciences and engineering like to exaggerate the
| "artiness" of their work because they don't want to come across
| as uncreative robots just as the more subjective subjects like
| to exaggerate the "science" of their fields (even often naming
| their field <name> science which is a bit like how communist
| dictatorships liked to call themselves "democratic republics").
| gotaquestion wrote:
| That's still a judgemental statement but has not nothing to
| do with the fundamental complaint: that learning isn't about
| ranking and rating to multiple decimal places, and that
| Language curricula isn't somehow inferior to Engineering.
| bachmeier wrote:
| I'm not sure about that. Questions like "Given the following
| problem description, write out a solution" is not in any
| sense more objective than the humanities. The fact that STEM
| professors are less likely to ask that type of question on an
| exam does not change the artiness of the field.
| jmbwell wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| In my most challenging and valuable CS classes, the ones I
| think about still to this day, the grades were practically
| irrelevant. We spent most of our time looking over our
| solutions, talking about why one person did it one way and
| another person did it another way. We could tell when a
| solution was efficient or elegant, and when a solution was
| awkward or clumsy. And we all learned from it.
|
| We never compared each other's grades. Honestly, I have no idea
| what anyone else's grade ever was. And today I have no idea
| what my own grades ever were. But when our project was up on
| the screen for the whole class to see, we knew right away where
| we stood relative to our peers. And that is every bit as true
| today in my work as it was back then.
|
| "Un-grading" strikes me as better preparation for being a real-
| world contributor and, dare I say, leader, than grades.
| robocat wrote:
| Peehaps your argument is about how engineering should be
| taught, and everyone is saying how it is taught as black-and-
| white answers.
|
| I studied Electronic Engineering, and I would say 95% of the
| questions in my exams had a correct answer, with zero
| subjectivity. It was decades ago in NZ so maybe things have
| improved?
| axus wrote:
| This is how it goes in the workplace, getting and giving feedback
| on documents to improve them.
| ryan93 wrote:
| Probably fine in something like english but maybe not circuit
| design.
| cinntaile wrote:
| You can point out something is wrong without grading it, so why
| do you think it wouldn't work?
| User23 wrote:
| You always have to grade students if you want to put them in
| classes where they are prepared to handle the material.
| Whether you call it grading, ungrading, or anything else some
| form of assortment relative to the class is necessary if you
| want every student to study material that is challenging for
| them.
|
| From this it follows that the scenario where truly not
| grading is feasible is the one where the class has no
| required preparation that isn't met by the least capable
| student in the cohort. Incidentally that was what I observed
| in general population US public secondary schools. There was
| no homework. In fact, there weren't even textbooks.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Lets say someone designs a circuit. Shows it to the teacher
| and the teacher points out the flaws. The student puts in
| some more work and comes up with a better design that took
| care of the flaws. Now the teacher gives the student a more
| challenging assignment.
|
| Do you consider that grading?
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Some kids derive motivation from being better than that
| other kid. In other words, competitiveness. Except modern
| education considers competitiveness toxic and is
| determined to stamp it out.
| ryan93 wrote:
| Let's consider a kid who half asses it knowing he can use
| the teachers notes to fix it. lots of people want
| admission to med school or an engineering job. its
| incredibly fair to test and evaluate those kids on their
| own work product.
| cinntaile wrote:
| You didn't answer the question and in your example you
| assume there is enough information in the teacher's
| comments to fix the design, this was not stated in my
| example. The discussion wasn't about fairness either.
| ryan93 wrote:
| So the professor just tells you you got it wrong? That's
| what grades are. To solve the problem of bad initial
| performance being low many classes weight mid semester
| and final exams highly so you have plenty of time to
| learn
| after_care wrote:
| Removing grades might be the best thing for teachers, is probably
| the best thing for students, but is very challenging for one
| specific reason unmentioned in this article.
|
| School is competitive and bureaucratic. The best
| classrooms/schools have less seats than students that want to be
| in the classroom. Grades are a valuable tool for matching
| students to classrooms.
| [deleted]
| kqr wrote:
| I agree with everything right up until "valuable". That grades
| would be better than outright sortition (lottery) is a very
| strong statement and I don't think it's true.
| ucm_edge wrote:
| The issue about equity and early poor performance dragging down
| the grade even when by end of course mastery the material has
| been known for years.
|
| The solution is to weigh work from the end of the course to be
| worth more, to have some assignments early in the course where
| you drop the two lowest score ones, or similar. Not to just stop
| grading.
|
| This way you can give critical feedback and establish the
| framework for evaluation without ruining any GPAs. It also
| protects the students because the instructor is behold to the
| framework, the students ca. appeal to higher authorities that the
| framework is unfair/flawed, etc.
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| I don't quite understand how that would be less stressing for the
| students. As long as you teach in a way that even someone
| starting without specific knowledge could understand everything,
| small graded tests along the way are nicer. That's because you
| can build up your final grade instead of everything depending on
| one big exam. Also it forces you to study along the way, instead
| of delaying everything until the final exam.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I love what this prof is doing. I suggested it here in the UK [1]
| and was met mostly with terrified laughter. Wonder how he gets
| away with such a progressive stance?
|
| [1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/fear-zombie-
| stud...
| michaelt wrote:
| _> I suggested it here in the UK and was met mostly with
| terrified laughter._
|
| I read your article and I honestly couldn't tell whether it was
| serious, or whether it was some swiftian "why are we even
| bothering to give exams if it's impossible to fail? we might as
| well just graduate everyone on day 1 of term 1" which was
| actually calling for higher admission standards and fewer
| resits.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > I read your article and I honestly couldn't tell whether it
| was serious
|
| Thanks for reading. It was indeed serious, though the concern
| was more about what I think is a financial abuse of students
| when they are recycled round and round a system that keeps
| giving them one more chance in order to take more money from
| them.
|
| The rest is an attempt to ponder solutions, and I kind of
| have to offer lots of angles for the piece to fit well with
| the publication.
|
| One of those, as you say, is that we offer a basic "pass"
| certificate just for completing the course. That's in keeping
| with student's expectations these days, since we commodified
| higher education and made degrees a "product", students
| expect to get something for their money even without effort.
|
| That's not an argument against meritocracy, because good
| students could still get a better degree grade if they want.
|
| Anyway just one idea to stop them being held hostage in a
| sunk-cost trap. And yes, another is to raise admission
| standards to a level where almost nobody who got in could
| fail, which is what some European institutions do.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > though the concern was more about what I think is a
| financial abuse of students when they are recycled round
| and round a system that keeps giving them one more chance
| in order to take more money from them.
|
| Aside from changes in the fee structure, I would suggest
| that the better solution here is to let students retake
| individual modules without having to redo an entire year.
| This is something that most European institutions allow,
| and has the bonus that it is likely _more_ accurate in
| terms of assessing a student 's actual level than the
| current system.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I think it's a good idea, you just have to be really careful
| with:
|
| > "Will you tell me where I stand?" My comments on your work,
| and our conferences, should give you a good sense of how you're
| progressing in the class.
|
| As an undergraduate student I had the experience of thinking I
| was doing just fine for an entire term (and to a lesser extent
| an entire year), only to find out at the end that I was doing
| so badly my professors actually wanted me to drop out of my
| course (despite my exam grades being ok-ish passing grades).
|
| I'm sure they thought they were communicating clearly, but they
| weren't. It probably didn't help that I spent my entire school
| career having teachers tell me I needed to put more effort into
| my homework only to get straight-A's in my exams. So similar
| messages in university didn't seem like a big deal.
| NoblePublius wrote:
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| I did do this in multiple engineering courses in grad school.
| Various homework assignments and projects throughout the
| semester that we turned in, got feedback on and submitted all
| of it as we got through it, or as one big portfolio at the end
| of the year. Similarly, we got a single grade on the whole body
| of work.
| gadders wrote:
| I was thinking Driving Licences.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| But this is closer to how getting a drivers license works.
| You go and take the test and you either pass and get your
| license, or they tell you what you did wrong so you can go
| practice with your learners permit and come back again.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jrm4 wrote:
| Yup. I get as close to this as reasonably possible. For most of
| my classes the biggest grade is an ongoing project that you get
| multiple submissions for.
|
| Where it's something "basic" like first year web design, I'm a
| huge fan of specs grading (and surprised that people take
| advantage of it) -- like
|
| You get a 50% if there's a file on the server with the name
| "index.html."
|
| You get a 60% if there is valid HTML on it...
|
| on up to
|
| You get a 100% if you have a fully responsive page with css and
| javascript that views differently on phones etc.
|
| (and many people are fine with the 80 or 90 level)
| dbg31415 wrote:
| I get it.
|
| Going to an Ivy League school in the '00s... everyone got As.
|
| This made grading BS.
|
| Employers just wanted to know that you had "at least a 3.0" and
| you parents just wanted to know that you weren't failing out. And
| the hyper-inflated grades I received from my expensive elitist
| school ensured I wouldn't hit issues. But... totally true, grates
| "are demotivating, they don't actually measure learning and they
| increase students' stress."
|
| The moment you introduce grading, you introduce ways to game it.
|
| Now look, the long standing joke for schools that don't grade, "I
| got a Pineapple in Underwater-Basket-Weaving-and-Thermo-Gender-
| Dynanics!" But yeah, so what if you get a Pineapple as long as
| you learned something? That spark of a desire to learn more is
| really what I want to see in anyone, and I don't know how to
| measure that.
|
| In most schools, it seems like getting good grades is just an act
| of subservience. "Yes, Professor! I gave up my weekends to do 3x
| 'extra credit' assignments, and I washed your dog and dusted the
| erasers!" Oof... not really the qualities I want to hire for a
| leadership position. Not unless I wanted a bunch of Yes Men.
|
| Seems like it should be on the interviewer to determine if you're
| any good at what you do, not rely on some arbitrary metric when
| hiring you. (And a lot of states are "right to work" so it's not
| like they don't know how to fire someone if they don't work out.)
|
| I'm all for abolishing grades in university classes. Just
| probably need some sort of standardized test at the end to say,
| "Yes, you know 85% what you should as a History Major..." And...
| that opens up a whole other can of worms. Oof.
|
| There's no great solution, but look I get that grades suck.
| sjg007 wrote:
| The best applicant for a job has a portfolio of work samples
| including projects.
| wnscooke wrote:
| I teach English but I rarely call myself The Teacher. I'm there
| to help them on their journey. I explain at the start of every
| class that their final grade (the uni currency) will rely more on
| the effort they put in than an actual note. The motivated ones
| love it, and I have seen this approach help the uncertain feel
| more confident when their effort is what is noticed, not a grade
| not lower language ability. Those students then start putting in
| more effort, and excel. There are still a number who just come,
| just sit, low effort, and this group is often equally divided
| into high level and low level language levels. It's not just the
| "bad" or "poor" students.
|
| By the start of the second semester the class is functioning
| really well, with students really trying, confident regardless of
| actual level, participating. It's always so heartening to see
| former back row students moving up to the front, and the front
| row making room for them.
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| I kind of don't like this approach. I grant there is a huge
| discrepancy between students in reading/writing ability coming
| into a class, but forcing everyone to put in the same effort
| didn't fly in my math and science classes, so why should it be
| different here? Instead of being able to use my extra time that
| I didn't need to use in my literature classes by studying other
| things, I had to put in more effort to make my writing "extra
| extra" good. Conversely, if someone was a math wiz, they could
| use the extra time not spent studying math to study literature,
| or whatever else.
| eropple wrote:
| I was good at pretty much every academic discipline growing
| up (except math when I got to calculus, ha). Being held to a
| higher standard in the things I was good at made me _better_
| at those.
| asoneth wrote:
| > Conversely, if someone was a math wiz, they could use the
| extra time not spent studying math to study literature, or
| whatever else.
|
| If a math wiz can ace their math class without studying I'd
| question why they're not taking a harder math class.
| Alternately if the math wiz want to focus more on literature
| (or whatever else) this semester wouldn't it more efficient
| to skip the math class entirely?
|
| Maybe in high school or mandatory undergraduate courses I
| could imagine a rationale for deliberately taking easy
| courses, but I've encountered students in graduate-level
| courses at an expensive private university that could have
| passed the final exam on the first day.
|
| I can't fathom why anyone would waste so much of their own
| time and money on a class that isn't going to teach them
| anything.
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| > If a math wiz can ace their math class without studying
| I'd question why they're not taking a harder math class.
| Alternately if the math wiz want to focus more on
| literature (or whatever else) this semester wouldn't it
| more efficient to skip the math class entirely? ... I can't
| fathom why anyone would waste so much of their own time and
| money on a class that isn't going to teach them anything.
|
| I agree, but unfortunately you can't just test out of
| required classes much of the time.
| omegaham wrote:
| The college typically requires a bunch of classes. You
| can't test out of them.
|
| This was a pain for me when I started college at 23; I'd
| been programming as a hobby since I was 16, but was shoved
| into intro-level classes anyway. I spent the classes
| learning tooling, so it wasn't a complete waste of time,
| but it wasn't very productive.
| matart wrote:
| When I was in university for engineering I didn't get a
| choice which classes I took. You took the classes that were
| part of your degree. You also didn't get a ton of
| flexibility in when you take a course. Courses were
| generally offered once per year as all students would
| progress at the same rate.
| jdkee wrote:
| "educational privilege"
| ALittleLight wrote:
| As a high school gym coach I noticed students with lots of
| experience running tended to get faster times. This is an example
| of fit privilege! So, I had to do away with my stopwatch...
| detaro wrote:
| Gym class is an excellent example of something where not
| grading, especially not based on absolute performance, would
| probably be quite useful, yes.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| That is patently absurd. Without knowing your absolute
| numbers it's very difficult to tell if you are improving or
| not and if so at what rate.
|
| It's also both unfair and dishonest to pretend that students
| who have spent more time training or have greater natural
| aptitude perform similarly to students who do not.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Literally no one cares if I'm improving or not.
|
| Gym teachers pushed me away from exercising for years and
| it's taken therapy and unlearning to get rid of my fear
| with working out.
|
| YOU DON'T NEED TO MEASURE HOW GOOD I RUN.
|
| This toxic view point that everything should be a
| competition and grading needs to die the fuck out. Gym is
| supposed to be a fun place for students to move their
| bodies and interact with their peers in a different
| capacity.
|
| People who want to go do this more professionally should
| have the opportunity and the right gym teachers to
| encourage them there. But grading me because I didn't run a
| certain distance in a certain time is absurd and damaging
| and emotionally humiliating. Shit that I wouldn't want to
| subject an adult to, let alone a kid.
| detaro wrote:
| Not sure how you got from "not grading" to "not knowing
| numbers". Do you care more about "got 15s faster between
| start and end of year" or "grade C at start and end"? Not
| grading != no feedback. The source article explicitly makes
| that distinction.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| The author doesn't exactly describe her method but says
| "No, I answered, because I really won't have put a grade
| on it." Which makes me think she's not putting numbers on
| things - she has, in other words, thrown out her
| stopwatch.
|
| Getting faster or writing better papers are both good
| results. Importantly, you can only know them if you are
| taking objective measurements. If you aren't, you will
| struggle to know if your methods and changes are
| improvements or degradations.
|
| Fittingly, the article suffers from the same relativistic
| malaise the author inflicts on her students. The article
| doesn't explain objectively why not grading is good.
| Instead, it's subjective feelings, preferences, and
| beliefs. Maybe this is a good change, I doubt it, but we
| haven't seen any evidence in this article.
| julianeon wrote:
| It's not at all clear or obvious that giving higher grades
| to someone with higher natural aptitude, in gym class, is
| "unfair." It seems mostly wrong to me.
|
| Example: I start gym class and run a course of arbitrary
| length, my best effort. It takes me 60s. After working very
| hard over the semester, I lower that down to 45. You can
| even physically see I'm in better shape, but that's as low
| as I can go, during that semester.
|
| Meanwhile some other kid starts at 44s, literally holds
| back, and 'improves' at the end (no real change) to 40.
| They pretty much don't work at it; where they finish is the
| same place they started.
|
| Should they get a higher grade than I do? If we're grading
| by how hard the students applied themselves to what the
| teacher taught them, the bigger improvement deserves a
| bigger reward.
|
| It's not obvious that "A for effort" is the wrong answer
| here.
| efitz wrote:
| It always puzzled me why you got multiple grades in any
| particular class. I always thought that the object of a class was
| to master some body of subject matter. If that's the case, then
| the most obvious objective way to rate students is a single grade
| on a final examination. I realize that most people don't like
| this because it puts too much emphasis and stress on a single
| event, but it measures your mastery of the subject.
|
| You could adopt such a system and maintain the general current
| pattern of education by changing the grading of projects and
| tests (before the final) to be diagnostic in nature. By this, I
| mean that instead of assigning a letter grade, The instructor
| should map individual questions and project feedback to a rubric
| for the class.
|
| In this way both you and the instructor can see the areas of the
| rubric that you have mastered in the areas where you still need
| work. Great instructors could even use that to tailor future work
| individually to the student to maximize their mastery of the
| rubric.
|
| This even lends itself to standardization. For example, instead
| of an instructor designed or department designed final exam, you
| could use some form of standardized test. Just like industry has
| certifications, professional societies and other organizations
| could develop exams to demonstrate mastery of a body of
| knowledge, and these could be administered instead of an
| institutional exam.
|
| Further, with this methodology we are emphasizing the outcome,
| not the process. Now, you can objectively measure how well
| specific institutions or even instructors prepare their students
| for these exams. And if the rubric for the body of knowledge that
| the exam tests, is public, then one can learn on their own and
| can demonstrate mastery of the body of knowledge just by taking
| the exam. Or, by taking the class online, or preparing using test
| prep books and sample tests, etc.
|
| Further, if someone developed curricula to specify which bodies
| of knowledge are required for a particular degree, then
| conceivably one could have degrees without universities. To prove
| you have the degree, you would simply need to provide evidence
| that you passed each of the exams for each of the bodies of
| knowledge in the degree requirement.
|
| I know this is a weird thought, and there are lots of problems
| with standardized testing, but this would be a way to end the
| financial tyranny of the current university system, at least in
| the United States.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Grades give students a way to calibrate their performance
| relative to peers. For some this is demotivating, for others it's
| motivating. Competitiveness is not inherently bad, and many
| people can't thrive in an environment where only effort counts
| and everyone gets the same participation trophy.
|
| Detailed feedback is a separate issue and is not an alternative
| to grading, but complementary to it. All writing can be improved
| in some way, and the teacher should give tips to each student in
| how to get to the next level. The best kid in class may saturate
| the grading scheme, but should still be told how to improve
| relative to themselves.
|
| Maybe English as a subject is too subjective for numerical
| grading, but the problem with text-only evaluation is that it's
| not clear and can be misinterpreted by students and parents.
|
| In Hungary, we had some years when the first few years in primary
| school were grade-free, with only free-text evaluation sent to
| parents, in order not to discourage low-achieving kids. Parents
| found it very difficult to interpret or conclude anything,
| though, like "okay, but what does that actually mean?"
| Eventually, most teachers converged on using certain turns of
| phrase which constituted a pseudo-grade-scale, and finally the
| thing was reversed and only the first school year is gradeless
| now (afaik).
| SpodGaju wrote:
| > Competitiveness is not inherently bad
|
| Creating competitiveness where is not needed is harmful.
| outside1234 wrote:
| I think this approach has merit - if there is discipline to
| downgrading students that clearly haven't mastered the material
| and assigned themselves an "A"
|
| I was a perfectionist and very competitive university student. I
| didn't just want the A -- I wanted the top score in the class. I
| often reflect decades later that I would have been better off
| mastering about 85-90% of the material in a class and then moving
| on to something else -- versus mastering 110% of the material
| through repetitive practice even after I had mastered it to
| obliterate a narrow exam in it.
|
| The current system encourages this because employers are more
| interested in the high GPA student than the students that have
| mastered a wide range of content at a B+ level. Perhaps this is
| part of the solution. There has to be accountability in the
| system for not mastering it - but the goal should be developing
| overall knowledge.
| SpodGaju wrote:
| "As for motivation, I asked them, What do you want to learn? Why
| are you here?"
|
| This is probably the most important statement in that article.
|
| How many of us do not seriously look at our motivations for what
| we, and other, do?
|
| Imagine if they no longer gave you money for your current job.
| How many of you would still do work where you do or do the job
| you do?
| conro1108 wrote:
| I agree that we could collectively be more mindful about why
| we're doing things and what we're getting out of them, but this
| seems like a strange example to emphasize the point.
|
| Do many people claim that they're intrinsically motivated to do
| their jobs independent of compensation?
|
| My answer to "would you still do the job you do if they no
| longer gave you money for it?" has been an emphatic NO for
| every day of my working life and I assumed that was the common
| perspective.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >After I explained the theory and the method, they peppered me
| with many of the questions that other ungraders have also faced.
| "If we ask you, will you tell us what grade we have on a paper?"
| No, I answered, because I really won't have put a grade on it.
| "If we decide halfway through the semester that we're done
| revising something, will you grade it then?" No again, because
| I'm grading an entire portfolio, not individual pieces. "Will you
| tell me where I stand?" My comments on your work, and our
| conferences, should give you a good sense of how you're
| progressing in the class.
|
| I think the teacher dismisses the concerns too quickly. The
| reality is that at the end of the semester he will have to put a
| numerical grade on the report card ... and in this 'ungrading', a
| unscrupulous teacher could punish or reward a student by 'making
| up' any grade they feel like and the student has no recourse if
| they disagree with the grade.
| avs733 wrote:
| background: I have tried ungrading in engineering courses, it
| freaks students out and tends to trigger process inappropriate
| optimization behaviors as opposed to learning orientation
| shifts...I've had better luck with a middle ground. overall
| statement of positionality - grades and summative assessment
| are necessary and important but are unrelated to creating
| learning, formative feedback is much more affective at creating
| learning.
|
| exactly. Students are people with lived experiences and
| expectations that drive how they perceive things. A lot of
| times things that are 'theoretically' better in education bomb
| in practice because they conflict with students'
| emotional/psychological needs, wants, and expectations. There
| are NORMS and all this does is mess with the norms the faculty
| can control - but not all the norms. The most important thing
| he is doing is cleaving formative from summative feedback.
|
| This isn't really a perfect with the underlying principles of
| ungrading...this isjust ungrading within the controlled climate
| of the course itself. Thats great, but the problem is his drive
| towards formative feedback over summative feedback is
| constrained by outside forces. There is still a grade at the
| end of the course and that makes it hard. And then add in that
| if too many students do well you get accused of 'grade
| inflation' (which is a whole nother ball of nonsense). Students
| KNOW there will be a grade at the end, to act as if there isn't
| is just introducing ambiguity not necessarily learning. You can
| bypass some of the problems with strong trust - but only some.
| Specific to the comment on rubrics, GOOD rubrics can't really
| be useful, self and peer evaluation can be useful, using the
| rubric to provide formative feedback can be useful. Revisions
| can be ESPECIALLY useful. But you can't truly (ugh...sorry, no
| true scotsman) within a typical university that demands I
| assign grades. Anything you do to try will be 'gamed' so the
| best you can do is make 'gaming the system' and 'learning' as
| similar as possible.
|
| I would love LOVE to just have all of the classes I teach be
| taken as pass/fail but they aren't and can't be based on the
| external systematic rules. I've settled on a tool called
| 'specifications grading' as a middle ground that basically
| translates learning behaviors and outcomes into a clear grading
| system.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| <3 this. For technical courses, where work can be objectively
| right and wrong, specifications grading, aka standards-based
| grading, aka mastery based grading, is 100% the way to go.
|
| There are some "ungrading" practices that are useful, but the
| grade earned serves an important credentialing step, and
| clearly showing students the skills they need to master is
| the whole dang point.
| avs733 wrote:
| two notes:
|
| 1) I would argue that most questions we are asking students
| in technical courses shouldn't have right and wrong
| answers...it communicates the wrong thing and reinforces
| the assumption that technical work is 'getting the right
| answer' for students. College level technical teaching
| should work beyond that norm towards using 'right answers'
| for decision making
|
| 2) While there are similarities and they are often used
| interchangably, standards based, mastery based, and
| specifications grading are not exactly the same thing.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| 1) Fair point. The problem-solving technique is the most
| important part, but from this physicist's perspective,
| there is work that is objectively wrong, and there is
| basically always a limited set of solution approaches and
| results that I'd consider fully correct. Making the leap
| from "right answers" to "right thinking for decision
| making" is the key indicator of the expertise we want to
| train, and it doesn't happen just by making feedback less
| clear ;)
|
| 2) True! You really have to be careful even within
| terminologies. There are lots of different
| implementations of mastery-based grading, for example,
| and they're subtly different.
|
| And a final note: we're of dangerously similar (but not
| quite the same) perspectives!
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANNX_XiuA78
| Dayshine wrote:
| > a unscrupulous teacher could punish or reward a student by
| 'making up' any grade they feel like and the student has no
| recourse if they disagree with the grade
|
| Surely the second assessor would catch that though? Or the
| external examiner's spot-checking?
| silicon2401 wrote:
| This is the same situation as any in which there are leaders
| who set rules and followers who have no say. Structure and
| guidelines protect the followers. It's the same as jobs where
| there aren't clear guidelines on time off, working remote, etc.
| Lack of structure is just freedom for leaders to become
| dictators. When there are clear rules and guidelines, then
| you're able to point to a violation and demand a solution. It's
| the whole reason society evolved laws in the first place.
| kqr wrote:
| I know this is the idea, but do you know of any practical
| case where a bureaucracy of rules and guidelines have ever
| been
|
| (a) actually clear? and
|
| (b) not suffered from the same problems except now encoded in
| rules that are even more difficult to change?
|
| I mean, this entire thing about the grades is a great case in
| point: it's a bad system from the start, but it got encoded
| into rules a long time ago and now it's difficult to change
| it. You're suggesting adding more rules to fix it, but that
| just makes it even worse!
|
| There is a middle ground between chaos and full-on
| bureaucracy and it's "not giving single persons so goddamn
| much power over other people".
|
| With a healthy dose of democracy, you can collaborate on
| appropriate procedures without risk of enshrining unfair
| precedents into firm rules.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| Yes, any of my several jobs that had clear rules and
| guidelines. I know what behavior is unacceptable and I
| could report a manager or director if I felt the need. I
| know I'm entitled to X days off a year and I have reason to
| complain if I'm not able to take that time off. I know how
| much my salary is and so on and so on. Regular jobs and
| schools will never be democratic because college students
| and employees don't have a direct say; at most they can
| encourage (within what limits their leadership allows) or
| quit.
|
| If you enjoy being in an unstructured environment, that's
| great. You would've loved my first job. I hate it. The more
| rules and bureaucracy a job has, the more I thrive. I don't
| care about democracy, I care about living my life as simply
| as possible, and rigid, plentiful rules are my preferred
| way of living.
| kqr wrote:
| Is your salary also determined by a clear function of
| years of experience? Do you know what your manager makes?
|
| Has anyone explained exactly how the number of days of
| vacation you get was determined? What's the process if
| you're unhappy with that?
|
| I get that it's very convenient to have fair and clear
| rules and formulae for everything. What I'm saying is
| that in practise, that's not actually what happens. What
| looks like clear rules, once you dig a level deeper,
| rarely is.
|
| In practise, the rules are almost always limited in their
| extent, arbitrary, and opaquely decided by the people in
| power in ways that disadvantage people not in power.
| Unfair rules are rarely changed or removed but generally
| just appended with more complex, opaque additional rules.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| > Is your salary also determined by a clear function of
| years of experience?
|
| No, it's determined via negotiation, which is fine by me.
| If there was a clear function, I'd be even happier.
|
| > Do you know what your manager makes?
|
| No, and I don't care, I just care about making as much as
| I can get away with and knowing what to expect. If there
| was some formula, I'd be even happier with that.
|
| > Has anyone explained exactly how the number of days of
| vacation you get was determined?
|
| No, and I don't care if they rolled a set of dice to
| determine it, I just want as much as I can get away with,
| and to know how many I can use. If they
|
| > What's the process if you're unhappy with that?
|
| I suck it up or find another job, which I'm fine with
|
| > What looks like clear rules, once you dig a level
| deeper, rarely is.
|
| Which of my rules do you think are unclear? I can assure
| you I take off the time I'm entitled to and my paychecks
| so far have added up correctly.
|
| > opaquely decided by the people in power in ways that
| disadvantage people not in power. Unfair rules are rarely
| changed or removed but generally just appended with more
| complex, opaque additional rules.
|
| We seem to be discussing different points. In settings
| like university or work, I don't care how rules are
| determined, I just want them to exist and be clear. You
| seem to care a lot about how they're determined, which I
| literally couldn't care less about.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Your grade in an English Literature class basically comes down
| to what grade the professor decides to assign you regardless of
| the grading method. There's no objective determination for what
| makes a paper an A paper versus a B paper, and plenty of people
| have stories about getting a C on a paper they thought deserved
| an A.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Indeed; I was a somewhat ... ill-behaved student, and it was
| interesting to see how different teachers reacted to it. It
| always crept in a bit. One teacher I never got above a C on
| an assignment, so I swapped papers with someone who never got
| below a B. The paper with my name on it (which he wrote) got
| a D+, the paper with his name on t (which I wrote) got an A.
|
| The most blatant was when an instructor told me to my face
| that no matter what work I did, the highest grade I was
| getting in her class would be a D. The class required a C to
| fulfill my graduation requirements. This was about a month
| into a 16 week semester. In retrospect she was probably
| trying to get me to drop her class, but I didn't consider
| that at the time (It was my very first semester of college
| and it hadn't yet occurred to me that dropping a class was an
| option).
| Misdicorl wrote:
| Yes, but you've removed the feedback loop that allows a
| student to adjust their output to accommodate their grader's
| wishes.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Not really; there is a literal feedback loop with the
| teacher writing comments/critiques, and the student
| responding to them.
|
| What is removed is the ability to say "this is good enough,
| I am meeting expectations, and am confident in staying the
| class" vs "I am not able to meet expectations and should
| instead drop it with a W instead of risking my GPA". That
| said, I think as a student if I'd had a teacher engage with
| me this way it would present enough of an opportunity to
| build trust that I'd be able to get a feeling as to whether
| they were invested in me improving my work, and use that to
| determine if I should stay in the class or not.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| We had a teacher in high school that was universally accepted
| as being sexist. I took "Honor's English" (basically "hard"
| English for more intelligent students) with her in 9th grade.
| There were 3 of us boys in her class of ~20 or so, and we
| were all on the high IQ end of the scale and good students.
| The girls were a mixed bag, including some that definitely
| shouldn't have been in the "honor's" class.
|
| They all got As and Bs. I pulled in the only Cs of my
| scholastic career. One of the guys got the exact same grade
| to the second decimal place on 4 papers in a row.
|
| My personal highlights were getting told my Polyphemus' cave
| diorama (boy, what a good use of time!) wasn't colorful
| enough, along with the time she accused me of plagiarism in
| front of the class in the middle of my book report because of
| the vocabulary I used.
|
| The sexism was so bad that the daughter of another teacher
| actually left mid-class to complain to the principal about
| it. Nothing was done.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The Honors Algebra II class at the HS my sister went to was
| the same way but it was girls rather than boys that she
| treated more harshly. Girls would drop out of the honors
| track to avoid her class. Math class might provide fewer
| opportunities for subjectivity to creep in, but it still
| provides plenty. My sister's homework was "lost" several
| times, and she was falsely accused by the teacher of
| skipping class (3 unexcused absences in a quarter was an
| automatic F).
|
| The response by the administration any time complaints were
| made were "We don't comment on any teacher's methods, but
| some of our best students come out of her classes." Given
| that honor students went _into_ her classes, it would be
| rather troubling if that weren 't the case...
| astrobe_ wrote:
| Unless I'm mistaken there's no indication in TFA on the topic
| this person teaches, which is very important in my opinion,
| because grading a science-related work is indeed very
| different from grading literature-related stuff.
|
| Both teachers and students sometimes forget that grading is
| not a "judgment", but an evaluation of how much of the
| knowledge/know-how they are supposed to have by graduation,
| have been learned. To the point that sometimes you can get a
| "F for bad behavior". No wonder students are confused when
| you use different meanings of _sanction_ with the tool.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| FTA: "Some took my children's literature class because they
| thought it would be a fun or easy way to fulfill the
| requirement."
| bjornlouser wrote:
| 'ungrading' is what used to be called remedial education.
| cuddlybacon wrote:
| I'm not a fan of this.
|
| There are two theories for why school improves outcomes for
| students:
|
| 1. Human Capital Development Theory: School improves students.
|
| 2. Signalling Theory: School ranks students.
|
| Both predict that students with higher quality of certain traits
| (intelligence, self-discipline, social skills) that lead them to
| all kinds of good outcomes: higher income, donates more, votes
| more, less likely to experience crime, less likely to commit
| crime, more likely to marry, less likely to divorce, more
| friends, etc.
|
| My opinion is that's schools ability to achieve the above comes
| 20% from HCDT and 80% from Signalling. Reading, writing, and
| arithmetic make up nearly all of HCDT.
|
| In our society, it seems you're only supposed to acknowledge
| HCDT. From the perspective of HCDT, this policy of not grading
| work makes sense. Other feedback is more valuable, and has more
| room for nuance. The grade is redundant.
|
| But I do acknowledge that Signalling is part of the equation, and
| believe it provides the majority of the affect. From that
| perspective, this policy prevents ranking from happening. To make
| up for that, we will need to extend school even longer just to
| get the same amount of the long list of good outcomes.
| fattless wrote:
| This is a neat concept and could work well, especially in the
| more subjective, art based classes. One of my favorite classes
| was digital audio production. A big part of that was the amount
| of creativity we could take with it, partially thanks to the
| grading. The teacher graded very easily, as long as you utilized
| this technique and "tried" you get 100 on the assignment, or a
| pretty high grade. This let me worry less about if I meet the
| requirements or not, and instead spend time putting creativity
| into it. He would always offer feedback as well spending time
| critiquing weak aspects about it and it helped me a ton. Yes,
| this means the class became a big blowoff for a lot of kids, but
| I liked being able to dip into the creativity without many
| worries.
|
| The grading discussed in the article probably couldn't apply to
| stem classes or something with a definitive right or wrong
| answer, but giving less focus on raw number grades in more
| creative classes can push kids in the right direction. I heard
| somewhere that kids are increasingly putting less creativity and
| energy into assignments because they are concerned with hitting
| the teachers exact expectations, and I think I see that in my own
| experiences.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| This is great in creative writing. It's so subjective. What about
| a math test?
| kqr wrote:
| The math test is subjective too, because what determines your
| grade is what questions the teacher included just as much as
| your ability in the subject.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| But there are right and wrong answers. The correct answer
| isnt subjective.
| yupper32 wrote:
| This is an absolutely ridiculous concept to me, and I'm surprised
| so many people are taking a positive stance on this article.
|
| Grades allow for tracking progress across many different classes,
| so that you know for sure where you should spend your time
| studying. Maybe if this was your only class and you had unlimited
| time to revise and revise and revise, then this concept would
| work. It's as if the professor here thinks their class is the
| only one that matters.
|
| And it's not like this matches up to life after university any
| better than grades do. Professionally, my task is complete when
| it meets the needs of the client and I get paid. With this class,
| tasks are never complete. There's always more revising to do, and
| you never know when to stop.
|
| The author just seems out of touch. "As for motivation, I asked
| them, What do you want to learn? Why are you here?" -- this is
| the same kind of person who asks "so why do you want to work at
| [minimum wage job]?" as if it has anything to do with the job and
| nothing to do with needing money (getting good grades).
| EricE wrote:
| What is more meaningful?
|
| A letter grade with no context, or written feedback/commentary
| on your work? A dialog around improving your work?
|
| Seems like a far superior concept than simple letter grading.
|
| Also as you get better, the need to revise goes down
| dramatically. Seems like a pretty good incentive to focus on
| actual improvement and not just now to get a better grade.
|
| Meaningful learning - after having dealt with "education" I can
| see why the concept puzzles you.
| yupper32 wrote:
| > Seems like a pretty good incentive to focus on actual
| improvement and not just now to get a better grade.
|
| Well that's great, but it doesn't help me when I also require
| the good grade, because the system still works around GPAs.
| atdrummond wrote:
| My final year at uni, my grades didn't matter as I'd already
| locked down my classification (UK system). So yet not knowing
| and not caring, I somehow still managed to adequately triage my
| time across classes. I'm not sure that particular critique
| carries water with me - if each teacher is designing course
| objectives with their students, that process should factor in
| the student's other obligations.
| yupper32 wrote:
| In the US, your final average grade typically (though not
| always) follows you for your first 1-2 jobs, at least. So
| it's quite important.
|
| The objective is a high grade, and learning the material is
| second, due to the system.
|
| And to be clear, the objective in the author's class is also
| a high grade. They're not living in another system, they're
| just pretending it doesn't exist until the very end of the
| term.
|
| And I'm certainly not saying the system or particularly
| _good_ , but it _is_ the system that they have to work with
| right now.
| atdrummond wrote:
| I am American, for what it's worth. Similarly in the UK,
| the best jobs are restricted to 2:1 or 1st Class Honours
| degrees and there's been a move towards more American style
| reporting of the average grade received rather than just
| the classification.
|
| My point is mainly that I don't buy this system would
| negatively impact one's ability to time manage courses and
| extracurricular work and activities. And if grades were to
| suddenly disappear, companies would find other ways to weed
| out applicants.
| dpeck wrote:
| | It's as if the professor here thinks their class is the only
| one that matters.
|
| That tracks fairly well with most every class I remember.
|
| | Professionally, my task is complete when it meets the needs
| of the client and I get paid. With this class, tasks are never
| complete. There's always more revising to do, and you never
| know when to stop.
|
| Sadly that maps pretty well with client work as well. The
| person getting the work done always thinks it's the most
| important thing you're doing because it is for them.
| sirspacey wrote:
| It seems ridiculous, but it's not.
|
| Grades are an invalidated assessment framework:
|
| 1. They don't do what they say they do (assess retained
| learning, track progress) 2. They create perverse incentives
| that diminish students desire to learn 3. They emphasize
| evaluation over iteration. Iteration is by far the more
| important skill - both pragmatically, for building knowledge,
| and for emotional development (grit).
|
| I'll zero in on "track progress" since you mention that. Start
| with a simple question:
|
| What is progress in learning?
|
| You'll quickly uncover two things:
|
| * progress is non-linear & child specific * learning isn't
| about task completion
|
| Here's another teacher's view:
| https://www.jessestommel.com/why-i-dont-grade/
|
| Grade do serve one specific kind of student persona - those who
| optimize getting tasks done & getting good grades for it.
|
| Task completion is an important skill, but it is currently
| being taught at the expense of much more important & valuable
| skills.
|
| The justification for that is that task completion is hard,
| difficult for children to learn.
|
| Only it's not.
|
| It turns out that children generally complete many tasks when
| they are engaged in an open, iterative learning process.
| They'll even generate & complete their own!
|
| Can you name one student who invented homework for themselves
| after they already knew they are getting an A+?!
|
| "Most likely to succeed" by Harvard professor Tony Wagner is a
| great introduction to the academic research behind the above.
|
| There really is a better, child-friendly way to learn.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| Pretending that there is no place for objective metrics in
| school is just as silly as pretending there is no place for
| objective metrics in society at large. Grading may not be the
| perfect way to measure learning, but it is far superior than
| no objective metric at all. The fact is that schools exist to
| instill certain basic minimums of competency. We must have a
| way to measure whether or not those basic minimums are being
| met.
| EricE wrote:
| >We must have a way to measure whether or not those basic
| minimums are being met.
|
| The teacher tells them. In written feedback. Far more
| nuanced and helpful than just a letter grade.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| Perhaps you missed the "objective" part of "objective
| metric". If, for example, we want to determine a
| student's proficiency in algebra, it is far less useful
| to compare feedback from teachers with different
| standards, different abilities and different objectives
| than it is to compare the results from an objective test
| that is given to all students in all classes. Unlike
| standardized tests, teachers (and their assessments) vary
| wildly. The goals, expectations and abilities of an
| algebra teacher in Scranton, Ohio may (and often do) vary
| wildly from the goals, expectations and abilities of an
| algebra teacher in Juno, Alaska. Take ten different
| teachers and ask them to write an assessment of the same
| student, based on the same coursework, and you will get
| ten wildly different assessments. Teacher assessments may
| be useful for student feedback, but they are not useful
| for comparing the relative grasp of course information by
| different students.
| zem wrote:
| if (as people are claiming here) grades don't accurately
| measure proficiency, their being objective won't
| magically make them a better measure.
| mattcwilson wrote:
| If grades are utterly uncorrelated with proficiency, then
| you are correct.
|
| Is that your claim? Grades have zero information content,
| zero predictive power, over someone's proficiency at the
| time the grades are given?
| Bostonian wrote:
| Colleges, rightly have a minimum GPA to graduate. You can
| average grades on a 4.0 scale but not written feedback.
| Employers may use GPA as a metric when hiring. Written
| feedback can supplement but not replace grades.
| neon_electro wrote:
| Does this invalidate the author's point, given that she
| still delivers a GPA-compatible grade at the end of the
| course?
| qiskit wrote:
| > 1. They don't do what they say they do (assess retained
| learning, track progress)
|
| So getting an A or a C in arithmetic doesn't reveal anything
| about retained learning or track progress?
|
| > 2. They create perverse incentives that diminish students
| desire to learn
|
| No. They create incentives where none exists. The perversion
| is not the grade, testing, etc. The perversion is the system
| itself. Where kids are taken from their families to given to
| stranger to educate in an educational factory.
|
| > 3. They emphasize evaluation over iteration. Iteration is
| by far the more important skill - both pragmatically, for
| building knowledge, and for emotional development (grit).
|
| How do you determine the need for iteration unless you get
| some sort of feedback ( aka grade ). If you get a C in a
| test, that should indicate to the parent/student/teacher that
| the student needs to go over the material.
|
| > * progress is non-linear & child specific * learning isn't
| about task completion
|
| I agree with the former. But task completion is most
| definitely part of learning.
|
| > Grade do serve one specific kind of student persona - those
| who optimize getting tasks done & getting good grades for it.
|
| You conveniently left out "learning". Those who optimize
| getting tasks done and learning and therefore getting good
| grades. How do you get good grades? By learning the subject
| matter.
| alexvoda wrote:
| > So getting an A or a C in arithmetic doesn't reveal
| anything about retained learning or track progress?
|
| Yes, because Goodhart's law is applied. "When a measure
| becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Many of
| those getting an A in arithmetics will have learned "how to
| get an A" instead of "how to practice and use arithmetics".
|
| In Romania, where school is very focused on grades at all
| levels, pupils really do actually learn how to get the
| grade instead of how to think. And the actual content is
| forgotten after a week or a month.
| mattcwilson wrote:
| I see your point about the possibility for a student
| getting an A to have perhaps gamed the system.
|
| Are you saying the same is true for (some of, all of) the
| C students? Are you saying that C students may in some
| cases be superior to the students who got As (including
| the "didn't game the system" ones)?
| qiskit wrote:
| > Yes, because Goodhart's law is applied. "When a measure
| becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
|
| It depends on whether the grade is the ends or not. But
| here the grades aren't the ends. It's just a means to
| achieve the ends - learning the material.
|
| > Many of those getting an A in arithmetics will have
| learned "how to get an A" instead of "how to practice and
| use arithmetics".
|
| That's just a reflection of corruption in the system and
| not grading itself.
|
| > In Romania, where school is very focused on grades at
| all levels, pupils really do actually learn how to get
| the grade instead of how to think.
|
| No school anywhere exists to teach you how to think. But
| that's besides the point. Does the grade reflect the
| student's understanding of the material?
|
| > And the actual content is forgotten after a week or a
| month.
|
| Most content is forgotten regardless of the education
| system.
|
| So how do kids in romania learn to get good grades?
| Bribery? That doesn't show that grades are bad, but that
| the corruption is bad.
| olliej wrote:
| > It depends on whether the grade is the ends or not. But
| here the grades aren't the ends. It's just a means to
| achieve the ends - learning the material.
|
| This is objectively false in the US education system at
| least. If you look at the training for standardized tests
| (the training that costs money, but is fundamentally
| necessary if you want to get into a good school) a huge
| amount of it has nothing to do with the material, and
| everything to do with how to rapidly exclude incorrect
| answers. All of that exclusion is based on various
| numeric tricks or filters with no actual understanding of
| why. Moreover standardized tests in the US explicitly
| encourage that behaviour by being ridiculously time
| constrained, to the extent that if you do not get
| training in _how to *quickly* answer questions_ , no
| amount of understanding the material matters.
| solveit wrote:
| How much time do people actually spend on this training?
| I am dead certain that the bulk of the time is spent on
| actually learning the material and not on gaming the
| test. This is because there are only so many tricks you
| can learn, and you can learn them all in a week.
|
| > (the training that costs money, but is fundamentally
| necessary if you want to get into a good school
|
| This is objectively false. Source: I went to multiple
| good schools and met a boatload of people who also got in
| without said training.
|
| Also, that test-taking training is an overhyped and
| overpriced collection of cheap common sense strategies.
| You can learn how to do well on a multiple choice test in
| 20 seconds. You always pick the most likely answer.
| Strategies specific to things like the SATs boil down to
| memorizing vocab and doing a hundred practice tests. You
| can do this for a hundred bucks by buying a couple test
| prep books over Amazon. The part of the test-taking
| training that costs thousands of dollars is where they
| get a teacher with a fancy degree to babysit unmotivated
| children into actually doing the work.
|
| > Moreover standardized tests in the US explicitly
| encourage that behaviour by being ridiculously time
| constrained, to the extent that if you do not get
| training in how to _quickly_ answer questions, no amount
| of understanding the material matters.
|
| There is actual academic research studying this, and
| shockingly understanding correlates strongly with being
| able to quickly answer questions. It's unfortunate that
| we can't assess millions of children by having them take
| time-unconstrained oral exams or projects, but the effect
| of _training_ is grossly overstated. Show me any
| intervention (other than actually learning the material)
| that boosts your SAT score by more than ~30 points.
| solveit wrote:
| When a measure becomes a target, the measure will be
| optimized at the cost of the actual target _if the two
| diverge_. If the measure is close enough to the target
| that the easiest way to optimize the measure is to
| optimize the target, then you 'll be fine. If the easiest
| way to get an A in arithmetic is to know arithmetic, then
| students will learn arithmetic.
|
| There is a reason the previous poster chose arithmetic as
| an example. It is very difficult to pretend to know
| arithmetic without knowing arithmetic. Can Romanians add,
| subtract, multiply, and divide?
| neon_electro wrote:
| >How do you determine the need for iteration unless you get
| some sort of feedback ( aka grade ).
|
| Did you not read the article, where the author describes
| how taking grades off of her own plate allowed her to
| "[write] meaningful comments, [suggest] improvements, [ask]
| questions and [enter] into a dialogue with my students that
| felt more productive - that felt, in short, more like an
| extension of the classroom."
| mattcwilson wrote:
| Strange to assume GP didn't read the article. I did, and
| I have these similar questions:
|
| 1. How do I, as a student receiving this teacher
| feedback, know how seriously to take it? How do I know
| when it indicates I should spend an additional revision
| cycle on it, versus on another assignment (possibly from
| another teacher)?
|
| 2. Assuming I can figure out how to evaluate severity of
| the feedback and the relative amount of improvement I
| should do, how is this better than just a grade letter
| telling me how much further I can (or should) go?
|
| 3. The class still culminates in a letter grade, no? So
| doesn't this create a potentially super-high-stakes
| environment, where I need to be damned sure I understand
| what the cumulative feedback I've received means, in
| terms of final letter grade?
|
| This honestly reminds me of the phenomenon of doing end-
| of-year self assessments on a 1-5 scale and having to
| turn that in to a manager before receiving the "real" 1-5
| scale evaluation from them. Massively long feedback
| loops, massively high stakes and opportunity for
| misalignment. Why the heck would you not want early and
| frequent evaluation?
|
| Maybe it would help for me to understand specific
| examples of the assignment feedback given to students. I
| just see way too much risk for students to hear "you're
| fine; a couple rough spots, but everyone has those, no
| big deal" only to flunk the class at the end of the year
| in a massive surprise.
| yupper32 wrote:
| You're missing one key point that I meant to touch on in the
| original post: This professor is _still living in the bad
| system you describe_. They just pretend it doesn 't exist
| until the very end.
|
| If they were some private school that lived outside of the
| GPA system, or were apart of some tutoring company, then sure
| it'd probably work well. But they don't.
|
| So when I say "track progress", I mean track progress in the
| current system using the main thing I am (or, was) measured
| on: GPA.
| sjg007 wrote:
| There are private schools including home schools that live
| outside the GPA requirement. A few colleges remain that do
| not grade.
|
| We like GPAs because they reduce evaluation to a summary
| statistic.
|
| But guess what? GPA does not predict a good Googler. Some
| of the best programmers never had a formal CS education.
|
| We fool ourselves and do our children a great disservice by
| creating artificial ranking mechanisms for the sake of
| convenience.
| rat9988 wrote:
| > GPA does not predict a good Googler. Some of the best
| programmers never had a formal CS education.
|
| These two statements are independant
| sjg007 wrote:
| Yes, that is why they are separate sentences. Some great
| programmers never went to college!
| mariusor wrote:
| > At the end of the semester, I do have to give students
| grades, as required by the university.
|
| > But I do not grade individual assignments. Instead, I give
| students extensive feedback and ample opportunity to revise.
|
| I see here both tracking progress and providing a clear report
| on the end result of a task. This teacher seems to meet both
| your requirements, and probably doesn't deserve the disdain of
| someone that seems to hold the opinion that mindless grade
| chasing is the way to actually learn things.
|
| More so, there's no indication that the answer "I am here just
| to get the credits and get some reading done" is unacceptable
| to the question of "why are you here?".
| olliej wrote:
| Why is it ridiculous? Especially for a subjective class like
| "English"
|
| They aren't saying they're not giving completion feedback,
| they're saying they aren't giving explicit grades.
|
| They also call out specific problems with the grading approach,
| and I'm curious what your solution to those problems is?
| anm89 wrote:
| This is an English class, and the teacher is arguing it allows
| her to give more specific and useful feedback. This isn't some
| kind of "everyone gets a trophy" thing and I don't thing any
| one is advocating for this in the hard sciences.
|
| In this specific case of a writing seminar it makes a lot of
| sense.
| MarcScott wrote:
| > Grades allow for tracking progress across many different
| classes, so that you know for sure where you should spend your
| time studying.
|
| Which subjects you should be studying, but not how to improve
| your work, or specific areas of the subject you should be
| focusing on. If I get an A in French, do I just stop studying
| until I slip down to a B?
|
| I was a teacher for 15 years, and I can tell you that grades
| are meaningless. A kid gets an A and thinks they're done. They
| won't even bother to read the feedback to see how they could
| have improved their work. A kid gets an F and thinks they're
| done, they give up on the subject and again don't read any
| feedback.
|
| There's cultural and socioeconomic factors to add in as well.
| For some kids a grade C is great, for other it means they've
| failed. What is important is them knowing how to improve, not
| how they rank against their peers.
|
| You talk about your job, and meeting the needs of your client.
| Does that mean you don't read or listen to feedback from your
| client? If you get paid, no matter how badly you did the work
| just to meet contractual obligations, is that all you care
| about? Imagine you got paid on a scale, awarded by the client,
| with an A being the full amount and an F being $0.
| mattcwilson wrote:
| > What is important is them knowing how to improve, not how
| they rank against their peers.
|
| 100% agree with this. I don't see how it's fundamentally
| incompatible with grades. If anything, a pre-post grade
| change, imo, would be the best indicator that they have
| learned how to improve.
|
| How about this - don't put limits on the number of times an
| assignment can be resubmitted. Grade each submission on the
| same scale. _Don't_ give the kids the grade right away. Give
| them the written feedback, talk to them about how they did,
| ask them if they want to do a resubmit. Once they answer,
| _then_ reveal the grade. Repeat as many times as the student
| is motivated to do so.
|
| I love the idea of marrying up evaluation, iteration,
| objectivity, and not disheartening kids early. The point
| about iteration and feedback is the best part of the article;
| I just don't understand why it requires eliminating graded
| assignments.
| yupper32 wrote:
| > What is important is them knowing how to improve, not how
| they rank against their peers.
|
| That's not true, though. What's important in the current
| system is your GPA, which is sometimes correlated to your
| rank in the class (curved grades being the most direct
| correlation).
|
| What you're asking for is for the system to change. What I'm
| asking for is for professors to not ignore that the system
| exists and to recognize that the incentives are not what
| they'd like them to be.
| itronitron wrote:
| My undergraduate major was within a college (within a
| university) in which all of the major classes were
| portfolio driven and the first year core classes were a mix
| of portfolio and graded assignments. All of the classes
| regularly engaged in feedback (daily, weekly, or monthly)
| and in a group setting as well. Students very quickly
| learned the criteria for A level work, and depending on the
| professor or assignment it wasn't always achievable.
|
| An important part of that system is educating students so
| they can identify for themselves where their work can be
| improved, and what they can achieve given their current
| abilities and available resources.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >If you get paid, no matter how badly you did the work just
| to meet contractual obligations, is that all you care about?
|
| For many people, yes.
|
| >Imagine you got paid on a scale, awarded by the client, with
| an A being the full amount and an F being $0.
|
| For many others, this is how it works. You are compensated
| basic on metrics of performance.
| qiskit wrote:
| > If I get an A in French, do I just stop studying until I
| slip down to a B?
|
| It depends on what the student's goals are? Did the student
| just take french because it's required or are they taking it
| because they want to be fluent? All grades do is tell you
| what your current level is.
|
| > I was a teacher for 15 years, and I can tell you that
| grades are meaningless. A kid gets an A and thinks they're
| done. They won't even bother to read the feedback to see how
| they could have improved their work. A kid gets an F and
| thinks they're done, they give up on the subject and again
| don't read any feedback.
|
| You use extremes to justify your conclusion. Many students
| and parents use grades/feedback to spend more time on a
| subject, get help, etc.
|
| > There's cultural and socioeconomic factors to add in as
| well.
|
| So what? There will always be cultural and socioeconomic
| factors. People nowadays use it as a crutch.
|
| > What is important is them knowing how to improve, not how
| they rank against their peers.
|
| How will they know they've improved without a grade?
| ryandrake wrote:
| I grew up with A, B, C, D, and F. You always knew where you
| stood, where you were excelling, where you were going fine, and
| where you needed to put in extra effort. It was simple and
| effective.
|
| My daughter's school uses this ridiculous categorization:
|
| - M: meeting standard
|
| - P: progressing towards standard
|
| - T: needs more time to meet standard
|
| - AC: area of concern
|
| Her "grades" are usually simply all M. Totally useless as a
| parent. I have no idea what "M" means in terms of her
| competitive ranking amongst her peers, readiness for AP or
| advanced courses and/or trajectory for future success in
| college. Someone who is barely hanging on, but technically
| "meets the standard" and someone who is a literal genius in the
| subject will both get "M". It tells me (and her) nothing.
| sjg007 wrote:
| How would a letter grade change your understanding of where
| she ranks? And why is a competitive ranking among her peers
| important?
| sytelus wrote:
| This is classic example of what happens when system tries to
| make everyone feel good about themselves no matter where they
| actually stand. The feedback signal is now so blunt that it
| is fairly useless. It's like you remove all the grading in
| compass and how you have no idea which direction you are
| moving and where you have to go. As a child, grading is what
| motivated me to work harder and be proud of my achievement.
| It's the reward you get for putting in the work. It was the
| reason I gravitated to doing extra work instead of watching
| TV. This new system basically says you have to do minimal
| thing and there is no reward or motivation provided for going
| above and beyond the norms.
|
| The argument that this will somehow help underpriviledged
| students is so severely misguided. I was in fact the
| underpriviledged student. The good grades is what allowed
| others to invest in me and give me opportunities. It was one
| thing I could own and control. I feel sorry for so many
| talented hardworking underpriviledged students who will have
| nothing more to show for than "Meets standards".
| alexvoda wrote:
| And that is perhaps the point. I believe that the intention
| is that you should not stress about it as long as they are
| doing fine. And that you should not pass that stress to the
| child either. The grade is only there to warn you if there is
| a problem. To get feedback about the areas of performance,
| you should talk directly to the teacher and receive more than
| just 3 bits of information.
|
| Even with a much more granular grading system, as long as the
| grades are assigned based on task completion (correctly
| solving all the exercises in a test) instead of ranking, you
| will still have a inability to distinguish anything above top
| grade.
|
| If you move to a ranking system, where grades are assigned by
| comparison to peers, you run into issues of fairness, because
| resource availability inevitably plays a role.
| mattcwilson wrote:
| You seem to be implying that there is no value in a student
| who just barely meets the standard trying any harder or
| going any further. I hear you about stress. You seem to be
| saying though that even when stress isn't an issue, there
| is no value in that student doing anything further (at that
| time). Am I mistaken?
| outside1234 wrote:
| Making another observation on this - this is actually how the
| corporate world works - so might as well get used to it. You
| submit a self assessment -- and fairly or not -- your manager
| adjusts it to what they perceive. Might as well get started on
| understanding how to play and master that game.
| Bostonian wrote:
| One student may outperform another because she is currently
| working harder, has worked harder in the past and is thus better
| prepared, or is simply more intelligent. The professor does not
| know why some students are doing better than others, and it's his
| business only to the extent that he can adapt his teaching to
| improve student learning.
|
| "For almost 10 years I have been studying inclusive pedagogy,
| which focuses on ensuring that all students have the resources
| they need to learn. My studies confirmed my sense that sometimes
| what I was really grading was a student's background. Students
| with educational privilege came into my classroom already
| prepared to write A or B papers, while others often had not had
| the instruction that would enable them to do so. The 14 weeks
| they spent in my class could not make up for the years of
| educational privilege their peers had enjoyed."
| matt321 wrote:
| In the USA, public school students who show up the required
| amount of days will graduate. No child left behind. Since failing
| grades can't keep you from graduating, then grading is pointless.
| Stop grading and colleges that are based on merit will look at
| your standardized tests, and colleges not based on merit don't
| care about how you perform anyway.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| _Since failing grades can 't keep you from graduating, then
| grading is pointless._
|
| That's not true, there is still the GPA.
| EricE wrote:
| More teaching/guiding and less judging. About time. School always
| felt like mostly a waste of time, doing rote things not because
| they would provided value but instead "because we always have
| done it".
|
| So much "we had to eat shit at your age, so here's your shit
| sandwich too"
| belval wrote:
| I had a teacher do something like that for a "communication"
| class and I hated it. Not only on the basis of class average/GPA,
| but mostly just because it was a complete joke.
|
| You'd have people that could barely speak the language, were
| reading their cards the whole time and with powerpoint
| presentations stuffed with grammatical errors that got better
| grades than native speakers.
| [deleted]
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