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Re: Grades: General thoughts



"Raymond A. Rogoway" wrote:
2. I know I will be castigated for this (all ready have) but I encourage
my students to get a B in at least one subject in both high school and
college. That way they can forget the striving for a 4.0 and start to
enjoy their educational experience. That way they are (hopefully) taking
the course for the content and not the grade.

In grade 9 I won the top academic award, beating out over 200 fellow
students, but I hadn't had a single straight A report card that year.
For me it is something that I can always go back to when somebody doubts
the reality of "grade inflation". Going back to Leigh's comment about
prefering a system in which I was able to survive/thrive... I was able
to take classes such as drama, creative writing, and typing where a C or
B as going to be my top performance mark, and still have a shot at
recognition for academic excellence. I think this is something Raymond
would approve of, but it wouldn't happen in the current grade inflated
era.

The fact that it can now be seen as devasting to scholarships etc to
obtain less than straight A's suggests to me that collectively we have
in effect given up on grades as having any real meaning. Maybe they
never did have real meaning and we were only kidding ourselves, but if
so why do we bother giving them at all? As physicists perhaps we should
be putting +/- on all our assigned grades - stop pretending that we can
really measure the difference between B+ and A performance. Of course,
there's nowhere on the transcript to actually put the grading
uncertainty figure. As a next best option, the bottom of the transcript
should read "the grades shown here are accurate within 1.0 nineteen
times out of twenty". (**take any offensive parts of this paragraph as
being interspersed with various <nudge>, <grin>, ;-> etc)

3. Finally. Ponder the irony of this.

a. As soon as a student gets accepting to a University no one ever
inquires about his/her elementary, middle school, and/or high school
grades again. 12 years of stress, being grounded for bringing home a
"C". Beatings, etc. All now useless and senseless.

(Sounds like poor parenting more than a problem with the grading
system.)

This goes all the way back. People take great pride in their kids who
can read/write or do basic math at age 4 or their 8 month old who can
walk, but by the time they're in early elementary school that's all
forgotten.

The point in any sort of grading shouldn't be that this is what proves
you for all time, in every situation we demonstrate our competence for
that situation and could be assigned a new "grade" for that situation.
Learn what you should learn to meet your goals. If there is really some
life advantage to reading at age 4, then teach your kids to read at age
4, but if nobody can distinguish those kids by grade 3 then why bother
(other than to obtain a couple of years of boasting rights)?

b. As soon as a student gets accepted either into Grad School or
employed no one ever inquires about his/her college grades again. 4 to 8
years of stress, near suicide, etc. All now useless and senseless.

And once you have your PhD... Whenever you move on everything else
becomes history, what you are doing now (and in the near past) is the
criteria against which you will be normally be evaluated. There has
been almost no case where a potential employer of stature has asked me
for even graduate transcripts. However, some pretenders to greatness
have wanted to see my transcripts all the way back to high school. The
correlation has been high enough that I now use whether they ask for
transcripts as one of my criteria for deciding whether to apply for a
given job.

c. Never in the history of man has a GPA, SAT score, or ACT score
been mentioned in an obituary or on a grave stone.

I don't know this for a fact, having not examined every obituary or
grave stone. However, its probably pretty close to being true. Neither
do they normally mention when the person learned to walk, recite ABC,
speak a second language, play a musical instrument... but that's not
proof that these things aren't important for some purpose at the time.

So just what is the measure of a man/woman and how much self worth,
stress, angst, psychological damage is down in the name of EVALUATION?

Evaluation is a fact of life. You are evaluated at work (for hiring,
promotions etc), as a potential mate... even the value of your
contributions to this discussion are being evaluated by your peers as
they decide whether to agree/disagree/ignore. You do not do anybody a
service by making them think they can make it through life without
others evaluating them. The challenge in all cases is to make
evaluations which effectively serve their intended purpose. So the
first thing to decide is what is the purpose(s) of school grades? Here
are some suggestions:

1) to demonstrate the level of knowledge obtained in a subject

2) to demonstrate the level of work and commitment you can expect from
this person

3) to demonstrate the intrinsic potential which a person brings to the
subject

4) to provide students/parents with feedback about how well they are
doing

I could propose more, but I'll leave that to anybody else who thinks
that it would be useful. #4 has been one of my greatest frustrations as
a parent of elementary school kids. Our report cards have entries like
"M" (maturing in ability), "E" (exploring), "S" (satisfactory) and so on
with nothing along the lines of "W" (work harder please). Its only by
talking to the teacher that you can find out if you need to get your
child to put more effort into a subject, and even then it can be
difficult. In this case the pendulum seems to have swung so far in one
direction that it makes report cards almost pointless except to try and
make everyone feel good. It doesn't make me feel good because I still
don't know what I need to know in order to help my child out.

\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\

Doug Craigen
http://www.dctech.com/physics/about_dc.html