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Pass/Fail can work reasonably well with well motivated students with good
work ethics, but consider what would happen (does happen) with the greater
proportion of students under pass/fail systems. They figure out how to do
the minimum amount of work to pass. While such students aren't going to go
out of their way to 'learn' in graded classes, you can often get them to do
enough work to actually develop a skill or two and even learn something in
spite of themselves. Under pass/fail the only goal is to 'pass'.
So, IMO (which has changed--used to think this was a great idea), pass/fail
systems are only good for high-end college prep programs and prestigious
university programs where the school reputation AND the standardized test
scores (SAT,GRE,MCAT) of the already highly motivated students will get them
into the colleges or graduate programs they seek.
It would take a much larger kind of experiment with some full-range
(student-wise) high-schools and colleges going totally pass-fail and then
comparing a few years of state achievement tests, SAT, ACT, GRE, MCAT, etc.
scores between equivalent graded programs and pass/fail programs to convince
me that pass/fail would work for the majority.
I would be interested in how the students in the 'high-end' pass/fail
systems like it. I have anecdotal accounts that says at least some
don't--the lack of a 'reward' or a ranking of their achievement bothers
them.
Rick
*********************************************************
Richard W. Tarara
Professor of Physics
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, Indiana
rtarara@saintmarys.edu
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Free Physics Educational Software (Win & Mac)
www.saintmarys.edu/~rtarara/software.html
NEW: Mac versions of Lab Simulations
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----- Original Message -----
From: "John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>
To: <PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu>
Sent: Friday, September 27, 2002 9:18 AM
Subject: Re: grades, pass/fail etc.
Steve Clark wrote:
My first year teaching was in a private school where the
only grades we gave was PASS or FAIL. Amazingly, most
students did very well when we took the grade pressure off
of them. ....
Tim O'Donnell wrote:
I often have thought that pass/fail is the way to go. I do
think students would then focus better on learning. I
have often thought about a check list. A student does
receive credit until all topic are checked. A lot of students
(some who want to be engineers) avoid my class because
it might hurt their GPA. It seems that the GPA is