Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: grades, assessments, etc.



John is quite right about grades (and just about everything else). They are
not that important.

If you want to see what organizations value, ask them what is on their
interview sheets or on their annual performance review sheets. The bottom
line is that you must add value to the organization. To do this, you should
have unique skills and knowledge, useful to the organization, that
complements the skills and knowledge of others in the organization.

If you want to prepare students for industry, ask the companies that hired
your students what their initial job assignments were and how your students
performed.

Here's an example of what 3M, a company known to be innovative, found to be
important characteristics of innovators:
http://mustang.coled.umn.edu/inventing/Innovation.html

Personally, I have found that the last characteristic to be critical:
"Take multiple approaches to a problem"
Yet I was never asked to develop multiple solutions to a problem - ever - in
school.

As an example of how my education could have been improved and better
prepared me:

My graduate course in E&M used Jackson. The professor mostly derived all of
the equations in Jackson and assigned problems. Very few problems in Jackson
are applied problems. At some point in the course, we should have been
asked something like:

"Your job is to design a certain type of antenna. (By the way, I don't know
anything about antennas.)
How are they currently designed? What materials are used? Who are the
companies that make them? What are the difference in their products? What
are problems with current designs? What are some recent patents about - what
have others been inventing? Determine some possible ways that you could
improve the existing designs - for cost, durability, or performance." (This
is the reality of much of R&D)

In general, the questions instead were: verify that the following equation
describes (fill in the blank).

I believe that "reformed" approaches that use a learning cycle are much more
closely allied with what I would have preferred and what would have prepared
me for my career, as compared to what I was actually taught in school.


Larry Woolf; General Atomics; 3550 General Atomics Court, San Diego, CA
92121; Phone:858-526-8575; FAX:858-526-8568; http://www.sci-ed-ga.org

-----Original Message-----
From: John S. Denker
To: PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu
Subject: Re: grades, assessments, etc.


1) In general, you can't possibly guess what traits
bosses are looking for.
2) Many of the behaviors that produce good GPAs (such
as signing up for the easiest-possible classes, not to
mention cheating) are anti-correlated with what I'm usually
looking for.
3) To be blunt: Teachers give out grades. Teachers
like to feel important. Ergo teachers drift toward thinking
that grades are important. Well, sorry, they're just not
that important. To the extent that you can use grades to
motivate the students, fine, but don't let students think
that grades _per se_ are the objective.


I still believe that GPAs are of verrry little value for
bosses, and I'm not backpedalling on that... But I
recognize that grades have some value for motivating
some subset of the students. You don't want them to
hesitate to take electives for fear of ruining their GPA.