Many teachers...grading...for compliance - not for mastering course material
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Later that year, another of the junior valedictorians was caught cheating on a test. After some deliberation among the councilors and administrators it was decided that she would receive only an informal reprimand, because to fail her with a note on her transcript about cheating (as dictated by school policy) could hurt her chances of getting into a good school (to say nothing of how it would effect her chances of receiving a National Merit Scholarship that the school loved to boast of its students receiving).
On several occasions it was explained to me that it would be "unfair" to heavily weight test scores, because many of the "best" students, who turned in all of their assignments on time, had difficulty understanding the material and might not be able to do well.
I hate to sound bitter, but even the public university I attend now (I wasn't one of the "best" students. I got A's on tests but didn't do much homework - didn't see the point, since I knew the material) is refreshingly performance based compared to that high school. Other than a few exceptional teachers, I find it best for my blood pressure to try to forget high school entirely.
In Wisconsin, the valedictorian gets a full-ride to anywhere in the UW system. Due to this, many valedictorians I've seen take easy classes and graduate with a 4.1, whereas many of those with lower GPAs--due to difficult classes--end up going to better schools. One year the valedictorian went to UW-Whitewater, and the Salutatorian went to Yale.
Of course, they are the ones who were more successful in university.
It's possible our honors classes were less rigorous than yours, too. As I pointed out in a recent thread, AP classes at my school were noticeably more rigorous than honors classes, because our normal honors classes wouldn't have been sufficient preparation for an AP test.
Also, it still penalizes students taking larger course loads. I had a friend who was robbed of Valedictorian basically because their A in Choir was pulling down their GPA, while they was taking all of the same courses as the Valedictorian in addition to choir, and outperforming the Valedictorian.
So you need to somehow penalize students who take weaker course loads, possibly by multiplying GPA by number of graded credits.
A lot of schools really heavily incentivize taking AP classes, because one of the main high school rankings (Newsweek/Washington Post) is literally "(AP tests taken)/(seniors graduated)". Yes, that's "taken", not "passed" or "aced". So you wind up in a situation in some schools where your options are "Physics for Jocks" or "AP Physics with a free +1.0 to your GPA". I was in a situation my senior year where I wound up taking 7 AP classes, not because I specifically wanted 7 AP classes, but because the alternatives were AP or "class that barely targets the standardized test you could already pass on Day 1"
I wasn't aware that a student could even focus on liberal arts in HS. When I was in HS there was some class choice at the high end, but every student had to take some sort of math, english, and social studies every year.
The councilor told me the average AP Physics test score was slightly above a 2. Calculus (AB - the differential/integral only version) test scores were in that range as well, despite most students getting As in both classes.
I haven't had a pay raise in over two years. My strategy for increasing the passing rate is to give points for things a well trained monkey could do. I give points for coming to my office. I give points for things that have nothing to do with mathematics.
By and large society does not really want us to grade on knowledge. People don't want to hear that they, or their kids, don't know something and that they will have to work in order to gain the required knowledge. People want a high GPA not a high level of knowledge.
I'm reminded of the Soviet joke:
As long as you pretend to pay us we will pretend to work.
60% of the students are seeking acceptance into the nursing program. The school claims it is one of "the top nursing schools in the country". This claim is based on their graduation rates (for those accepted, around 80%). The school inflates their graduation rates by leaning on biology teachers to increase the rate at which people pass their classes, and by making the most difficult classes (e.g. Microbiology) optional.
The problem is that community and liberal arts colleges are small enough that the only significant measure of success is the rate at which students graduate. In my school, at least, nursing tends to (by and large) attract the sort of stupid people who are only interested in the certificate. In this the program is surpassed only by Elementary Education. Thus, economic pressures overpower academic concerns.
Side note: I worry about our nurses. I spent the first three days of June in in the Intermountain Hospital, and I caught the CNAs inadvertently giving me someone else's prescription. Twice.
This may be a valid request, but it's impossible to know without more information. If we take your total pool of students we can probably break them down into 4 groups
1) Intelligent and motivated 2) Intelligent and unmotivated 3) Not intelligent and motivated 4) Not intelligent and not motivated
Nearly all students in 1) should be passing while nearly all students in 4) should be failing. It's the students in groups 2) and 3) where the teacher can really make a difference. This is where teaching styles, more/less work, etc... come into play.
If a large percentage of students from groups 2) and 3) are failing then there may be some teaching issues that need to be addressed. Group 4) simply needs to not be let in the class in the first place.
A is 27 years old, never had algebra in high school and hasn't had math in 10 years. She's going to college because her hands have arthritis and she can't continue to cut hair (her current profession) for much longer. I'm trying to teach her in one semester stuff that took me a year to learn when I was in eighth grade. I told her the class was going to be tough. I told her it would require a lot of effort on her part and that it would be frustrating. Her response was, "Well, I have a life outside of school and work and I'm not going to sacrifice it." I knew then she would fail. She dropped a few weeks ago.
B is Hmong barely speaks English, has 7 kids, a job and never went to school as a child. She's getting an A.
Is A's failure my fault? Is B's success my fault?
My experience is that groups 2, 4 as you label them are a large majority of the students I encounter. I can't force a student to be willing to sit down and do problems. And algebra is a subject that requires you to do problems to get it. If a student isn't motivated there isn't much I can do.
Learning is work. It requires effort. It's frustrating. Students at my college, for the most part, are not willing to go through the frustration, effort, and work necessary to learn. I'm a bad motivator. I've tried to be a better motivator. I believe strongly in the correctness of the Chinese proverb:
A teacher can only open the door to the house of knowledge, he can not make you enter.
If schools were simply a place of teaching and learning, such a student should face no problems, but in most schools he would be highly unlikely to graduate. The imposition of discipline is not merely a secondary function necessary to facilitate teaching, it is an end in itself. Children are taught that a teacher must be obeyed because he is powerful, not because he is worth listening to. There is a clear and persistent message that teachers should be respected and obeyed simply because they have a bigger desk. Even in jurisdictions where it is relatively easy to dismiss incompetent teachers, they are rarely dealt with. I believe that there is simply no demand to do so, as teaching is merely a ruse to allow for schooling to happen.
I argue that the failures of our school system are not simply symptomatic of underfunding, union problems or poor strategy. They are the product of our inability to define the purpose of schooling, our unwillingness to confront the role of schools as cheap daycare, and our hypocrisy as to the real purpose of schooling as a thing apart from education.
School admittedly has multiple purposes, but your view of it is, I think, unnecessarily cynical. Sure, there are bad teachers and systems out there, but there are also amazing teachers, principals, and superintendents doing unbelievable things with students - both academically, and socially.
For one, parents expect that schools are, at least to some extent, keeping their kids safe and out of trouble during school hours. It may not always work out that way, but when the rule is that they have to be in class, at least the school isn't endorsing them leaving, so there's a lot less liability.
Also, there's a lot of gray area that arises if you start making exceptions. How old is old enough for high achievers to skip school? Obviously, you're not going to let a first grader skip school, but when does it start becoming ok? And how high achieving do they have to be? If a kid has a B+ in one class, is he still allowed to skip school? And when do you tell a straight-A student whose grades start to slip that he has to start coming to class again? If he gets one B on one test, that's probably just a fluke, but where do you draw the line and tell him he's not doing well enough?
Plus the lower-achieving kids would complain of unfairness. And it's a lot harder to enforce rules against truancy when some people are allowed to leave. People would see kids leaving school, but might assume that they're just approved truants.
It also raises the incentive to cheat. A student could cheat on every assignment and test to keep up his A averages so that he can keep skipping school, and then he'd really be learning absolutely nothing. That's an extreme case, and he'd probably get caught eventually, but when you reward high marks on tests, people will go to great lengths to do better, but they might not be the lengths you want.
If schools were teaching deference and compliance, you wouldn't have such a student who is truant yet aced every test.
The truth is our schools aren't teaching much of anything, and it's partially because of the attitude you outline in your post - everyone believes that their child is that exceptional student who despite being an arrogant prick and never showing up to class, is still brilliant. Consequently they raise hell until teachers relent and give their children good grades. Now, of course this is less likely to happen with the aforementioned truant child, because the teacher has something concrete to point to as to why the child is undeserving. In the case of the child who shows up every day and does work yet is not learning, the teacher has nothing to tell the parents other than the truth - and the truth will cause the teacher a world of grief.
Of course, really, parents don't have to actually cause trouble. The assumption that every child is deserving of good grades has been institutionalized, so teachers have to have wills of iron to go in year after year and risk parental attacks.
One of the basic premises of SBG is that students know exactly what knowledge and skills they have to master. They are assessed and then encouraged to address weaknesses so that they can be re-assessed. This is opposed to a "gotcha!" based assessment system.
This approach can have a profound impact on students because it encourages them to assess their own learning and take the initiative to grow and improve.
My mom started using standards based grading this year in her IB & honors chemistry classes. She's been very successful so far with it and her students have been rising to the occasion with their re-assessments. From her, it sounds like defining all of her tests and assignments in terms of the standards (knowledge and skills) they cover and grading them as such has been difficult, but effective.
This is a great post describing the mechanics of SBG. You'll get a sense of how it can work in a rigorous high school classroom.
Because it would be tremendously difficult to grade the students on both things separately.
One of the problems with schools and our society in general is the idea that you can take something complicated and distill it down to a single, meaningful number. Another problem is the notion that you should even try to do this. We're taking this to ridiculous extremes.
I can easily say in a single sentence, "Johnny has mastered 95% of this material but he's apathetic, only completes half of his homework on time, and throws spitballs at his classmates." Done. How hard is that?
Are they trying to save paper and ink costs on report cards?
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So why not have a comments section? Is it too much to ask that a subjective assessment be spelled out in a written sentence or two?
The problem is that, in our increasingly data driven world, comments are very hard to deal with on the large scale. I'm actually working on trying to define goodness around teaching interactions, and one of the big wildcards is how we structure feedback such that we get the depth of comments, and the processability of numbers. It's tough.
I don't see any indication that there is not a comments section.
Translated: order/tidyness/organized-ness, participation in lessons, diligence and conduct.
Some people still moan that this system was given up, and there are occasional discussion about re-introducing it.
"Some people still moan that this system was given up, and there are occasional discussion about re-introducing it." lost all meaning when it was used with regards to the Trabi.
I know that I didn't get into my (Top-25) college based on my High School GPA[1], and I know I got my current entry-level job despite my college GPA. Fortunately, the people evaluating the grades aren't using them as the only criteria.
"How hard is that?"
OK, but do that 150 times. And remember that one wrong word in that sentence is going to draw lawsuit threats or complaints to the principal/school board. You'll eventually be forced to fall back on pre-screened, buzzword-heavy, meaning-light phrases like many school districts currently have.
[1] - 9 people from my high school graduating class went to my college - #2 through #9 in the GPA ranking and me (#38, barely in the top 10%)
Well it depends on what school is for. To be perfectly honest, I'd say that organization and scheduling my time properly and working hard are far more important in college and in the workplace than mastery of subject matter that's ultimately outside my career field. I don't use what I learned in Physics or Calculus or German at my job or in my life, but I need to be organized and schedule my time (work time and personal time) effectively on a daily basis.
"The percentage of students who attend college is rising; 67 percent of high school graduates now enroll in some sort of post-secondary school after graduation (up from 43 percent in 1973). But the reality is that many don’t succeed, in large part because they are not academically prepared."
I don't know if it's because they don't know the material or because they aren't able to adjust to working as hard or managing their time as effectively. From my perspective (entering college in 2005) it was generally the case that students had gotten used to skating by because they could get A-'s without trying and then ran into trouble in college, not that students who had worked hard but weren't as smart were getting too overwhelmed to get good grades. Personally, if I had gone into college with less material knowledge and better organizational/management skills, I'd wager my GPA would have been like a point higher or something.
Disclaimer: I was absolutely one of those "knew the material, scrambling to finish homework as the teacher was collecting it" types in HS, so my grades suffered relative to a purely "material mastery" metric.
I think that's an issue at the core of a lot of the debates around evaluating both students and teachers. You can measure some of it really well, but much of it is on the "soft" side of things. You want to be able to quantify it in order to understand whether or not a student is actually progressing across a wide array of dimensions, but, by it's nature, it is hard to quantify.
In my experience, in the US, EMPLOYEES in marketing, sales, management, finance, and operations do much better if they have high "life/social" skills even when their level of intelligence or knowledge are lower than others. However, this pattern doesn't fit IT/software and engineering (hard sciences) where creativity and knowledge are required. Some of the best engineers have the worst social skills. You won't find that in other fields.
Then there are the entrepreneurs who tend to break rules and take shortcuts. But they also tend to prefer to hire rule followers. I used to be surprised by all the entrepreneurs without degrees who require degrees for employment. But today I think good entrepreneurs instinctively know they need rule followers to carry out their vision and provide balance.
The question we need to ask about education: What are we trying to produce?
a. Good employees b. Innovative scientists c. Entrepreneurs d. All of the above
d. All of the above. The problem is... Our unionized government run education system isn't flexible enough to allow these different types of people to consciously choose their own path. Instead, in the past, it tried to turn everyone into a rule follower. Now the approach in the article is trying to turn everyone into a scientist and/or entrepreneur. The answer is to educate and evaluate different people different ways. Social skills are critical for some professions, and others not so much. Rule following is also essential in some professions, but deadly in others.
K-12 education as we know it today was first mandated/implemented by the King of Prussia in the 1860's to jump into the Industrial Revolution. We sent envoys to study and copy his schools. He sought 3 products: Compliant citizens, efficent factory workers, and obedient soldiers. We in the US have added a 4th purpose: free day care so both parents can be productive workers.
Can't separate the tree from the seed. Talk of "reform" needs to remember origins.
On the side, you have a series of other 'grades' on the side. I can't remember their names now, but they broadly mapped to how disruptive you were, your initiative, how much of your work you completed (marked and unmarked) etc etc. These were marked as excellent, good, satisfactory, or needs improvement. From what I remember, it's actually not possible to fail as a result of having a lot of N's. Though in my case, I got a talking to from my parents whenever an N (or a few S's) showed up.
I remember thinking that those marks were kinda bullshit. And to an extent they are, since they are subjective and easily colored by how much a teacher likes you. I also knew some teachers who really hated dealing with that stuff and just gave everyone Gs, except for the trouble makers who got Ss.
The article asks the questions:
Should students be rewarded for being friendly, prepared, compliant, a good school citizen, well organized and hard-working? Or should good grades represent exclusively a student’s mastery of the material?
This strikes me as a false dichotomy, and it sounds like it has been in use with no catastrohpic effects.
But on the other hand, I think part of the reason that I have such a thorough understanding of calculus is that my Calc AB teacher required us to do large quantities of homework. And I was totally fine with having to turn in weekly problem sets in my Multivariable Calc and ODE courses senior year because I needed the homework to solidify my understanding.
I probably would have done the Multivariable and ODE homework on my own because I actually struggled with those classes, but I probably would have done only a small fraction of my AB homework if it weren't required. I still would have gotten A's on most of my AB tests, but I might not have had quite as solid of a foundation. I think I'm better off because I had to do that homework. So that has made me question how I feel about mandatory homework.
Plus, that there's the issue of students who aren't disciplined enough/don't care enough to do optional homework even if they know that that will lead them to do poorly on tests.
It's possible that a system where homework is optional for people who are doing well could solve the latter problem, but it wouldn't have made me do my AB homework. Plus it might breed even more resentment against the nerds who get to skip the homework just because they know the material.
tl;dr: I've experienced many classes where mandatory homework bored me out of my mind and wasted my time, but at other times it has helped me a lot. Also, some people will do as little as they're required, so if homework is optional, they won't do it even if they just failed a test the day before.
"...their grades are more accurately reflecting their knowledge, not whether or not they brought in a box of Kleenex for the classroom, a factor that had influenced grades at Ellis in the past."
I applaud the effort to separate knowledge grades from "life skills" grades. I can't imagine anything more useless than making a kid repeat a class or defer their graduation when they've already acquired the requisite knowledge.
I think that only makes sense if the output of the evaluation is the end state and not the learning of the student. Ideally teaching and evaluating (not grading) is baked into one action. A teacher works closely with a student, assists them in their studies, judges the amount they've learned (evaluates) and where they're struggling, and helps them with their weak points. Done. The standardized tests are then given (if they must), and the teacher is allowed to look over the results to judge from an external evaluation how well the student did and learn from it.
Is this different from what you're saying?
Formal end-of-term type grades do not directly serve the students. They are used by others to rank the students and decide who among them are useful for a given purpose (jobs, college admissions). Students are still going to want these so they can signal to employers that they are valuable.
The grades are incentives that the teacher can use to control students. The intended use is of course to get them to learn the material. One point of the article is that they are also easily used for other types of control. Because teachers are to some extent judged by how well their students do, there is often pressure for them to give better grades. Occasionally there is some inflexible rubric of X% of each class must get grade Y. There is no direct pressure that these grades should correspond at all to mastery of material.
Grades on e.g. homework assignments and quizzes can also serve to help the students (or their parents) gauge their progress and find weak areas so they can better learn the material.
Most schools in the U.S. make the final grades incorporate these earlier grades. This means there is pressure on these grades as well making them less useful for the purpose of helping the student learn better. This also means that they are useful for control, because students care about their final grades.
Suppose instead that the final grades were not at all set by teachers. Imagine something like the AP tests. Because the homework and quiz grades would not factor in, they are less useful as means of control, and theri only use is now monitoring and helping he student learn. Because the testers are not teachers, there is much less incentive to score the students highly. They can measure mastery with much less bias.
More then half the parent teacher meetings I've been to (K through 12) where with teachers who I would fire if they worked for me. Having achieved six figure salaries by surviving school politics they contribute as little as possible to their students while punching their ticket each year until retirement. The good teachers are not rewarded but penalized for not going along with policies created to benefit administrators.
Having excelled at politics as a teacher the administrators are interested in nothing more than having days without problems. A day where everyone behaves and follows the rules is the quest. Parents seeking accountibility from schools are a problem. I have never seen an administrator hold a teacher accountable for not doing their job of teaching the students.
The adults who are not in the discussion yet for improving schools are the parents. Every slackard kid has a slackard or absent parent. Too many parents see school as a babysitting service allowing them to concentrate on more important things.
My primary objection to the article is the statement that the main reason students don't succeed in college is that they are unprepared. The main reason kids don't succeed in college is because they don't belong there. Too many adults teach college as the 13th grade. Kids go there because it's the path of least resistance. Kids who were unmotivated in school are not going to be magically motivated just because they are now in a junior or four year college.
Johnny can't do university because all through his life the adults didn't give a shit. They were only looking out for themselves.
Failure does not exist in the U.S. public school system. Even if a student does not participate, they are "remediated," wherein they sit in front of a computer for 6 weeks in order to receive class credit.
Each of them admits that things are critically wrong with the system, and have proposed solutions to ones that I've read on HN. But, they know it's simply never as easy as many journalists propose. You can't unshift our education system's paradigm without considerable labor.
One: The tail wags the dog. Since No Child Left Behind, schools have had one major metric: test scores. They have now geared everything else towards making test scores improve, from curriculum to teaching how to take a test. So the test drives all.
Two: Tests are not necessarily a great way to assess mastery of material. The fact that teaching test-taking strategies can dramatically improve scores (independent of underlying domain knowledge) is one example of testing's weaknesses.
Three: Tests are not a good way to construct ideal curriculum. They, of necessity, have to be far more limited in scope than what we (should) want to educate people on.
If you give this training to everyone (note: it doesn't take that much time), everyone receives the dramatic improvement due to test-strategy education, and test scores become comparable again.
Tests [...], of necessity, have to be far more limited in scope than what we (should) want to educate people on.
Please explain. Is the concern simply that tests are only a statistically representative sampling of things the student should know, rather than the actual knowledge?
That's true. Similarly, a map of America isn't actually America. Doesn't mean it isn't useful.
When metrics/scores/grades matter, they become much less useful. Grades are harder to game than the Dilbert cartoon -- learning the material is still one of the best ways to increase your score. But once grades matter to teachers and schools as well, the opportunities for gaming increase substantially.
If the cure's worse than the disease, we could bring back the curve. I don't think it's gone that far yet, though...
I don't think the world would collapse if we had entire generations coming out of school ill-equipped to handle petty bureaucracy, especially if the tradeoff was that those generations are smarter and better educated about things that matter.
“The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.” --Terry Pratchett
When I talk about 'navigating the bureaucracy', I do not mean 'following the rules'. I mean something more analogous to 'hacking the system'. My definition of social awareness is, to some degree, not allowing arbitrary societal restraints to prevent you from making wealth and meaningful connections. In this sense, the single best lesson a student can learn wrt bureaucratic hurdles is that there is a better way.
Teachers are all bent because kids aren't doing well on standardized tests, so they get pressure to raise the grades. So they address the situation by drilling the kids to pass the test, and it's obvious that the dumb kids are still dumb and the smart kids are still smart.
You have all of these people making big money analyzing these states to death and coming up with lots of brilliant ideas. At the end of the day, it means nothing because some percentage of kids do well, some percentage are drinking in the boy's room and some people in the middle are penalized/rewarded by some variance introduced by the system.