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Comment by drblast | Hacker News Reader

"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?"

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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"In addition to an academic grade, the 950 students at the school will get a separate “life skills” grade for each class that reflects their work habits and other, more subjective, measures like attitude, effort and citizenship."

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This doesn't really address the problem; the "life skills" grade isn't standardized and will be meaningless for just about anything beyond the report card. Its value is as a signal to parents.

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?

Um, back in the day when the "life skills" grade was incorporated into the actual grade, it was also non-standardized and meaningless for just about anything. Splitting apart the knowledge assessment from the life skills assessment seems to be a big win.

I don't see any indication that there is not a comments section.

Had an ex-gf who was a teacher and had to do just that - comments on every single student in addition to their grades. It was incredibly time consuming, but, I'm guessing incredibly useful for parents and students.

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 guess in the US you have to worry about litigation.

"A grade can be regarded only as an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite amount of material." -Dressel

"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 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%)

Interesting. When I was going to school in ex-Soviet Union we did have a 2 grades. A 'behavior' grade and an academics grade. There was a strong correlation between both but not always. I guess one could distill the behavior grades into other sub-categories as well.

Former East Germany also used to have grades for behaviour (averaged over all subjects): Ordnung, Mitarbeit, Fleiß und Betragen.

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.

Maybe it was a good system, maybe it was bad. However, the sentence

"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.

The Trabi used to be a pretty good and modern car. In the 1960s.

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