Give 100 Percent?

Grading is, psychologically, a special case of gamification.

There's a debate on this point, but many smart people believe that gamification should only be used to provide an extrinsic motivator for things that A) have no intrinsic motivation, or B) have a steep learning curve that is discouraging at first. In the latter case, the game mechanics should be removed once the difficult first step has been conquered so that the intrinsic motivation can supplant the extrinsic ones, leading to a naturally reinforcing cycle of growth (and flow). If it isn't removed—or if it shouldn't have been there in the first place—then the game mechanics can completely overwhelm the intrinsic motivators.

Here we see that learning is intrinsically motivating by itself; no external rewards necessary. As another commenter mentioned, the Montessori method acknowledges this.

I realized this shortly before I dropped out of high school. Nobody who hired me ever asked for my grades. I appreciated teacher's critique of my work if I thought his own skill was significantly superior to mine. Yet ultimately I did not give a crap about whether I had 2.5 or 4.0 GPA.

I was surrounded by perfectionist people who would retake a class because of A-, but after a while I realized they were just playing a game I wasn't interested in.

I am interested in creating impressive graphics code/designing things that don't suck/creating things of high aesthetic value. I am interested in getting paid because it allows me to have independence and concentrate on creating those things, and not feel like a parasite. That is my game, so to speak.

I did not see a very strong correlation between grades and the above so it ended up low on my list of priorities. Just like a game of chess, it made me smarter at those things I wanted to do, but I couldn't dedicate a lot of time to chess or gaming the teachers, just because I did not give a crap about those things.

I know I'm going against the zeitgeist here but I think grade, SAT scores, or degrees don't mean a lot in life.

I recently had to work with legacy code written by a guy with the highest degree possible in US. The code was hard to read, did not use clearly superior architectures, lacked documentation, and quite frankly, I could've done a lot better. There was no empathy at all to the person who will inherit the project but the "I HAVE PHD" feeling of smugness I felt strongly.

One of the worst math instructors I knew had a graduate degree which she liked to brag about more than everybody thought was appropriate to her skill.

On the other hand, I was in touch with several professors who were clearly brilliant and well-spoken... obviously education doesn't necessarily fuck up your sense of humility and introspective self-critique.

From the title I thought "give 100%" meant putting in your full effort, rather than the mark you got. Maybe change it to something less ambiguous?

I'm torn. I think the post has a point, but in my experience (as a teacher and as a student) the people who complain most vociferously about grades also tend to be the people who get the lowest grades. More importantly, the correlation between grades and competence isn't perfect -- but it's also much higher than zero. Most of the people I've met in the valley have earned fantastic grades, at the best universities. You can argue that this is mere correlation or selection bias, but regardless of the reason, the relationship still exists.

To paraphrase Churchill: grades are the worst system of measuring accomplishment, except for all the others we've tried.

I wonder why some people end up being intellectually curious while others are not. I think intellectual curiosity is very important, especially now since the majority of the world's information is available for free online.

The person who grows up being intellectually curious will have a big heads up in the job market since they will have acquired more information than the other applicants. Plus, I think a lover for knowledge can enrich an individuals life as well.

I don't know exactly how schools and parents can instill intellectual curiosity into their students and children but I think the subject matter should be researched and prioritized.

Unluckily, this is the truth. This develops even further. The aim become how to optimize to get good grades and not actually learn to get them. This develops even further: You don't want to learn unless you get rewarded for it. The result is the decline in the quality of work you do.

This might explain the current economics: The smart always (most of the time) find a job or a way to live. Those who care only to take a job are the jobless (because they create less value and also there are many of them).

In a funny way, that's like graduate school: the good parts of it, at least.

It's just you, and striving to learn something, in depth, with understanding. You have access to immense knowledge in the form of the University library and the faculty. You can learn, really learn, in a way that isn't sneaking it or being the disruptive one. It's okay to learn.

(Yeah, there's also advisors, other students, student loans, classes, the U bureaucratic world, and the rest of the bad parts.)

I'm torn. On the one hand, my understanding is that the concept of a Montessori school is based on the notion of exploratory learning for young children, and there was an article recently that remarked on the unusually high rate of Montessori-schooled individuals in places of power. So there is some sort of lesson to be drawn from this idea, namely: send your kids to a Montessori school.

But I don't like the characterization of the preferred drive for approval in writing from an adult as a "cancer", and I think it obscures the fact that at some point grades and such will become important because society is going to have to sort them, and grades are just the sorting mechanism.

I think that for each socio-economic stratum there is going to be some optimal transition age which puts the students in the best position to succeed, make money, have families, found companies, make great art, heal people better, make scientific discoveries, etc... and ultimately have more kids.

Link: http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/05/the-montessori-...

Grades have this affect because they become psychologically tied to your self-worth. Where does it start? I don't think small children care or are even aware of the significance of having good grades (what 5-8yr old is gunning for Harvard?), but they can certainly sense which end of the spectrum is desirable if they seek to maximize love, affection, and acceptance from adults and peers.

You take the organic process of knowledge acquisition and now you've added game mechanics to it. For children the prize is acceptance, and for college students its social status, employment prospects, and respect. Now you have scores and outcomes, and critically, the outcomes do not have to be tied to any intrinsic motivation for the thing you are trying to learn.

So children might do things not because they're interested in them, but because it makes them look smart. People will chase lucrative jobs in fields they don't particularly care for, or want to join particular institutions just for the prestige, and a wide range of other behavior thats driven by rewards of performance and not of one's real interests. Learning for learnings sake takes a back seat to all of this.

OT: if you are on an iPad, be aware the site uses that broken OnSwipe theme, which has a good chance of running your browser out of memory and crashing it. Might want to wait until you are on your desktop or laptop.

Great anecdote; learning and education are often at odds.

This blog post echoes what is said in the book MindSet (http://mindsetonline.com/). Never praise children because they accomplished a task. Always praise the effort done to do so.

For those interested in this subject, Alfie Kohn is a good author to read.

Check out the book "punished by rewards". Also explains why achievements in video games are such a bad idea.

In some sense, I had this feeling when I came to the US for the first time. I was used to study in Universities were the failure % could be easily below 10% for some courses (Calculus, Algebra being an example). In most of the courses the best grades were below a 7 out of 10. And no, there were no A+ to anybody if the grade was not 9+ out of 10.

In the US, though, it is difficult is to fail a course. I really think that failing a course requires big amount of effort.

I think that neither of both systems are really effective. The spanish version can be depressing and the students are not willing to study for the sake of learning but to pass (the average number of years for a engineering undergrad is 7 years back when the engineering was 5 years of study). On the other hand, most students in the US lack passion and are not going to study since most of the time they don't need to study to pass the courses.

Or, don't give a '100%' until everything is learned? If they've giving up before the work is done because you told them it was done, don't tell them it's done?

I get the moral of the story. But if there's more words to learn, how could they possibly have mastered the test?

There's more wrong here than just the grades.

Isn't this part of the Montessori model -- no grading?

Back in the second grade, my teacher would offer extra credit math that brought your percentage over 100%. I remember competing with the other kids to get ridiculously inflated scores like 361%.

Of course, everyone who made it to 95% got an A, but the "bonus XP" aspect of going over 100% was a fun incentive to keep you trying harder.

This highlights a deeper problem in human psychology. It takes many otherwise intelligent people years to realize that the approval of some abstracted authority is not a useful measure of accomplishment. Many people never get over it.

marking their work prepares the children for the next thing which will be even more cooler shower upon their curiosity and enthusiasm - money/salary/financial incentives distribution system in the economy.

Grading?!? Wait til they get a budget, a schedule, and major requirements that change weekly...

More seriously though, this is a fascinating glimpse into an aspect of human motivation.

"Men will die for colored ribbons" Bonaparte.

"In time...six months; five years, perhaps...a change could easily begin to take place. He would become less and less satisfied with a kind of dumb, day-to-day shopwork. His creative intelligence, stifled by too much theory and too many grades in college, would now become reawakened by the boredom of the shop. Thousands of hours of frustrating mechanical problems would have made him more interested in machine design. He would like to design machinery himself. He'd think he could do a better job. He would try modifying a few engines, meet with success, look for more success, but feel blocked because he didn't have the theoretical information. He would discover that when before he felt stupid because of his lack of interest in theoretical information, he'd now find a brand of theoretical information which he'd have a lot of respect for, namely, mechanical engineering.

"So he would come back to our degreeless and gradeless school, but with a difference. He'd no longer be a grade-motivated person. He'd be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He'd be a free man. He wouldn't need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors assigned him were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He'd be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they'd better come up with it.

"Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn't stop with rote engineering information. Physics and mathematics were going to come within his sphere of interest because he'd see he needed them. Metallurgy and electrical engineering would come up for attention. And, in the process of intellectual maturing that these abstract studies gave him, he would he likely to branch out into other theoretical areas that weren't directly related to machines but had become a part of a newer larger goal. This larger goal wouldn't be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing."

-- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

One of the ways in which most grading systems are fucked up is that there's more downside than upside. One failure cancels out 3 or 4 successes, no matter how great. If a teacher decides that any late work gets a zero, then being half a day late on one paper nullifies several great, on-time papers.

I think it's a vicious cycle. This sort of system is designed to produce the sort of risk-averse rule-followers required by old-style industry: people destined for jobs where creativity isn't required but following orders 90% of the time is failure. But for that system's defense, it's good practice for real life. Humans are vindictive and focused more on stigma, gossip and the aversion to failure than in seeking out excellence and creativity. Hence, they create societies (like our society at a macro level, like most corporations, and like many school systems) that punish failure brutally but don't really value (or even fully trust) excellence, and which actively discourage the risk-taking usually required to excel. (And no, our society's outsized reward for economic fortune is not "rewarding success" since most of those people at the top are effective social climbers or hereditarily-placed parasites.) The "vicious cycle" is closed if one believes that the vindictive, punitive nature of people comes from how they are taught. Or is it innate? I'm really not sure.

The way I think grading should be done is an inverse of the current system. Make the problems really, really hard. Some should be so hard that the hardest exam problems go for years without being answered. Make it so hard that 20% is passing and 60% is exceptional-- instead of 70% being passing and 95% being exceptional-- and so that students are used to it (and therefore they don't panic when they take an exam and can't solve half the problems). I argue for this because the reality for the most creative, hardest-to-get-right pursuits is that for 60% of one's efforts to succeed is exceptional.

All that said, I think grading is important, but it shouldn't be started at such a young age, and that grades should generally be internal (for the student's and school's benefit) only. Many business schools actually prohibit their students from disclosing GPA or transcripts, only verifying which courses were taken and passed. If I were running a college, full transcripts would be available only to academic graduate departments-- not to future employers or professional schools. I'm not going to do their job (sorting) for them.

Would love to read this if it wasn't for Wordpress using OnSwipe. Why is this awful startup breaking website usability?