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Comment by DiggyJohnson | Hacker News Reader

I am extremely skeptical of this approach. Weary, too.

It is prioritizing all the wrong things. If grading is inefficient then it ought to be improved, but replacing qualified achievement with instant gratification is very sad to see and will only harm the education of all students subject to the practice.

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I don't think you understood the article at all. For example, they talk about how standard grading practices often misrepresent mastery, by including grades from the beginning of a class, before the learning has happened. This benefits people who start out with advantages, and clearly disadvantages people who end up with the same level of mastery, but start at a place where they need to learn more. This relates back to software design: Averaging the homework scores from the entire class is a "default" in how most grading software works. It doesn't have to be.

I read the entire transcript and understood that point. I prefer the default grading method to the proposed solution, though I admit I much prefer this discussion to those of the form of “getting rid of grades altogether.”

I don’t think we actually see the outcome you are referring to, where students who struggle at first end up with the same level of mastery. I don’t think we should use the grading process itself to compensate for inequities if they do exist.

It's less a matter of someone failing all the early tests but pulling a Hail Mary in the final, and more a matter of someone failing an early test because it took them an extra week to grasp the material; i.e., if the test had been offered a week later, they would have passed. So they still learned everything, just not on the artificial schedule imposed by one-off tests.

Well then why not just give one big test at the end of the year, something tells me that would end up being even less equitable than the current system

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