Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

> The problem is that student performance is continuous. When you are forced to discretize into a small number of bins, injustice is inevitable.

Yeah, so why insist on doing that? Because that's what's easy for the schools and the teachers of this rather inhumane mass education system. How else are they to evaluate the performance of hundreds of students? They can't know each student individually. They must create artificial tests which they can apply at scale. They must create a grade economy. They must reduce humans to statistics.

Why even have grade boundaries? The difference between 89.95% and 90% is no doubt statistically insignificant. Why cause pain by creating rigid A-F boundaries?

> But some teachers are principled and are determined to police cheating anyway.

The problem is much of what is considered "cheating" by these people is actually perfectly normal real world behavior. Research and team work are absolutely normal and expected in the real world but in the artificially difficult dream world of academia they are frowned upon.

Why? Because allowing these things would force them to use less efficient evaluation methods. Much easier to ask a ton of questions in timed high pressure exams that will single-handledly decide the student's future.

> Because that's what's easy for the schools and the teachers

That's too dismissive, almost a bad faith frame. The sad reality is that there is not enough money, there are not enough teachers, and most teachers are not good teachers, and quite a few are actually bad. That cannot be changed. We can't open a can of one million good teachers. Even if money weren't an issue, they just aren't there. More teachers, even if mediocre, would help probably, but that's a matter of money and politics.

> The problem is much of what is considered "cheating" by these people is actually perfectly normal real world behavior.

So is stealing and murdering. Schools are not there to teach "real world behavior", but increasingly advanced motoric, cognitive and (to a lesser degree) social skills. At higher levels of education, project and team work becomes more frequent (even too frequent, if you ask me). But you cannot learn reading, writing and arithmetic in a group of 3 where 1 person learns to read, one learns to write, and one learns arithmetic.

Simply, because using absolute points would lead to debate over every single decimal of a point. A student with 89.95% would be determined to fight to get 90.05% and then continue to fight to get 90.15% so it only makes the problem worse.

That's not my experience. There were no A-F grade boundaries in any of the schools I've ever attended. Students only ever cared about the one boundary that still remained: minimum passing grade. I saw exactly one student trying to get a teacher to round up a 99% grade to 100% just so he could say he had a perfect grade, nobody else cared about decimals unless they were in danger of failing a class.

Boundaries are the problem. Standardized testing for post-graduate positions in my country would give students bonus points based on their overall academic performance. Full bonus points for grades > 90%, half points for grades > 80%... Of course students wanted to optimize that number as much as possible and I don't really blame them.

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