I'm not sure this is the worst flaw with grading (the equity issues may be worse), but it's certainly the dumbest flaw. A scoring system for scholastic ability that disadvantages those that start off with little knowledge, even when they do well by the end of the course, is ridiculous on its face.
Then next semester I had a the same class but a different professor. He was much different. He had us write about our life experiences and things that interested us. You would get the grammatical corrections as feedback but you would not get blasted for them. Over that one semester I used the literary handbook I was given, and got a lot better at it. It really helped me. In my future liberal arts classes I had to take, I got good grades on my papers and they were well received.
My experience was terrible. There was no real artistic instruction. For instance, during our first or second week we were told how to use the pen tool in Illustrator and or homework was to make a logo for a made up company. I, having absolutely no art background, did a bad job. She actually projected my work in front of the class and had me stand up in front to be ridiculed. I decided to drop the class.
When I brought her the form to sign all she said was “thank you,” which I very much took to mean “thank you for dropping out of my class.”
Heaven forbid you actually need to do your job, professor.
In contrast with your experience, I tried to take a programming class early in college and felt completely alienated by that professor who expected all of us to already know how to code and was visibly and verbally frustrated when I struggled to understand things that were completely new to to me but well known with the rest of the class. It wasn't until nearly 10 years later I finally learned it.
At the beginning of the semester we were given a large binder filled with competencies we were expected to master. Every question on every test was labeled with a competency that the question assessed. Once you demonstrated knowledge of the competency you no longer needed to demonstrate it again. You marked it as complete in your binder, attached the graded test as evidence, and turned it in to your advisor.
Advanced students could go into the final, answer only the questions that tested competencies they hadn't previously mastered, then turn in their final after just a few minutes of work. Students who struggled early in the semester could rally through the last few tests, ace all the questions, and demonstrate enough of the required competencies to end the semester with a decent grade.
It was an intensely _weird_ way to be graded and required a massive amount of overhead and bookkeeping from both students and faculty. I'm not sure it was a good idea, but I did do much better that year than any of the later years. My freshmen 4.0 sustained my total GPA through some much more difficult times.
Also, history. No one was getting 98% on my physics or math exams.
This is one reason I did poorly in school and eventually dropped out. Teachers chose (either independently or by arrangement) to weigh all grades equally, whether they were at the start of the class or the end. So if you did poorly at the start, you might as well give up, you'll never dig yourself out of that hole.
The argument is that students should be evaluated based on their mastery of the content at the end of the course.
Giving too much weight to early grades and tests results in disproportionately penalizing those students who enter the course with the least prior knowledge. Those students are already going to have to work harder than their classmates to catch up. Averaging in their initial low grades just serves to penalize them further.
I've never looked at how long someone was in college, and honestly don't care if it took them 4 years or 10. I assume there's a reason it took them 10, and that could be lighter class load, a change in major, or all manner of things. If it's because they took every class 2-3x, because the first time it didn't stick, it'll show up in the interview process that they can't pick things up quickly, and I can do what I want with that information.
But to the grandparent's point, if I gave a leetcode problem (I don't), and someone immediately coded the ideal solution effortlessly, which tells me they have seen that problem recently, I'm not going to just be like "yep, hire this person, they're clearly a great engineer!" They're great and/or lucky at test prep, which is not the skill I care about.
One student gets 30%, 60%, 90%, and 100% on a series of four cumulative projects throughout the semester while another student consistently gets 70% on all four.
I would argue that the former likely has greater mastery and certainly has learned more during the semester. If you want to make sure those two things (mastery and learning ability) are measured by the final grade you need to use some method that de-emphasizes the earlier grades.
This hasn't been true for probably half a century, possibly longer. The number of people who go to university simply for the learning experience is almost certainly vanishingly small.
If you look, for example, at the completion rates of non-college courses like you'd find on Udemy, etc. It's <10%.
You would also expect audit rates to be much higher for people looking 'just to learn' - auditing classes is typically significantly cheaper than paying full price for the course.
People go to school because they are looking for an edge in their long term earning potential (types of jobs, credentials leading to higher salaries, etc).
If this is your viewpoint, I can only conclude that you're from an elte family born into money.
The rest of us go to uni to get a higher paying job and avoid wage-slavery and/or poverty.
And if this is you, ewww https://gfmsouthwest.org/ Academics, work and "jesus" have no place together.
Are you seeking signal and view this change in grading style as noise? Do you really believe this style of grading captures merit? What does the grade represent? What is the point of this exercise for you? Are grades just for deciding which student to give the best spoils to?
In practice I've found that many of the students who are at the top of the bell curve after the first test are the ones who have the most prior familiarity with the subject matter. Whereas the fast learners are typically the ones who are at the top of the curve at the end of the course.
In this context, equally-weighting early grades has a higher probability of penalizing the fast learners than it does of rewarding them.
Grading isn't just a feedback mechanism. It also is an incentive. When you say "only the final test matters", then young students (who probably haven't totally grasped long-term planning yet) have not as much reason to care about learning the early material until it's too late.
The closest thing I ever saw to this was my high school weightlifting class. Your bench press single rep max was a high percentage of your overall grade, and was tested several times over the course of the semester. You were graded on improvement. The teacher made sure not to mention this before the first test, to keep people from cheating, but a few kids were in the know and faked a low max.
From a philosophical/values point of view- what is more important for education- incentivize all students to try to achieve the mastery level expected, or incentivize all students that as long as it looks like they're making progress, that is enough? I'd go with mastery. The appearance of progress is too easy to game, too subjective, and not easily applicable to varying courseloads.
Why should it be graded? The point of the class is not to learn quickly and effortlessly, but to learn the material completely. If by the time the class is over the student has learned it well, they should get a grade that reflects that learning.
I mean, by your logic, should we give extra credit to the students who never show up to office hours in college, since clearly they're learning it 'faster and (more) effectily(sic)'?
But even disregarding that, it is philosophically problematic to think along these lines. People learn and know things in an absolute plurality of ways, and in ways that can only be measured with very limited means; there is more than one way for someone to skin the cat of learning.
In general, an absolute Platonic ideal of intelligence, which IQ enthusiasts implicitly rely on, is the thing that got us in this mess pedagogically.
First - Are you coming from a system where a student's rank in class is ordered? In that situation, grades are a zero-sum game, where you may be fighting for Valedictorian status. In the US at least, such things have been a farce for at least 20 years, when I graduated we had 13 Salutatorians in a class of 200, what a joke. The weighted GPA is what matters, even if half the student body has a GPA over 3.5. Nobody here cares what your rank was.
Second - As others have stated - the topic is about bringing the lower-graded students up, not bringing the higher-graded students down. Could you explain why you are reframing the topic?
One of my strategies in college was to really study on the first exam. The logic being is it's just introductory material and therefore the easiest exam to make an A on. Subsequent exams tended to get into the nitty gritty and require a lot more information to be understood / retained. This held true on any course. In my experience, this negates the quoted point that people who had little prior knowledge would do poorly early on. Granted I went to college a long time ago. Things may have changed.
Why did you really have to study if it was so easy? Right, because you didn't know it. For others who came in knowing it, they didn't have to 'really study'. And this still holds true for every successive test.
I feel like that kinda negates your negation.
To speak of specifics, I took calc 1 twice. First time was due to inconsistencies in the teacher's grading, but whatever; the second time I took it, I was very familiar with the concepts, and made an easy A. Others struggled. It's fair to say I should have gotten the A at the end because I knew the material, and it's fair to say the people who got an A on every test (those 'easy' first ones you mention being included) should receive an A, but was it fair to say others, who by the end had the same understanding I and the other A students did, should have gotten a B even if they aced a cumulative final, because they struggled with the concepts initially and did less well on the earlier tests?
>For others who came in knowing it, they didn't have to 'really study'. And this still holds true for every successive test.
Ya I see your point. The first test was the easiest and the most likely to get an A assuming I didn't know it. Of course if you study for the first test and get an A because it's the easiest and someone who already knows the material doesn't study and gets an A, then one isn't lower than the other.
In other words, this gap only seems to apply if both groups (familiar and unfamiliar) don't study much or at all on the first test.
Admitted, this would require to use grades slightly differently (not as aggregation towards an end result) and it would require the teachers to repeat tests multiple times. But shouldn't that be how learning is organized?
Thanks for the thoughtful response
Also, from personal experience as someone who's taught computer programming (US college 1st & 2nd year courses - listed as "computer science" but really mostly computer programming): I've seen a _lot_ of people tell me some variation on "My program won't compile, I'm totally stuck, but those are just (implied minor) details - I really do understand what's going on!". Bonus points for when their code indicates that they've missed huge concepts at both the language level ("What do you mean I can't do arrayName = arrayName + 1 in Java?") and/or algorithmic level ("The variable defined by the outer loop of the bubble sort was never used so clearly that loop was useless so I removed it").
Ok, I'll stop ranting :)
My point being that you may be able to measure your own progress but not everyone is.
Plus, certification / credentializing is one of the services that education provides to the the rest of society.
The other comment pointed out that if you fully understand the material its a lot easier to judge your own understanding. Now that someone said that it seems really obvious, but It wasn't something I ever thought about!
Thanks for the insight
unless you are in Germany
Historical data without too much emphasis on the past.
Then you can also adjust the way you grade.
If people that already have some related knowledge have an easier time studying, that's just life. How does it unfairly disadvantage you, if somebody else is already more skilled than you?
Consider two students, one whose education path in the course is exponential and the other whose path is logarithmic where both paths intersect at the end of the course. According to traditional grading the logarithmic student would score far better in the course despite their knowledge being equal to the other student by the end.
Which student would you rather be? who has more potential?
Should the body of a course be treated like a series of 100m sprints or a marathon, and what is the net positive outcome through each approach?
They get graded from the very beginning, not from a single final exam
Student A comes in barely meeting the prerequisites and struggles with low grades on initial tests and projects. They come to office hours, put in substantial effort, and eventually ace the final projects and tests.
Student B comes in with substantial background experience and gets decent but not stellar grades on all tests and projects.
Depending on how much weight is given to the final tests/projects student B may still end up with a higher grade despite the fact that they probably do not have as strong an understanding of the material as student A.
I've had both kinds of students the handful of times I taught graduate-level seminars and it's one reason I weighted the final projects more heavily than initial projects. (Though I found grades on initial projects were still useful for other reasons.)
If Student A ends up only at 80% then so be it, but if they end up matched then they should end up with a similar grade.
In the same way that not being a genius is a disadvantage. Cant change it unless we handicap the smart people.
It seems sensible, at least at the college level, to have 90% of the grade depend on the (cumulative!) final.
Of course, this then leads us back to the problem of assessing people early on in the term before they've had a chance to build up some momentum in their knowledge & learning.
But yeah - there's this sea-saw balancing act between a small number of higher-stakes assessment vs. spreading the assessment out & assessing earlier as well as later when designing assessments in formal education.
I get the perverse incentive of fucking off and taking the final but nobody actually does that, shits hard yo. The game is actually trying to get your grade high enough that if you bomb the final you're still good.
I'm not claiming that it always works this way; a long-term transformative process isn't going to be as simple as "show up -> get taught -> git gud". There are substantial and structural issues with how formal education works - for example, it's well known amongst people who study education in the US that the single biggest predictor of your grades is the socio-economic level of your parents.
But please let's not forget the "teaching" part of education :)
That seems like it would work to me.
If someone is discouraged from a subject, they are less likely to put in the effort to succeed in the subject. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle, which ideally education would fix.
Similarly, this sets students up for a false idea of their “good subjects”, when instead those are familiar subjects. A student who could be a polymath gets discouraged from pursuing multiple subjects because they’re already far ahead of the game in math, so they pigeon-hole themselves to the subject where they receive positive reinforcement.
Essentially, grades as a feedback system are less than ideal, and we can do better.
I had never considered it that way, interesting perspective. Not yet sure how this will work in the grander scheme, I'm thinking of the impact on the value of a diploma when it's based on learning ability or broader knowledge as compared to being specialized in one thing. Something I'll be thinking about in the future.
The underlying problem here is that people of different skill levels are being graded on the same criteria. They're in the same class.
Classes should be far more granular and far shorter (e.g. two weeks) so that people of the same skill level can be so-grouped.
I recall some classes in Uni that would have, say, three major exams. And if you had adequate participation and grades in smaller assignments, the score of the lowest exam would be replaced with the 2nd lowest, in order to smooth out a negative deviation. I think it achieves what is being discussed here: Either you did really well through the course but had a bad final, or you didn't grasp the material early on but ended up getting it in the end.
Those all seem like appropriate solutions to the problem, whereas your response here, blaming the teaching staff and curriculum, seems to indicate you did not do what you should have.
It should not be a university's job to "fix" unprepared students, whether due to the student's prior indifference to his education, or because that eduction was provided poorly.
People with prior knowledge will still have an upper-hand in everything (even beyond school), so I'm not sure that it's even a solvable problem.
I guess perhaps one could give a baseline exam on day 1 to qualify prior knowledge and give a handicap to people if they're coming in blind? Though if I knew that purpose I'd game the system, so it probably still isn't fair.