How far should we strech this? there are students who come into courses with superior memory or iq and get a head start from that.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?