Report Cards Give Up As and Bs for 4s and 3s | Hacker News Reader

Report Cards Give Up As and Bs for 4s and 3s

nytimes.com

16 pointstokenadult18 comments

Everyone's bedazzled by the numeric grades, but I'd like to take a moment and gawk at the things being graded: "Decoding Skills", "Reading Engagement", "Basic Computer Skills", "Presentation Skills", "Research Skills".

I question the system's ability to grade based on such categorizations. "Reading Engagement" aka "Faking Interest In Boring School-Assigned Books" is particularly distressing of the set I can see.

(Yes, you read some interesting books in school assignments. So did I, but the bulk were pretty dull. I was and am an avid reader and faking an interest in The Scarlet Letter would probably have been beyond me. Fortunately, nobody actually required that of me.)

Yeah, it sounds like it is explicitly giving busywork it's own grade.

Teacher to Parent: "Well Johnny has a 4/4 math comprehension right now, so he knows everything we plan on teaching this year. But his math engagement has really gone down, to about a 1/4. So Johnny really needs to work paying more attention to what I'm saying in class"

"North Westall, a fifth grader, got 27 3s this marking period"

I'm glad they're giving a more realistic report and showing specifically what needs improving.

"while the top grade of 4 celebrates 'meeting standards with distinction.'"

However, meeting "standards with distinction" to me means you haven't met much. Of the standardized testing I've done (which admittedly was many moons ago), getting a perfect score wasn't saying much. It was truly a lowest-common-denominator type of standard. For our future's sake, I hope this is no longer the case.

However, if this comment is representative of what's happening:

"What happened was the high-performing students said, 'I don’t have to work that hard' and they all stopped trying"

Then I fear there's no hope in such a system. This was happening even among the best of the best in my high school, where we often joked about "points per minute" to see how well you could do on tests or assignments in the shortest amount of time.

And I hate to say it, but what Dr. Guskey points out about the traditional way of grading:

"'The dilemma with that system is you really don’t know whether anybody has learned anything,; Dr. Guskey said of grading on a curve. 'They could all have done miserably, just some less miserably than others.'"

Is even more true of the standards as I've seen them. You only get a chance to show you can excel at mediocrity.

So we grade tests with two significant digits (0-100%). Then we partition these to a letter grade (<1 significant digit) Then we average the letter grades to a GPA with three significant digits. So what's a bit more confusion? Small wonder colleges place more emphasis on the SAT (3 digits).

Actual quotation from a U.S. News top-25 university admission officer who visited my town last year: "The G.P.A. has become the most meaningless number in college admissions." Yes, the test scores continue to play a significant role in college admission, as one factor among several, because grade averages are hardly comparable at all from one high school to the next.

The SAT is a little over 2 digits, too. First, you can never get a 755 or something - it always ends in a 0. Then, you can't get less than 400 and more than 1600. So it's 1-120, again.

I once went to a magnet system that did something similar, presumably to prevent excessive competition for As when everyone was already exceptional.

I think the theory was "We teach algebra to 4th graders but there is no way they'll figure out a 3 to 3 mapping on their own."

The advanced elementary school I attended(15 years ago) did numbers. We always just saw them as a rewrite of letter grades.

This is exactly what it is, perhaps it will work for a while until parents figure out how to make A's equivalent to a number etc.. all the pressures and expectations will not change once they do however.

Exactly. It's like reworking the scoring of the SAT from 1600 to 2400. If you have ANY kind of scaling system in place (which is integral in any kind of ranking system), it will always be converted.

Seriously. I dont get the point of this article, the number grade will be converted to rankings by the students and parents in due time, its not a problem with the ranking, its always a problem with us.

The biggest change I see is that the numbers are based on year long benchmarks, while report cards are received multiple times a year. So basically, if a report card were handed out in the first week of school, nearly everyone would receive ones.

Benchmarks are being planned for every grading period, so that will soon change though.

I see nothing good about this. The only good purpose I can see this much information having is to split the class into many different sections by ability. And that will take a lot more resources than the new grading scheme is taking, so splitting up the classroom won't be a consequence of this.

If parents are really interested in having more information about how their kid is doing, I'm sure the teachers would be willing to talk with the parents. But this is just too much information, I mean a 14 page guide is needed to explain a one page grading sheet. It sounds very confusing.

I find it interesting that these "new" grades are linked to statewide standards, but there are still fifty different states setting these standards, so there won't be any comparability in these grades from state to state. I'm acutely aware of such issues as someone who moved to another state (twice) during my secondary education.

About time. We had quite a few discussions with the registrar in my university about the benefit of converting a numeric grade to a letter grade (round to the neared quarter), which would then be converted back to numeric to compute the GPA.

The only real change seems to be the removal of the concept of 'D'. This is understandable, D and F were interchangeable anyway.

What the submitted article says the change is are two things:

a) division of each subject into several topics, with each topic being reported with its own grade,

and

b) setting standards for grading not in a norm-based ("curved") manner for each classroom, but in a criterion-based manner comparable across a whole state.

No, you're confusing the grade with credit. Grade 'D' denotes below average, Grade 'F' means failure. But most schools don't award class credit for below average ('D' grade). I think this explains why you would say this, correct? So they're not interchangeable, they denote performance.

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