Comment by sly010 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sly010 | Hacker News Reader

Real story:

In Hungary students are rated from 1 to 5, where 5 is the best score and 1 is the worst. During the semester you have multiple tests (both verbal and on paper) each giving you a score between 1 and 5. Your final score is the average of these rounded to an integer. These final scores are the only important measure when you apply to study further, nothing else matters.

I had a [5,5,5] and had to take a verbal test which I didn't prepare for. My biology teacher decided to rate it as "three fourth" and logged it as "3/4". [despite being horribly wrong it was commonly understood that it actually means "between 3 and 4"]

However...

At the end of the semester she calculated my score as:

(5+5+5+3+4)/5 = 4.4 -> 4

instead of

(5+5+5+3.5)/4 = 4.6 -> 5

Imagine a 13 year old student arguing a 50 year old biology teacher in front of the whole class about how to calculate my score properly. I even tried to convince her to downgrade my "3/4" to a "3" and recalc my score (that would yield 4.5) She didn't listen, eventually I was thrown out of the classroom and finished the year with a 4, because of a math error.

Edit: This was long time ago, so I am almost sure the exact numbers are off, but I clearly remember the broken math and the result.

Had a similar experience when I was in highschool with an answer on a physics test. She insisted that her math was correct, and pretty much the whole class got the answer incorrect. Despite us telling her why she was wrong, she refused to listen.

I took the problem to a technology teacher I had, who was known for being a extremely intelligent-abrasive-and-fair (was a nuclear engineer before changing career paths and genuinely enjoyed teaching). Explained the situation and gave him the problem to independently solve. He said he didn't want to overstep his bounds with the physics teacher, but the next day our scores had curiously changed to reflect the correct math.

Some people have too much pride to admit fault, especially to those they view as inferior.

Not quite a straight up math error but my high-school english class had a weekly 10 question spelling/definition quiz. Each question was worth "10%" if you got both the spelling and definition correct and "0%" if you got either wrong. I typically got all the definitions correct but very few of the spellings (a major weakness of mine) scored typically 20-30 "%". At the end of the semester these tests were weighted equally with the 2-3 essays and a aggregate reading comprehension score which I did very well on (typical grades of 98%). The result was me scoring "40%" in a class where I was one of the top participants. No amount of explanation from the principal, my family or me could change the teachers mind on the fairness of this.

Actually, this story makes me want to defend the teacher here.

Seems to me that this grading regime was explained beforehand and was a fair way of assessing your spelling and comprehension. Your complaint seems to be that you think the spelling should be a smaller proportion of the grade. While I agree with that, this appears to be a case of the teacher valuing skills differently not (as with so many other anecdotes being posted here) a case of the teacher not evaluating students fairly.

If comprehension and spelling were decoupled but still equally weighted then the aggregate score would've been significantly higher. Let's split the difference and say that 20-30% on the set of [all answers simultaneously spelled correctly AND comprehended] becomes a 25% on the "spells things correctly" axis. If we weight that equally against the "comprehension" axis then you get

  let R = 25   # reading
  let C = ?    # comprehension
  let M = 40   # reported mean

  (R  + C) / 2 == M
  (25 + C) / 2 == 40
  (25 + C)     == 80

  C == 55      # implied comprehension grade from a 40% average

If comprehension was any higher than 55% - which this anecdote certainly suggests - then the 40% aggregate score awarded is an ineffective assessment of the holistic learning picture.

This is the grade school equivalent of tossing out resumes over a single copy editing mistake.

I had similar arguments with my university. They couldn't figure out how to weigh my grades. All grades are weighted by the amount of credit a course is worth, but they added it up wrongly. A Fucking university!

In my first year of university we had to do a maths module. My final score was 120%. Imagine just many different broken and non-mathematical things have to go into that!

I graduated High School with a 6.022 GPA[1]! Texas is Awesome!

1. Normal max is 4.0, school gave extra credit for Advanced Placement and college concurrent courses.

I was once told of a similar situation in a high school: AP classes were worth 6.0 in your GPA, while regular ones were worth 4.0. The valedictorian wound up being the person who realized this, took as many AP classes as possible, and as few regular classes as possible.

It is massively stupid and unfair -- but there is a part of me that sees that as preparation for real life, a great deal of which is run in stupid and unfair ways. While you'd like to change that, you also have to know how to respond to it when you can't change it.

Why is it unfair? The AP courses are more challenging, and therefore get more weight. Isn't the valedictorian (theoretically) the smartest kid in the school?

Somewhat unrelated, but AP courses can often be easier for brighter students as they generally keep disruptive clowns out and offer more engaging material instead of boring busywork. The classes are thus more like college classes and less like babysitting sessions.

> and as few regular classes as possible

I enjoyed band so I took it and they didn't have an honors or AP version. So for me to maximize my GPA would mean that I would have to forgo band all four years of my high school existence in order to min-max for GPA.

How is this min-max? Isn't this just straight maximization?

You are minimizing anything that hurts your GPA. If the highest grade you could get in a course is a 4.0 for a regular course and say a 5.0 for AP or Honors and band is a regular course you wouldn't want to take the hit from band.

If you have all your graduation requirements fulfilled, the system penalizes you for taking any further classes. You improve your GPA by taking a quarter of Nothing/Study Hall if you can't get another AP class.

And indeed, I believe the valedictorian did exactly that, for exactly that reason.

(Sorry I'm late to the party)

That is indeed exactly what happened -- the valedictorian was in all of the same advanced/AP classes as the rest of the top 10 students. But while each of us had additional classes like band, choir, or drama, she simply took the minimum number of credits, and as a result ended up with a slightly higher GPA. I actually ended up dropping all the way to fifth because I was taking math at a local college (multivariable calculus, linear algebra) which was treated as an ordinary course for GPA.

I am a high school senior taking two college math courses, but to discourage this practice (which costs the school money) the school counts my grade as a 4.0 max in my GPA (AP classes are 5.0, regular are 4.0).

The opposite happened when I went through high school. AP classes gave you a .75 bonus to your GPA, Honors classes gave a .5 bonus.

However, many of the AP classes were hard, to the point that the AP exam was laughable. The average grade in AP Biology was a C+, and more than 85% of the class got 5s on the exam. Same thing with calculus, physics, chemistry...

The valedictorian took AP Psychology, Statistics, Environmental Science, and US History, and then went down to the easiest Honors classes he could take. Just a .25 penalty on his GPA bonus... but he was getting 100s in the classes.

The kids who were looking for the hard classes to learn had much lower GPAs.

Can you be more specific? Curving and extra credit can go over 100, and extra credit can be common in a mandatory intro module.

I don't remember the exact details now, and this was at a British university that did neither extra credit nor curving. I think they weren't a particularly good teacher and just wanted everyone to get higher marks so things kept getting biased up for gratuitous reasons. And the result still called a percent.

Students are far less likely to complain about teachers, course work, etc the higher the grades they get, making this an easy cop out for the teacher.

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