
Many teachers...grading...for compliance - not for mastering course material - yummyfajitas
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/weekinreview/28tyre.html
======
russell_h
One of my favorite memories from high school was from my AP physics class. One
of the junior class valedictorians (there were at least 3 girls, all very
liberal arts focused, tied for the position at the time) got a C on a test
that accounted for a major portion of our grade. After class on the day we got
our tests back, she approached the teacher and explained to him that she had
never gotten a C before and was generally very distressed about the possible
effects on her GPA. He was very understanding, and changed her test grade to
an A.

Later that year, another of the junior valedictorians was caught cheating on a
test. After some deliberation among the councilors and administrators it was
decided that she would receive only an informal reprimand, because to fail her
with a note on her transcript about cheating (as dictated by school policy)
could hurt her chances of getting into a good school (to say nothing of how it
would effect her chances of receiving a National Merit Scholarship that the
school loved to boast of its students receiving).

On several occasions it was explained to me that it would be "unfair" to
heavily weight test scores, because many of the "best" students, who turned in
all of their assignments on time, had difficulty understanding the material
and might not be able to do well.

I hate to sound bitter, but even the public university I attend now (I wasn't
one of the "best" students. I got A's on tests but didn't do much homework -
didn't see the point, since I knew the material) is refreshingly performance
based compared to that high school. Other than a few exceptional teachers, I
find it best for my blood pressure to try to forget high school entirely.

~~~
sudont
I'm surprised that they were taking AP physics.

In Wisconsin, the valedictorian gets a full-ride to anywhere in the UW system.
Due to this, many valedictorians I've seen take easy classes and graduate with
a 4.1, whereas many of those with lower GPAs--due to difficult classes--end up
going to better schools. One year the valedictorian went to UW-Whitewater, and
the Salutatorian went to Yale.

~~~
dkarl
In my school, any grade in an "Honors" or "AP" class got a ten-point boost
(equivalent to a full letter grade) for GPA calculations. My graduating class
had at least three kids with GPAs over 100, which would be impossible to match
without taking honors classes. An A in an honors class always beats an A in a
non-honors class, so it's hard to beat a kid who takes more honors classes
than you.

~~~
lukeschlather
That's all well and good, but the fact is "Honors" and "AP" classes are not
well-defined as more difficult than the other classes.

Also, it still penalizes students taking larger course loads. I had a friend
who was robbed of Valedictorian basically because their A in Choir was pulling
down their GPA, while they was taking all of the same courses as the
Valedictorian in addition to choir, and outperforming the Valedictorian.

So you need to somehow penalize students who take weaker course loads,
possibly by multiplying GPA by number of graded credits.

~~~
ShardPhoenix
Australia has a good system (at least here in Victoria - different states
vary). The ultimate goal is to produce a percentile ranking of students (as
opposed to an absolute GPA), and to that end, classes are weighted by the
quality of students taking them (as measured by a state-wide general test) and
the final exams are all standardized. Plus, only the top 6 scoring subjects
taken count (and only the top 4 scoring count fully), eliminating that issue.

------
yequalsx
I teach mathematics at a community college. Every year the administration
sends to my department statistics on how many people pass our classes. We're
told to come up with strategies to increase the passing rate.

I haven't had a pay raise in over two years. My strategy for increasing the
passing rate is to give points for things a well trained monkey could do. I
give points for coming to my office. I give points for things that have
nothing to do with mathematics.

By and large society does not really want us to grade on knowledge. People
don't want to hear that they, or their kids, don't know something and that
they will have to work in order to gain the required knowledge. People want a
high GPA not a high level of knowledge.

I'm reminded of the Soviet joke:

As long as you pretend to pay us we will pretend to work.

~~~
anthuswilliams
I attend a podunk university in southern Utah, where college life resembles an
episode of 'Community', and the phenomenon you describe is apparent.

60% of the students are seeking acceptance into the nursing program. The
school claims it is one of "the top nursing schools in the country". This
claim is based on their graduation rates (for those accepted, around 80%). The
school inflates their graduation rates by leaning on biology teachers to
increase the rate at which people pass their classes, and by making the most
difficult classes (e.g. Microbiology) optional.

The problem is that community and liberal arts colleges are small enough that
the only significant measure of success is the rate at which students
graduate. In my school, at least, nursing tends to (by and large) attract the
sort of stupid people who are only interested in the certificate. In this the
program is surpassed only by Elementary Education. Thus, economic pressures
overpower academic concerns.

Side note: I worry about our nurses. I spent the first three days of June in
in the Intermountain Hospital, and I caught the CNAs inadvertently giving me
someone else's prescription. Twice.

~~~
nutmeg
Note on side note: CNAs are not nurses.

~~~
anthuswilliams
Duly noted (and upvoted). I should have made it more clear--my belief is that
their actions reflect poorly on the RN who supervises them.

~~~
lukeschlather
Leadership abilities can't really be taught, and are always in short supply.
It's hard to make the people around you more effective at their jobs.

------
jdietrich
The job of schooling isn't to teach skills and knowledge, it's to teach
deference and compliance. I can prove this quite straightforwardly. Imagine
how our system would treat a student who aced every test, completed every
assignment perfectly, but who habitually truanted and generally refused to toe
the line.

If schools were simply a place of teaching and learning, such a student should
face no problems, but in most schools he would be highly unlikely to graduate.
The imposition of discipline is not merely a secondary function necessary to
facilitate teaching, it is an end in itself. Children are taught that a
teacher must be obeyed because he is powerful, not because he is worth
listening to. There is a clear and persistent message that teachers should be
respected and obeyed simply because they have a bigger desk. Even in
jurisdictions where it is relatively easy to dismiss incompetent teachers,
they are rarely dealt with. I believe that there is simply no demand to do so,
as teaching is merely a ruse to allow for schooling to happen.

I argue that the failures of our school system are not simply symptomatic of
underfunding, union problems or poor strategy. They are the product of our
inability to define the purpose of schooling, our unwillingness to confront
the role of schools as cheap daycare, and our hypocrisy as to the real purpose
of schooling as a thing apart from education.

~~~
jackowayed
While I agree with this sentiment to an extent, I hate when people bring it up
like this. There's a lot of good reasons for schools to have rigid rules other
than the cynical idea that schools are purely there to teach kids to conform
so that they'll make good, obedient workers.

For one, parents expect that schools are, at least to some extent, keeping
their kids safe and out of trouble during school hours. It may not always work
out that way, but when the rule is that they have to be in class, at least the
school isn't endorsing them leaving, so there's a lot less liability.

Also, there's a lot of gray area that arises if you start making exceptions.
How old is old enough for high achievers to skip school? Obviously, you're not
going to let a first grader skip school, but when does it start becoming ok?
And how high achieving do they have to be? If a kid has a B+ in one class, is
he still allowed to skip school? And when do you tell a straight-A student
whose grades start to slip that he has to start coming to class again? If he
gets one B on one test, that's probably just a fluke, but where do you draw
the line and tell him he's not doing well enough?

Plus the lower-achieving kids would complain of unfairness. And it's a lot
harder to enforce rules against truancy when some people are allowed to leave.
People would see kids leaving school, but might assume that they're just
approved truants.

It also raises the incentive to cheat. A student could cheat on every
assignment and test to keep up his A averages so that he can keep skipping
school, and then he'd really be learning absolutely nothing. That's an extreme
case, and he'd probably get caught eventually, but when you reward high marks
on tests, people will go to great lengths to do better, but they might not be
the lengths you want.

------
px
I'm glad the NYT is shedding light on this topic but, perhaps the most
important aspect of standards based grading is almost burried in this article.

One of the basic premises of SBG is that students know exactly what knowledge
_and skills_ they have to master. They are assessed and then encouraged to
address weaknesses so that they can be re-assessed. This is opposed to a
"gotcha!" based assessment system.

This approach can have a profound impact on students because it encourages
them to assess their own learning and take the initiative to grow and improve.

~~~
caryme
Very true.

My mom started using standards based grading this year in her IB & honors
chemistry classes. She's been very successful so far with it and her students
have been rising to the occasion with their re-assessments. From her, it
sounds like defining all of her tests and assignments in terms of the
standards (knowledge and skills) they cover and grading them as such has been
difficult, but effective.

~~~
aik
So what does this mean practically? How does she use it? Does she basically
let them retake the tests? What does it mean "defining" tests in terms of
standards? How is that different exactly? Who's standards?

~~~
px
[http://samjshah.com/2010/09/09/first-day-
of-201011-introduci...](http://samjshah.com/2010/09/09/first-day-
of-201011-introducing-sbg/)

This is a great post describing the mechanics of SBG. You'll get a sense of
how it can work in a rigorous high school classroom.

------
drblast
"Should students be rewarded for being friendly, prepared, compliant, a good
school citizen, well organized and hard-working? Or should good grades
represent exclusively a student’s mastery of the material?"

Because it would be tremendously difficult to grade the students on _both_
things separately.

One of the problems with schools and our society in general is the idea that
you can take something complicated and distill it down to a single, meaningful
number. Another problem is the notion that you _should_ even try to do this.
We're taking this to ridiculous extremes.

I can easily say in a single sentence, "Johnny has mastered 95% of this
material but he's apathetic, only completes half of his homework on time, and
throws spitballs at his classmates." Done. How hard is that?

Are they trying to save paper and ink costs on report cards?

~~~
slyn
"In addition to an academic grade, the 950 students at the school will get a
separate “life skills” grade for each class that reflects their work habits
and other, more subjective, measures like attitude, effort and citizenship."

page 2

~~~
drblast
This doesn't really address the problem; the "life skills" grade isn't
standardized and will be meaningless for just about anything beyond the report
card. Its value is as a signal to parents.

So why not have a comments section? Is it too much to ask that a subjective
assessment be spelled out in a written sentence or two?

~~~
MichaelSalib
Um, back in the day when the "life skills" grade was incorporated into the
actual grade, it was also non-standardized and meaningless for just about
anything. Splitting apart the knowledge assessment from the life skills
assessment seems to be a big win.

I don't see any indication that there is not a comments section.

------
ZachPruckowski
"Should students be rewarded for being friendly, prepared, compliant, a good
school citizen, well organized and hard-working? Or should good grades
represent exclusively a student’s mastery of the material?"

Well it depends on what school is for. To be perfectly honest, I'd say that
organization and scheduling my time properly and working hard are far more
important in college and in the workplace than mastery of subject matter
that's ultimately outside my career field. I don't use what I learned in
Physics or Calculus or German at my job or in my life, but I need to be
organized and schedule my time (work time and personal time) effectively on a
daily basis.

"The percentage of students who attend college is rising; 67 percent of high
school graduates now enroll in some sort of post-secondary school after
graduation (up from 43 percent in 1973). But the reality is that many don’t
succeed, in large part because they are not academically prepared."

I don't know if it's because they don't know the material or because they
aren't able to adjust to working as hard or managing their time as
effectively. From my perspective (entering college in 2005) it was generally
the case that students had gotten used to skating by because they could get
A-'s without trying and then ran into trouble in college, not that students
who had worked hard but weren't as smart were getting too overwhelmed to get
good grades. Personally, if I had gone into college with less material
knowledge and better organizational/management skills, I'd wager my GPA would
have been like a point higher or something.

Disclaimer: I was absolutely one of those "knew the material, scrambling to
finish homework as the teacher was collecting it" types in HS, so my grades
suffered relative to a purely "material mastery" metric.

~~~
akharris
Agree that the question comes down to the purpose of school, and I think
that's part of the problem. There's tension around what the actual ask is for
students. Is school a force for teaching socialization and competence in the
real world, or for learning academics. And should that learning be focused on
practical knowledge, or on ways of thinking in general.

I think that's an issue at the core of a lot of the debates around evaluating
both students and teachers. You can measure some of it really well, but much
of it is on the "soft" side of things. You want to be able to quantify it in
order to understand whether or not a student is actually progressing across a
wide array of dimensions, but, by it's nature, it is hard to quantify.

------
solson
Watch out, I am going to generalize here...

In my experience, in the US, EMPLOYEES in marketing, sales, management,
finance, and operations do much better if they have high "life/social" skills
even when their level of intelligence or knowledge are lower than others.
However, this pattern doesn't fit IT/software and engineering (hard sciences)
where creativity and knowledge are required. Some of the best engineers have
the worst social skills. You won't find that in other fields.

Then there are the entrepreneurs who tend to break rules and take shortcuts.
But they also tend to prefer to hire rule followers. I used to be surprised by
all the entrepreneurs without degrees who require degrees for employment. But
today I think good entrepreneurs instinctively know they need rule followers
to carry out their vision and provide balance.

The question we need to ask about education: What are we trying to produce?

a. Good employees b. Innovative scientists c. Entrepreneurs d. All of the
above

d. All of the above. The problem is... Our unionized government run education
system isn't flexible enough to allow these different types of people to
consciously choose their own path. Instead, in the past, it tried to turn
everyone into a rule follower. Now the approach in the article is trying to
turn everyone into a scientist and/or entrepreneur. The answer is to educate
and evaluate different people different ways. Social skills are critical for
some professions, and others not so much. Rule following is also essential in
some professions, but deadly in others.

~~~
bradley
> The question we need to ask about education: > What are we trying to
> produce?

K-12 education as we know it today was first mandated/implemented by the King
of Prussia in the 1860's to jump into the Industrial Revolution. We sent
envoys to study and copy his schools. He sought 3 products: Compliant
citizens, efficent factory workers, and obedient soldiers. We in the US have
added a 4th purpose: free day care so both parents can be productive workers.

Can't separate the tree from the seed. Talk of "reform" needs to remember
origins.

~~~
xiongchiamiov
Sir Ken Robinson talks more about this in his classic TED talk, "Do schools
kill creativity?". <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY>

------
icegreentea
In Ontario the primary/secondary school report cards have been somewhat like
this for a while. Your 'grade' is based almost completely on your academic
performance (supposedly). Of course, if you miss evaluations, then your mark
will suffer a bit. And some (or many) teachers will still wrap a participation
mark into the course (usually something like 5-10%). I can't speak for
everyone, but in my experience, these are typically in language courses where
participation is crucial (apparently... I just sucked at languages period) for
learning. Depending on grade/place, these were given percentage or normal
letter grades. Homework was wrapped into this mark depending on the teacher.

On the side, you have a series of other 'grades' on the side. I can't remember
their names now, but they broadly mapped to how disruptive you were, your
initiative, how much of your work you completed (marked and unmarked) etc etc.
These were marked as excellent, good, satisfactory, or needs improvement. From
what I remember, it's actually not possible to fail as a result of having a
lot of N's. Though in my case, I got a talking to from my parents whenever an
N (or a few S's) showed up.

I remember thinking that those marks were kinda bullshit. And to an extent
they are, since they are subjective and easily colored by how much a teacher
likes you. I also knew some teachers who really hated dealing with that stuff
and just gave everyone Gs, except for the trouble makers who got Ss.

~~~
mmt
Separating the two seems the most sensible to me.

The article asks the questions:

 _Should students be rewarded for being friendly, prepared, compliant, a good
school citizen, well organized and hard-working? Or should good grades
represent exclusively a student’s mastery of the material?_

This strikes me as a false dichotomy, and it sounds like it has been in use
with no catastrohpic effects.

------
jackowayed
All through elementary school and middle school, and in many of my high school
classes, I bemoaned that I had to do tedious homework that didn't teach me
anything (not in every class--mostly math, science that was primarily math,
and grammar). I frequently said that homework should be optional, and if I do
well on tests/quizzes/projects/papers/whatever, homework shouldn't bring down
my grade.

But on the other hand, I think part of the reason that I have such a thorough
understanding of calculus is that my Calc AB teacher required us to do large
quantities of homework. And I was totally fine with having to turn in weekly
problem sets in my Multivariable Calc and ODE courses senior year because I
needed the homework to solidify my understanding.

I probably would have done the Multivariable and ODE homework on my own
because I actually struggled with those classes, but I probably would have
done only a small fraction of my AB homework if it weren't required. I still
would have gotten A's on most of my AB tests, but I might not have had quite
as solid of a foundation. I think I'm better off because I had to do that
homework. So that has made me question how I feel about mandatory homework.

Plus, that there's the issue of students who aren't disciplined enough/don't
care enough to do optional homework even if they know that that will lead them
to do poorly on tests.

It's possible that a system where homework is optional for people who are
doing well could solve the latter problem, but it wouldn't have made me do my
AB homework. Plus it might breed even more resentment against the nerds who
get to skip the homework just because they know the material.

tl;dr: I've experienced many classes where mandatory homework bored me out of
my mind and wasted my time, but at other times it has helped me a lot. Also,
some people will do as little as they're required, so if homework is optional,
they won't do it even if they just failed a test the day before.

------
yummyfajitas
Note: not trying to editorialize in the title. In my opinion, the first
sentence of the 5'th paragraph summarizes the article better than the actual
title.

~~~
shasta
So I wasn't supposed to read the title as William Shatner?

~~~
yummyfajitas
The periods indicate text I removed to make the title < 80 chars.

~~~
xiongchiamiov
Ellipses, if you'd like to be technical. Periods pretending to be ellipses, if
you'd like to be even more so.

------
ShabbyDoo
Allowing teachers to choose the metrics upon which grades are based is much
like a Third World dictator being able to print currency at will. Don't have
the budget for classroom Kleenex? Just issue an incentive. Want your students
to be compliant? You have an incentive that most of them (or at least most of
their parents) will value. Until this school in Austin audited Teachers'
ability to turn on the printing presses at will, there was no disincentive to
abuse the currency. The benefits of currency inflation are local to a
classroom, but the downsides are macro in nature. Outsiders looking at a high
school report card can't tell if a particular "A" was due to mastery or
compliance, but those same observers will base the value of those grades on
the aggregate of their correlation to competence over time.

~~~
pmb
Only if a teacher's pay or reward depends on the grade they give their
students. Otherwise, it is treating teachers like professionals who worked
hard to get where they are.

------
steveklabnik
I have failed a course in college because I forgot to do the homework. 100% on
midterm, B on final, fail on the course. Whoops!

~~~
enjo
Which is just ridiculous.

~~~
matwood
Not necessarily. Do you think most programs for a programming classes are
written during the exams? What if a student passed every programming exam with
an A, but never wrote a complete program and turned it in during the class?

~~~
steveklabnik
This was a math class. The homework was just hundreds of problems that were
just like the ones I aced.

------
rhettinger
There's room for debate on whether grades should reflect homework completion
and timeliness, but some of the grading practices were nuts:

"...their grades are more accurately reflecting their knowledge, not whether
or not they brought in a box of Kleenex for the classroom, a factor that had
influenced grades at Ellis in the past."

I applaud the effort to separate knowledge grades from "life skills" grades. I
can't imagine anything more useless than making a kid repeat a class or defer
their graduation when they've already acquired the requisite knowledge.

------
wnoise
I once again wish to suggest that teaching and grading are two separate jobs
and should not be done by the same people. The conflict of interest should be
obvious.

~~~
aik
Please explain further.

I think that only makes sense if the output of the evaluation is the end state
and not the learning of the student. Ideally teaching and evaluating (not
grading) is baked into one action. A teacher works closely with a student,
assists them in their studies, judges the amount they've learned (evaluates)
and where they're struggling, and helps them with their weak points. Done. The
standardized tests are then given (if they must), and the teacher is allowed
to look over the results to judge from an external evaluation how well the
student did and learn from it.

Is this different from what you're saying?

~~~
wnoise
More or less. I'm pointing out that incentives are not set as well as they
could be, without specifying in great detail how they should be set.

Formal end-of-term type grades do not _directly_ serve the students. They are
used by others to rank the students and decide who among them are useful for a
given purpose (jobs, college admissions). Students are still going to want
these so they can signal to employers that they are valuable.

The grades are incentives that the teacher can use to control students. The
intended use is of course to get them to learn the material. One point of the
article is that they are also easily used for other types of control. Because
teachers are to some extent judged by how well their students do, there is
often pressure for them to give better grades. Occasionally there is some
inflexible rubric of X% of each class must get grade Y. There is no direct
pressure that these grades should correspond at all to mastery of material.

Grades on e.g. homework assignments and quizzes can also serve to help the
students (or their parents) gauge their progress and find weak areas so they
can better learn the material.

Most schools in the U.S. make the final grades incorporate these earlier
grades. This means there is pressure on these grades as well making them less
useful for the purpose of helping the student learn better. This also means
that they are useful for control, because students care about their final
grades.

Suppose instead that the final grades were not at all set by teachers. Imagine
something like the AP tests. Because the homework and quiz grades would not
factor in, they are less useful as means of control, and theri only use is now
monitoring and helping he student learn. Because the testers are not teachers,
there is much less incentive to score the students highly. They can measure
mastery with much less bias.

------
forgotAgain
What's new here? My experience as a parent confirms the truism that schools
are run for the benefit of the adults: teachers, administrators, and parents.

More then half the parent teacher meetings I've been to (K through 12) where
with teachers who I would fire if they worked for me. Having achieved six
figure salaries by surviving school politics they contribute as little as
possible to their students while punching their ticket each year until
retirement. The good teachers are not rewarded but penalized for not going
along with policies created to benefit administrators.

Having excelled at politics as a teacher the administrators are interested in
nothing more than having days without problems. A day where everyone behaves
and follows the rules is the quest. Parents seeking accountibility from
schools are a problem. I have never seen an administrator hold a teacher
accountable for not doing their job of teaching the students.

The adults who are not in the discussion yet for improving schools are the
parents. Every slackard kid has a slackard or absent parent. Too many parents
see school as a babysitting service allowing them to concentrate on more
important things.

My primary objection to the article is the statement that the main reason
students don't succeed in college is that they are unprepared. The main reason
kids don't succeed in college is because they don't belong there. Too many
adults teach college as the 13th grade. Kids go there because it's the path of
least resistance. Kids who were unmotivated in school are not going to be
magically motivated just because they are now in a junior or four year
college.

Johnny can't do university because all through his life the adults didn't give
a shit. They were only looking out for themselves.

------
steveplace
My wife's boss doesn't like 9's. So if a student get's a 59, 69, 79 or 89 at
the end of the semester, you get a call.

Failure does not exist in the U.S. public school system. Even if a student
does not participate, they are "remediated," wherein they sit in front of a
computer for 6 weeks in order to receive class credit.

------
ghurlman
This is in _no_ way anything new; not in the US at least.

~~~
j_baker
It _is_ new for school systems to actually recognize the phenomenon though.

~~~
hugh3
From what I've heard about what school was like prior to, say, 1960 ("sit up
straight or you'll get the cane!") old-school schools would have _embraced_
the idea that their job was to teach good behaviour as well as academic
skills. It is, perhaps, a shame that some of this has been lost.

------
aspir
Just wondering, but are any HN readers in non-university education? Sometimes
these articles runs a risk of outsiders looking in without the essential
industry experience needed to make truly sound judgements and suggestions. Its
easy to point fingers and propose ideal solutions when you aren't in the
classroom on a daily basis. My wife is in early childhood ed, my sister-in-law
in elementary, and my mother-in-law in middle school and I still "don't get
it" in the same way as they do.

Each of them admits that things are critically wrong with the system, and have
proposed solutions to ones that I've read on HN. But, they know it's simply
never as easy as many journalists propose. You can't unshift our education
system's paradigm without considerable labor.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
Single page:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/weekinreview/28tyre.html?_...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/weekinreview/28tyre.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all)

------
terra_t
I've long believed that standardized tests are a better measure of what people
know than grades.

------
aidenn0
The only problem with this is that highschool GPA is a better indicator of
college performance than standardized tests.

------
roc
And the followup will likely be: Many teachers teaching to the test, not
teaching so students master course material.

~~~
bradly
If the test accurately reflects the course material, is there a difference?

~~~
yanowitz
The problem is (at least) three-fold.

One: The tail wags the dog. Since No Child Left Behind, schools have had one
major metric: test scores. They have now geared everything else towards making
test scores improve, from curriculum to teaching how to take a test. So the
test drives all.

Two: Tests are not necessarily a great way to assess mastery of material. The
fact that teaching test-taking strategies can dramatically improve scores
(independent of underlying domain knowledge) is one example of testing's
weaknesses.

Three: Tests are not a good way to construct ideal curriculum. They, of
necessity, have to be far more limited in scope than what we (should) want to
educate people on.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_The fact that teaching test-taking strategies can dramatically improve scores
(independent of underlying domain knowledge) is one example of testing's
weaknesses._

If you give this training to everyone (note: it doesn't take that much time),
everyone receives the dramatic improvement due to test-strategy education, and
test scores become comparable again.

 _Tests [...], of necessity, have to be far more limited in scope than what we
(should) want to educate people on._

Please explain. Is the concern simply that tests are only a statistically
representative sampling of things the student should know, rather than the
actual knowledge?

That's true. Similarly, a map of America isn't actually America. Doesn't mean
it isn't useful.

~~~
madcaptenor
It's not just a sampling, though. Tests have to be constructed to fit within a
single class period -- usually an hour or an hour and a half -- and as a
result you can't really ask students to do any single problem that would take
more than maybe twenty minutes. Unfortunately, most things in life take longer
than twenty minutes.

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xtrycatchx
here in our country this is the very big problem. seems like the industry's
demand doesn't meet what the school's offer. even if they do offer the
courses, the teachers are not that well equipped..

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mite-mitreski
And this is news ???

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klbarry
If you are absent for a surprise quiz because you cut a great deal, the 0 will
make your other 100 tests average to about 80, even if you know the course
material greatly. Does a job prefer better if you master the course material
but in general don't follow the smaller rules? For instance, in an interview,
wouldn't you look like a fool if you explained away sub-par grades as
bureaucratic issues? Part of life, sadly, is following small and stupid rules.

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philwelch
It's a complicated feedback loop, obviously. Society is petty and
bureaucratic, hence schools have to be petty and bureaucratic in order to
teach how to navigate society? Partially, but partially society is petty and
bureaucratic because _schools_ are petty and bureaucratic and people are
trained to consider such systems normal and good. (In fact, schools seem a lot
pettier and more bureaucratic than the rest of the world, though it depends on
your perspective.)

I don't think the world would collapse if we had entire generations coming out
of school ill-equipped to handle petty bureaucracy, especially if the tradeoff
was that those generations are smarter and better educated about things that
matter.

~~~
bfung
If school's sole purpose is to create academic machines out of the students, I
would not have a comment. But life is more than that; we DO have to deal with
other people. Being 'smarter' should also mean becoming better socially aware
as well, I'd hope. In the end, there will be different levels of intelligence
between people. Communicating and executing the best solution requires some
social mean to convince or plant the seeds of evaluation to many other people
for their understanding, less we fall back to the an inferior solution
(playing on emotions, being 'pc' as oppose to discussing reality..), or worse,
violence.

“The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the
number of people in it.” --Terry Pratchett

~~~
anthuswilliams
I think this is an argument for grading students on knowledge rather than
compliance. Forcing students to serve time in the school system as though they
were felons doesn't teach social awareness. It doesn't teach you how to
navigate the bureaucracies in society. It teaches you to submit to authority.

When I talk about 'navigating the bureaucracy', I do not mean 'following the
rules'. I mean something more analogous to 'hacking the system'. My definition
of social awareness is, to some degree, not allowing arbitrary societal
restraints to prevent you from making wealth and meaningful connections. In
this sense, the single best lesson a student can learn wrt bureaucratic
hurdles is that there is a better way.

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duffbeer703
All of this crap is just that... crap. "Teaching for the test/compliance" is
the big whine today. 15 years ago, the trend was to give everyone an A so
their feelings wouldn't be hurt.

Teachers are all bent because kids aren't doing well on standardized tests, so
they get pressure to raise the grades. So they address the situation by
drilling the kids to pass the test, and it's obvious that the dumb kids are
still dumb and the smart kids are still smart.

You have all of these people making big money analyzing these states to death
and coming up with lots of brilliant ideas. At the end of the day, it means
nothing because some percentage of kids do well, some percentage are drinking
in the boy's room and some people in the middle are penalized/rewarded by some
variance introduced by the system.

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Andrew_Quentin
Nonsense!

