

Our Grading System is Broken - baddox
http://www.tshaddox.com/?p=115

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tokenadult
These are interesting suggestions. There is much more about the arbitrariness
of grading systems in a book I read in high school, Wad-Ja-Get? The Grading
Game in American Education.

[http://www.amazon.com/Wad-Ja-Get-Grading-Game-American-
Educa...](http://www.amazon.com/Wad-Ja-Get-Grading-Game-American-
Education/dp/0805501134/)

That book makes the excellent point that EVERYTHING about grades is arbitrary.
Having a uniform system of accumulating scores on class work to set a course
grade, as the author of the submitted article suggests, leaves a lot of
important improvements undone. How does any outside observer know whether, for
example, Podunk High School or Elite Prep Academy has a chemistry class that
really covers the fundamental principles of secondary-education-level
chemistry? How does an outside observer know whether an English teacher grades
mostly on the basis of thoughtful argumentation and carefully chosen content,
or on neatness and spelling only?

Any reform of school grading will be hard put to eliminate the role of
standardized testing for precisely this reason. Harvard's dean of admission
recently commented on this:

"Q: You recently lead a high-profile commission that recommended de-
emphasizing the SAT and ACT from admission requirements. A number of colleges
have already made the tests optional. Do you see this ever happening at
Harvard?

"A: We do not foresee a time that Harvard would be test optional. Only a few
years ago we were receiving applications from about 5,000 high schools each
year and now the number has grown to over 8,000. We need some common
yardsticks that enable us to gauge in a rough way what is being learned in an
ever-increasing and diverse high school context, not to mention the increasing
number of students who are home-schooled.

"We continue to believe that the College Board's Subject Tests, along with
either the SAT or ACT with the writing tests, allow students the best
opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned thus far. Advanced placement
and international baccalaureate results are also helpful."

[http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2009/02...](http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2009/02/24/5_questions_for_harvards_admissions_dean/)

~~~
baddox
Precisely! This is why I've always liked standardized tests (although
admittedly, I did far better on my ACT than on my high school grades).
Unfortunately, there are many arguably legitimate complaints about
standardized tests, namely: that they're governed by the state or federal
government, and that they may encourage schools to "teach to the test."

------
sgupta
"Making the tenth of a percent from 89.4 to 89.5 worth immensely more than the
9.4 percent from 80 to 89.4 is idiotic."

I got an 89.4% in a CS class and asked the professor, whose office hours I
frequented, if he could bump me up to an A since I was so close.

His response was: "If you truly understood the material and deserved an A, you
would have earned an A by a large margin rather than missing it by a small
one."

~~~
baddox
Then your teacher is admitting that my design only the few tenths of percents
surrounding the letter grade cutoffs are worth anything. I suppose it's just a
matter of opinion, but I find this system remarkably arbitrary.

~~~
sgupta
Even if the grading system is arbitrary, it's usually fully transparent and
disclosed ahead of time.

I knew that the cutoff for an A was 90%, and I also knew that the grade would
be calculated based on my projects and exams. I knew the exact weight of each
project and exam too, all within the first few days of class.

I knew what was expected of me in this situation and didn't deliver, so it was
my fault for not getting the A - not the grading system's fault. But my 89.4%
was so close to an A that I somehow felt entitled to getting one, but as his
quote points out, I didn't really deserve it.

~~~
baddox
For college, which is voluntary, full disclosure would excuse the practice,
although I still think it's foolish. However, in high school, which isn't
voluntary, and where grades can affect your ability to get into college, it's
worse.

I think the point isn't whether or not it's ethical (full disclosure in
college would make it so), but whether it's a smart way to do things. I claim
it isn't.

~~~
sethg
Well colleges use a combination of factors--grades, class rank, standardized-
test scores, extracurricular activities, football talent--to decide who they
are going to admit, and the practical difference between a first-tier and
second-tier college degree is much less than most people are willing to admit.
So one flukey B is not going to doom you for life.

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psyklic
It seems to me that learning material over a long period of time is better
than just "crashing" for exams, which this author's proposed system would
encourage.

It is easy to imagine that a student will skip an assignment at one point,
then stop doing homework altogether. The student will realize he should have
done the homework toward the end when he realizes his grade, but by then it
will be too late -- his homework average will be too low to make a difference.

~~~
jey
His suggestion just saves the people who already know the material or who
learn in other ways than homework from being penalized by having to do a ton
of pointless busy work. If a person who thinks they can learn the material
without doing the homework ends up trying to cram and then failing the test,
that's his/her own problem. That person should just do the homework unless
they're sure that they can learn the material without the homework.

~~~
amanfredi
I don't think it is only their own problem. Many people in school simply
cannot recognize when doing the homework is necessary to learn the material
versus when they already sufficiently understand it. Good teachers actually
teach students how to learn effectively, and can help recognize how a student
learns best.

It seems that the prevalence of homework => test in schools today is a result
mainly of larger class sizes requiring the teacher to make compromises for
students with varying levels of ability, motivation, and parental involvement.

~~~
jey
Then they should just always do the homework and be on the safe side. Anyway,
even if they screw up once and think they can get by without the homework,
that's one F and they'll quickly figure out that that approach doesn't work
for them.

~~~
amanfredi
The point I was trying to raise is that there are people who don't care if
they get an F, but who teachers still have a responsibility to teach.

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sethg
There's no sense in prescribing a change to "our grading system" without even
referring to the content of the class that's being graded, based on the
assumption that all the work a teacher gives out to students can be classified
as "homework", which is for the purpose of practice, and "test", which is for
the purpose of comprehensively measuring one's performance.

For example: If the teacher assigns a 10-page research paper or critical
essay, most people wouldn't classify the paper as a "test", so under this
schema it must be "homework". But I don't see how the skills that one could
demonstrate by writing such a paper could also be demonstrated in an exam.

~~~
baddox
Actually, I would consider the large research projects to be the tests of that
course. Besides, the English/lit/composition courses I've taken don't really
give small daily or regularly assigned "homework" assignments anyway, so this
plan wouldn't really apply to those.

~~~
sethg
What if the teacher feels that ten homework assignments can cover more breadth
than two or three tests, and therefore can give a more accurate picture of the
student's abilities? Would you also redefine those homework assignments as
"tests"?

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rsheridan6
It wouldn't work. Homework is there so that you learn the material well before
the exams instead of cramming. If it doesn't count towards the final grade,
people won't do it.

I had a professor who said that having frequent (like twice-weekly) quizzes,
which has the some purpose as assigning homework, had reduced the number of
failures in the class considerably.

~~~
baddox
But with this system, the "safe" option is still to do all the homework
assignments. If you're implying that making them option "punishes" the "bad"
students (by bad I simply mean more likely to fail), then by that logic
requiring the homework punishes the "good" students.

~~~
rsheridan6
It's not about punishing anybody, it's about getting them to learn.

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gommm
I strongly believe that having a grading system where a number of people need
to have A for the grading system to be considered fair is harmful. In the
university I went to in France, exams are made so that the gaussian curve of
results in centered around 60% (12/20 in the french way of counting) with
grades under 40% considered to be failing grades. Once you start having this
kind of grading system, it forces the examinator to make the test hard and for
that the best way is to have long tests (around 3-4 hours) where you have to
apply the knowledge you gained on small projects (example a compilation exam
where you have to work on a simplified subset of a natural language). Added to
this, there was a healthy distrust of multiple choice questions and teachers
who asked too much of them were considered by everyone as being lazy.

Contrast this with tests I took in the US at RIT where the questions were
"When was the OpenGL committee founded?" (for a computer graphics class) or
other such useless questions.

Homework was also different between both universities... In France, the graded
homework were mostly medium to large size projects that took quite a few weeks
to complete. In the Us, there was a much a higher number of busy work with
small simple to do exercise that didn't really make student learn a lot
(although I did have a few interesting homework projects so not everything was
bad)...

------
trjordan
Of course, the assumption here is that grades should represent how well a
student knows the material, not how hard they worked in the class. I know a
number of teachers I had used that philosophy, despite the clamoring of the
kids at the top of the class.

Now that I'm not there anymore, I actually agree with them. Classes don't
exist simply to teach course material - there is a lot of stuff you learn
simply by doing all the work. Consider a lit course. The stated goal of the
course might be reading and analysis of the course texts, but you also get
better at writing simply because you did the "busywork".

The same holds for quantitative classes. There's only so much you can test in
an hour, even if there are tests every week. Longer problem sets cater to a
different skill set that tests, and they are both worth learning. A class that
lets you skate by on pure test-taking ability misses a large chunk of the
education.

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sethg
I wish more classes used "portfolio assessment" to rate their students...

<http://www.unm.edu/~devalenz/handouts/portfolio.html>

...but given how labor-intensive it is to grade a portfolio, I can't blame
teachers for shying away from the technique.

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decode
I was a full-time student for about 20 years, all said. I was never assigned a
homework assignment that did not benefit me in some way. Whether by teaching
me something new, honing a skill, or reinforcing and deepening knowledge I
already had, each homework assignment I did was helpful. It seems like the
author wants to cut out all of this beneficial work just because he can do
well on tests. I don't think that's a good idea.

~~~
jibiki
Your null hypothesis (or whatever it's called) is very pessimistic. Even if
you benefited from those assignments, you might have benefited more from doing
something else instead. Shouldn't it be your choice, as long as you can
demonstrate command of the material?

~~~
decode
My assumption is that the teacher should optimize the class on the amount of
the course material the students learn, and how well they retain that
knowledge. As far as I can tell, the goal of all of the teachers I know is to
get the students to learn the material the best they can, so they structure
the class around that ideal. I fully understand that some students just want
the credit, or to just get by with whatever they deem to be sufficient
knowledge, but I don't think it would be generally beneficial to structure the
class to give them incentives to do so.

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fabjan
In Sweden we have three grades: fail, pass, and pass with distinction. I
rather like it as I don't believe it's meaningful to try to distinguish
hundreds of different grades.

Engineers have one more grade than the rest of us: fail, 3, 4, 5

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time_management
Making homework optional across the board (e.g. you can get an A if you ace
the exams) is silly. It makes sense for a few courses (e.g. freshman writing,
calculus sequence, intro language) which exist to train a specific mastery
that can be objectively tested in a short period of time. It doesn't make
sense, though, to pass a CS major based on exams alone (as opposed to
programs), an English major without papers, or a math major without take-home
proof assignments. He could argue that such assignments _are_ tests, but then
the distinction between tests and homework becomes so blurry as to be useless.

 _Making the tenth of a percent from 89.4 to 89.5 worth immensely more than
the 9.4 percent from 80 to 89.4 is idiotic._

I'd argue that the problem is inherent in the fact that different grading
scales (0-100 vs. A-F) are appropriate for numerically-graded exams and
subjective assignments like papers. Converting a 0-100 scale to A/B/C/D/F has
the problem the OP mentioned. But when it comes to papers, most people can
only judge 4-5 levels of quality before inconsistencies pop up. This is one
reason why the "E" (high fail) level of the original A-F grading system almost
immediately dropped away, and D is rarely used. A/B/C/(D)/F exist, in effect,
to mirror those separable levels of quality.

In fact, I'd argue that innate this 4-level limitation is one of the reasons
many colleges (esp. Ivies) have such grade inflation in qualitative courses:
with plus/minus grades, the three discernible levels of respectable work are
mapped to A, A-, and B+/B, the one of mediocrity to B-/C+/C, depending on the
professor's proclivities, and the truly awful work to C-/D/F... whereas a
solid B (85%) in an intro science or language course is still a respectable
grade.

~~~
baddox
I agree with your statement about only being able to judge 4 or 5 quality
levels. This of course only applies to subjective work, not to things like
math, grammar, etc. Subjective classes like Composition usually don't feature
such an emphasis on daily or otherwise regular homework assignments, therefore
the large assignments would be the tests. But I would also argue that 4-5
levels of quality is too much, because is the grader comparing papers to other
papers, or to some ideal paper that exists in his mind? I think for subjective
grading, the only options should be pass or fail.

~~~
time_management
_But I would also argue that 4-5 levels of quality is too much, because is the
grader comparing papers to other papers, or to some ideal paper that exists in
his mind?_

I think, in general, the grades A, B, and C map to the following standards of
acceptable work:

A: That of a student intending graduate study in the field. B: That at a
major. C: That of an ordinary student, e.g. a non-major.

Hence, C is failure in graduate school, whereas a C in Calc 2 for an English
major is unambiguously not failure.

F obviously represents failure. D is essentially a high-fail that's counted as
a pass. It means, "you didn't pass this class, and you shouldn't use it as a
prerequisite, but you didn't do so poorly that I want to set you back a
course." D would probably vanish if college weren't so fucking expensive.

~~~
antiform
Some schools already do something like this. For instance, I know that Brown
does not have pluses or minuses, and they only have grades of A, B, C, and NC
(no credit). Furthermore, the NC grades do not appear on official transcripts.
On top of that, you can take almost any course Pass/No-Credit with an option
of a written evaluation instead of a grade.

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ddemchuk
I've personally felt that grades for a class over the course of a semester
(and also from freshman year to graduation) should be calculated using an
average of both the student's overall grade point average as well as some sort
of moving average, that shows a more realistic progression of their knowledge.

The whole point of a class is to go from a point of lesser knowledge to a
point of more knowledge on a subject, but by simply averaging out student's
scores over the course of the semester, there is no evidence of their
progression. By using a combination of a moving average and the total average,
a teacher can more accurately see how well the student is progressing.

