

A Colorado school district does away with grade levels - gscott
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20090210/ts_csm/agradeless

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AndrewHampton
Based on the comments, it seems everyone thinks they're doing away with grades
as in A, B, C, D and F. I think they're actually just doing away with grade
leves 1-12.

A good analogy for the gamers out there would be they switching from a level
based system to a skill based system. Currently, after each school year, you
level up to the next grade. In other words, when you pass a grade, you move to
the next grade level in all subjects.

In the new system, your math level is independent of you english and history
levels. In one school year, you could advance two levels in math, one level in
english and half a level in history. To graduate on time, the overall goal
would be to average passing at least one level of each subject per year.

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DLWormwood
> Based on the comments, it seems everyone thinks they're doing away with
> grades as in A, B, C, D and F. I think they're actually just doing away with
> grade leves 1-12.

It looks like this site is coming down with the same RTFA-itis that plagues
other news aggregators. And I no longer have the down vote ability to help
correct this...

Back on topic, I'm curious how slow progression or level skipping could be
handled. I would think this kind of system would make it hard to synchronize
lesson plans or teaching sessions, if all the students in a given classroom
are in differing levels. The "little red schoolhouse" never really scaled up,
after all...

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AndrewHampton
The way it works at my wife's school is she ends up acting more like a
classroom moderator as the students work through workbooks independently.
She's there for one-on-one help if the students have trouble with the content.

Not sure if this is how they're doing it in Denver however.

~~~
DLWormwood
> She's there for one-on-one help if the students have trouble with the
> content.

I hope Denver really vets its teachers well then. I remember going through
public school in the 80's, and having to be careful which questions I asked in
class because the teacher would be literally learning the material at the same
time as the students. The teachers under this new system, in order to be
effective, will have had to already gain familiarity with the course content
ahead of time; they won't be able to afford any "Yukari Tanizaki" type
teachers who drop all prep work when away from school...

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jerf
"I remember going through public school in the 80's, and having to be careful
which questions I asked in class because the teacher would be literally
learning the material at the same time as the students."

I'm curious: Do you have more details? Because it seems to me that it's just
absurd that such would occur. Not because I don't believe you; I do. But... at
the risk of sounding snotty, there just isn't anything that a public school
could cover that should have the teacher _scrambling_ to learn the material,
unless the school did something radically stupid. The curriculum just isn't
_that_ large, and by definition, teachers were at least smart enough to get
through college.

The only thing that leaps to mind that this could have happened with is "new
math". I could see how that could cause trouble, since it was pretty stupid.
But what else could throw the teacher for such a loop?

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DLWormwood
I know this is late, but...

> But... at the risk of sounding snotty, there just isn't anything that a
> public school could cover that should have the teacher scrambling to learn
> the material, unless the school did something radically stupid.

In my experience, it was usually just that. Either the teacher was given a new
textbook or curriculum the prior summer with no evaluation period, or the
instructor was transferred from one subject to another due to a financial or
staffing pinch.

For example, I had a teacher who specialized in teaching algebra and trig, but
had to be pressed into teaching calculus one year. While he knew enough of the
material to grade and write assignments, his ability to explain the more
obscure stuff in lecture was hobbled by his forgetting most of the material
was about last time he was exposed to it. I've also had instructors bounced
between teaching English and Social Studies because administrators thought
they were similar because the tests of both subjects involved essay answers.

My experience may also be atypical, since at the high school level, I tended
to take "honors" courses, which usually were an afterthought funding-wise than
the majority of the "college prep" or "remedial" classes.

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Xichekolas
> _She often uses a video game analogy: Students are engaged, take as much or
> as little time as they need to at each level, and can't move on to the next
> level until they've mastered the one before it._

There is your elevator pitch.

This is brilliant. This lets kid move at their own pace without resorting to
grouping by ability, and it turns school into a _set of things to accomplish_
rather than a _length of time to tolerate_.

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tokenadult
This is long overdue.

<http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html>

~~~
andreyf
This isn't about grading, it's about grade levels - K-12. Still, it's not a
new idea, Ted Sizer has been promoting this since the 80's:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_Essential_Schools>

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AndrewHampton
My wife teaches at a small private school similar to this. It mostly works
well for them, but the kids who don't want to work can fall behind. I think
this problem would be exaggerated in public schools because of the larger
classrooms, but hopefully it will work out in Denver.

~~~
Radix
Perhaps we could let them tier themselves into a trade. I don't think it would
be so bad for society. Either they're going to end up in a trade, or worse, or
they'll have a chance to realize where they're going early to work themselves
back into HS and College.

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lionhearted
I was studying business/project management full-time while running a couple
companies. My biggest beef was that the grading scale rewards consistent
mediocrity over inconsistent excellence - basically the opposite of the real
world.

Out in the wild, let's say you run three advertising campaigns. Each costs
$1,000. Two return almost nothing - utter failures. The third returns $9,000.
In the real world, you've got +$6,000 and you've tripled your money. In
academia, you've got an average of 33% and you've failed the course.

The problem is, once an assignment is "near perfect" and gets an A, there's
nothing to separate "excellent" (an "A") and the "best paper ever put together
in this topic" (...also an "A"). In the real world, you can do excellent work
and make $100,000 in a year, or do the best work ever done in a field and make
millions. Academia has a mild learning component and a significant
credentialing component (it is a major plus, and I do look at degree/grades
when hiring), but the atmosphere is not conducive to experimentation and
prioritization - two crucial skills for making it big in the real world.

Passing heavy homework-laden courses shows you can take orders and execute on
them sufficiently well and consistently, which has some value for people who
want to be employees, but considerably less value for people who want to do
great things. A mix of real world learning from experiences, and accumulating
some credentials in other ways is more and more becoming a viable option.

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jackchristopher
Marvin Minsky's thoughts about this problem. He was thinking about the OLPC
project in particular.

<http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Drawbacks_of_Age-Based_Segregation>

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Raphael
It would be awesome if this started to catch on across the country.

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albertcardona
In Spain, the ESO (a high-school reform) implemented a system of no grades.
The only grades were "needs to improve" and "is progressing fine".

Guess what, it didn't work: they did away with any incentive for students to
really improve. Overall knowledge and performance of students went down.

I conceptually agree that grades are not proper for an evaluation system. But
the alternative can be worse! I hope they really, really worked out and tested
an alternative that wasn't just _politically correct_ or _fair_ (ugh) but
rather, a proper, better evaluation system.

~~~
gscott
I would think the stigma of your friends moving up and your staying behind
with ever younger students would create the social imperative to learn.

