
Give 100 Percent? - ColinWright
http://samanthadouglas.wordpress.com/2011/07/28/give-100-percent/
======
ianterrell
Grading is, psychologically, a special case of gamification.

There's a debate on this point, but many smart people believe that
gamification should only be used to provide an extrinsic motivator for things
that A) have no intrinsic motivation, or B) have a steep learning curve that
is discouraging at first. In the latter case, the game mechanics should be
removed once the difficult first step has been conquered so that the intrinsic
motivation can supplant the extrinsic ones, leading to a naturally reinforcing
cycle of growth (and flow). If it isn't removed—or if it shouldn't have been
there in the first place—then the game mechanics can completely overwhelm the
intrinsic motivators.

Here we see that learning is intrinsically motivating by itself; no external
rewards necessary. As another commenter mentioned, the Montessori method
acknowledges this.

~~~
wisty
In Australia, continuous assessment is the fad. Shudder.

I see it as a vicious cycle. One teacher (or lecturer) sets lots of highly
weighted assignments. Students work hard in their class, and ignore the ones
that "don't matter". So the other teachers (or lecturers) have to also ramp
up, or no-one will study for their classes. It's a tragedy of the commons, and
the students are the commons.

~~~
lutorm
Continuous assessment should happen every time someone's teaching. This is
"formative assessment", and is essential for informing teaching practice. That
doesn't mean you give the students grades.

~~~
aik
Exactly. The difference is whether the assessment is seen as feedback or an
evaluation/judgement by the students (and the teacher). In the case of marking
100% on homework -- that's bound to be seen as an evaluation and hence an
extrinsic motivator -- not good.

Assessing for the sake of gaining feedback on where the students are (for the
teacher) and providing feedback to the students on where they are (for the
students) is the way to promote intrinsic motivation.

------
mannicken
I realized this shortly before I dropped out of high school. Nobody who hired
me ever asked for my grades. I appreciated teacher's critique of my work if I
thought his own skill was significantly superior to mine. Yet ultimately I did
not give a crap about whether I had 2.5 or 4.0 GPA.

I was surrounded by perfectionist people who would retake a class because of
A-, but after a while I realized they were just playing a game I wasn't
interested in.

I am interested in creating impressive graphics code/designing things that
don't suck/creating things of high aesthetic value. I am interested in getting
paid because it allows me to have independence and concentrate on creating
those things, and not feel like a parasite. That is my game, so to speak.

I did not see a very strong correlation between grades and the above so it
ended up low on my list of priorities. Just like a game of chess, it made me
smarter at those things I wanted to do, but I couldn't dedicate a lot of time
to chess or gaming the teachers, just because I did not give a crap about
those things.

I know I'm going against the zeitgeist here but I think grade, SAT scores, or
degrees don't mean a lot in life.

I recently had to work with legacy code written by a guy with the highest
degree possible in US. The code was hard to read, did not use clearly superior
architectures, lacked documentation, and quite frankly, I could've done a lot
better. There was no empathy at all to the person who will inherit the project
but the "I HAVE PHD" feeling of smugness I felt strongly.

One of the worst math instructors I knew had a graduate degree which she liked
to brag about more than everybody thought was appropriate to her skill.

On the other hand, I was in touch with several professors who were clearly
brilliant and well-spoken... obviously education doesn't necessarily fuck up
your sense of humility and introspective self-critique.

------
hardy263
From the title I thought "give 100%" meant putting in your full effort, rather
than the mark you got. Maybe change it to something less ambiguous?

~~~
kqr2
Same here.

Title should be: _How to kill the drive to learn - give grades_

~~~
ColinWright
That's the title as I originally submitted it. The mods, in their infinite
wisdom, changed it.

I think my title gave a better idea of what the article was about. The mods
changed it to the article's own title. I do not believe my title was
editorializing, I believe it was providing useful information.

<shrug> The mods know best. Well, they have the power, anyway.

Personally, I'm disappointed. I put some time into finding a title that I
thought didn't editorialize, but did give better insight into what the article
is about, helping people make a decision whether to click on it or not.

It's different when you've already got the article in front of you - no
further clicks required.

------
timr
I'm torn. I think the post has a point, but in my experience (as a teacher and
as a student) the people who complain most vociferously about grades also tend
to be the people who _get the lowest grades._ More importantly, the
correlation between grades and competence isn't perfect -- but it's also much
higher than zero. Most of the people I've met in the valley have earned
_fantastic_ grades, at the best universities. You can argue that this is mere
correlation or selection bias, but regardless of the reason, the relationship
still exists.

To paraphrase Churchill: grades are the worst system of measuring
accomplishment, except for all the others we've tried.

~~~
jessriedel
If you were only interested in _measuring_ accomplishment, you'd keep the
grades secret (say, until the end of the year). Instead, grades are used as a
stick/carrot for motivating students.

~~~
hugh3
And as feedback. Students need to know whether or not they're doing well.

In some subjects it's obvious to the student whether they're doing well, but
in others it's not.

~~~
TeMPOraL
But the problem is that this feedback turns into a 'grade-based economy',
where your value in the eyes of peers and parents becomes determined by the
grades you get.

------
abiekatz
I wonder why some people end up being intellectually curious while others are
not. I think intellectual curiosity is very important, especially now since
the majority of the world's information is available for free online.

The person who grows up being intellectually curious will have a big heads up
in the job market since they will have acquired more information than the
other applicants. Plus, I think a lover for knowledge can enrich an
individuals life as well.

I don't know exactly how schools and parents can instill intellectual
curiosity into their students and children but I think the subject matter
should be researched and prioritized.

~~~
law
> The person who grows up being intellectually curious will have a big heads
> up in the job market since they will have acquired more information than the
> other applicants.

I unfortunately do not agree with you. Despite how much it kills me to admit
this, intellectual curiosity (at least in the legal world) is more of a
cancer... you don't want people who will bury themselves learning as much as
they can about a topic. This mindset is discordant with the concept of
deadlines, because it's almost impossible to estimate the duration of
something that is by definition factorial in complexity. As such, employers in
fields so heavily dictated by deadlines are not looking for people who thrive
on learning...they're looking for people who thrive on completing the task
that they're assigned--even if it means suppressing their intrinsic desire to
learn in favor of an extrinsic motivator: $$$.

~~~
_delirium
I mostly agree with this; I think a reasonable degree of intellectual
curiosity is necessary to do well, but that the most successful range is "a
moderate amount". Read some, but not too much, and get quite skilled at some
in-demand skill, while staying flexible enough to adapt it and pick up related
skills. Having _too_ much intellectual curiosity can reduce focus (harder to
be content with a fairly limited job, even if well-paying), can cause angst if
you do too much digging-into-foundations (i.e. don't just excel within the
parameters of your task, but try to understand why it exists or is set up the
way it is in the first place), etc.

Not that that means intellectual curiosity is bad, I'm just not sure it's
income-maximizing or good-employee-maximizing, at least in the normal case.

~~~
law
Yeah, I'm not at all arguing that intellectual curiosity is _bad_ , just that
it's not always _right_ , where what's "right" is parameterized on the inputs:
your task, the expected output, the deadline, etc.

------
csomar
Unluckily, this is the truth. This develops even further. The aim become how
to optimize to get good grades and not actually learn to get them. This
develops even further: You don't want to learn unless you get rewarded for it.
The result is the decline in the quality of work you do.

This might explain the current economics: The smart always (most of the time)
find a job or a way to live. Those who care only to take a job are the jobless
(because they create less value and also there are many of them).

~~~
entangld
>>The smart always (most of the time) find a job or a way to live.<<

You're talking about expedience not intelligence.

------
pnathan
In a funny way, that's like graduate school: the good parts of it, at least.

It's just you, and striving to learn something, in depth, with understanding.
You have access to immense knowledge in the form of the University library and
the faculty. You can learn, really learn, in a way that isn't sneaking it or
being the disruptive one. It's _okay_ to learn.

(Yeah, there's also advisors, other students, student loans, classes, the U
bureaucratic world, and the rest of the bad parts.)

------
yrislerlhf
I'm torn. On the one hand, my understanding is that the concept of a
Montessori school is based on the notion of exploratory learning for young
children, and there was an article recently that remarked on the unusually
high rate of Montessori-schooled individuals in places of power. So there is
some sort of lesson to be drawn from this idea, namely: send your kids to a
Montessori school.

But I don't like the characterization of the preferred drive for approval in
writing from an adult as a "cancer", and I think it obscures the fact that at
some point grades and such will become important because society is going to
have to sort them, and grades are just the sorting mechanism.

I think that for each socio-economic stratum there is going to be some optimal
transition age which puts the students in the best position to succeed, make
money, have families, found companies, make great art, heal people better,
make scientific discoveries, etc... and ultimately have more kids.

Link: [http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/05/the-
montessori-...](http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/05/the-montessori-
mafia/)

~~~
fleitz
It is a cancer and I could care less how useful grades are to society. I treat
society like it treats me, a mark on a piece of paper somewhere. I'm not a
grade I'm a person. If not having a great means society can't sort me then all
the better, I don't want to be anywhere near the people who care to be sorted.

------
goblgobl
Grades have this affect because they become psychologically tied to your self-
worth. Where does it start? I don't think small children care or are even
aware of the significance of having good grades (what 5-8yr old is gunning for
Harvard?), but they can certainly sense which end of the spectrum is desirable
if they seek to maximize love, affection, and acceptance from adults and
peers.

You take the organic process of knowledge acquisition and now you've added
game mechanics to it. For children the prize is acceptance, and for college
students its social status, employment prospects, and respect. Now you have
scores and outcomes, and critically, the outcomes do not have to be tied to
any intrinsic motivation for the thing you are trying to learn.

So children might do things not because they're interested in them, but
because it makes them look smart. People will chase lucrative jobs in fields
they don't particularly care for, or want to join particular institutions just
for the prestige, and a wide range of other behavior thats driven by rewards
of performance and not of one's real interests. Learning for learnings sake
takes a back seat to all of this.

------
tzs
OT: if you are on an iPad, be aware the site uses that broken OnSwipe theme,
which has a good chance of running your browser out of memory and crashing it.
Might want to wait until you are on your desktop or laptop.

------
glimcat
Great anecdote; learning and education are often at odds.

------
arasraj
This blog post echoes what is said in the book MindSet
(<http://mindsetonline.com/>). Never praise children because they accomplished
a task. Always praise the effort done to do so.

------
kingkilr
For those interested in this subject, Alfie Kohn is a good author to read.

~~~
jwn
I second that. Reading his work has strongly influenced my parenting
philosophy for my 3 young boys.

~~~
sp332
Yeah, but how did they turn out? ;-)

------
keithburgun
Check out the book "punished by rewards". Also explains why achievements in
video games are such a bad idea.

~~~
hugh3
To save me the trouble of reading an entire book just to get the one point I'm
interested in, why _does_ the author think that achievements in video games
are a bad idea?

------
tassl
In some sense, I had this feeling when I came to the US for the first time. I
was used to study in Universities were the failure % could be easily below 10%
for some courses (Calculus, Algebra being an example). In most of the courses
the best grades were below a 7 out of 10. And no, there were no A+ to anybody
if the grade was not 9+ out of 10.

In the US, though, it is difficult is to fail a course. I really think that
failing a course requires big amount of effort.

I think that neither of both systems are really effective. The spanish version
can be depressing and the students are not willing to study for the sake of
learning but to pass (the average number of years for a engineering undergrad
is 7 years back when the engineering was 5 years of study). On the other hand,
most students in the US lack passion and are not going to study since most of
the time they don't need to study to pass the courses.

~~~
minikomi
Japan is even worse - with most tertiary education considered a break between
high school and company, and your entry level position mainly determined by
the name of your school... Hence the mad situation where your adult life
hinges on one year of grueling study for the uni entrance exams!

------
wccrawford
Or, don't give a '100%' until everything is learned? If they've giving up
before the work is done because you told them it was done, don't tell them
it's done?

I get the moral of the story. But if there's more words to learn, how could
they possibly have mastered the test?

There's more wrong here than just the grades.

~~~
Vivtek
I think the flaw there is imagining that "everything" can be learned.

~~~
wccrawford
He obviously has a list to learn from. That's 'everything' in this context.

~~~
Vivtek
The entire point here is that letting the kids think in terms of "finishing
the list" is wrong. You can't "finish" learning English vocabulary, or
mathematical theorems, or really anything worth doing in life.

If the kids use up the pre-researched list, then you _go get more_. Or tell
the kids how to get more.

------
bprater
Isn't this part of the Montessori model -- no grading?

~~~
msutherl
The Montessori model is a particular 'no grading' model.

~~~
Apocryphon
So there's more than one way to not grade.

~~~
epochwolf
More like: not all models of teaching require grades.

------
peng
Back in the second grade, my teacher would offer extra credit math that
brought your percentage over 100%. I remember competing with the other kids to
get ridiculously inflated scores like 361%.

Of course, everyone who made it to 95% got an A, but the "bonus XP" aspect of
going over 100% was a fun incentive to keep you trying harder.

------
nazgulnarsil
This highlights a deeper problem in human psychology. It takes many otherwise
intelligent people years to realize that the approval of some abstracted
authority is not a useful measure of accomplishment. Many people never get
over it.

------
VladRussian
marking their work prepares the children for the next thing which will be even
more cooler shower upon their curiosity and enthusiasm -
money/salary/financial incentives distribution system in the economy.

------
digikata
Grading?!? Wait til they get a budget, a schedule, and major requirements that
change weekly...

More seriously though, this is a fascinating glimpse into an aspect of human
motivation.

------
Kilimanjaro
"Men will die for colored ribbons" Bonaparte.

------
logjam
"In time...six months; five years, perhaps...a change could easily begin to
take place. He would become less and less satisfied with a kind of dumb, day-
to-day shopwork. His creative intelligence, stifled by too much theory and too
many grades in college, would now become reawakened by the boredom of the
shop. Thousands of hours of frustrating mechanical problems would have made
him more interested in machine design. He would like to design machinery
himself. He'd think he could do a better job. He would try modifying a few
engines, meet with success, look for more success, but feel blocked because he
didn't have the theoretical information. He would discover that when before he
felt stupid because of his lack of interest in theoretical information, he'd
now find a brand of theoretical information which he'd have a lot of respect
for, namely, mechanical engineering.

"So he would come back to our degreeless and gradeless school, but with a
difference. He'd no longer be a grade-motivated person. He'd be a knowledge-
motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would
come from inside. He'd be a free man. He wouldn't need a lot of discipline to
shape him up. In fact, if the instructors assigned him were slacking on the
job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He'd be
there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they'd better
come up with it.

"Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in
the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he
wouldn't stop with rote engineering information. Physics and mathematics were
going to come within his sphere of interest because he'd see he needed them.
Metallurgy and electrical engineering would come up for attention. And, in the
process of intellectual maturing that these abstract studies gave him, he
would he likely to branch out into other theoretical areas that weren't
directly related to machines but had become a part of a newer larger goal.
This larger goal wouldn't be the imitation of education in Universities today,
glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of
something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the
real thing."

\-- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

~~~
chops
Thank you for that. ZatAoMM (whoa acronym) has always been on my list to read,
but this little excerpt has helped to propel it near to the top of my list.

So thank you muchly!

~~~
nbashaw
It's a wonderful book. I read it before I'd been exposed to too much other
philosophy and I thought it was the greatest thing that had ever been written.
Then in college I started reading a lot of other philosophy and didn't ever
quite reach the same passionate reaction I had with ZAMM. It's both engaging
and deep.

~~~
msutherl
As somebody who tried to read it _after_ having read some other philosophy, I
found it entirely boring and put it down before 100 pages.

~~~
klbarry
I also disliked it and got 3/4 of the way through - I found it very
pretentious and not nearly as full of wisdom as the author would like to
believe.

~~~
andy_boot
I recon that Sophie's World is much better than Zen

~~~
hugh3
I learned most of what I know about philosophy from "The Bluffer's Guide To
Philosophy" when I was about twelve.

It enabled me to win arguments with philosophy undergrads at least up 'til
second year uni.

------
michaelochurch
One of the ways in which most grading systems are fucked up is that there's
more downside than upside. One failure cancels out 3 or 4 successes, no matter
how great. If a teacher decides that any late work gets a zero, then being
half a day late on one paper nullifies several great, on-time papers.

I think it's a vicious cycle. This sort of system is designed to produce the
sort of risk-averse rule-followers required by old-style industry: people
destined for jobs where creativity isn't required but following orders 90% of
the time is failure. But for that system's defense, it's good practice for
real life. Humans are vindictive and focused more on stigma, gossip and the
aversion to failure than in seeking out excellence and creativity. Hence, they
create societies (like our society at a macro level, like most corporations,
and like many school systems) that punish failure brutally but don't really
value (or even fully trust) excellence, and which actively discourage the
risk-taking usually required to excel. (And no, our society's outsized reward
for economic fortune is not "rewarding success" since most of those people at
the top are effective social climbers or hereditarily-placed parasites.) The
"vicious cycle" is closed if one believes that the vindictive, punitive nature
of people comes from how they are taught. Or is it innate? I'm really not
sure.

The way I think grading should be done is an inverse of the current system.
Make the problems really, really hard. Some should be so hard that the hardest
exam problems go for years without being answered. Make it so hard that 20% is
passing and 60% is exceptional-- instead of 70% being passing and 95% being
exceptional-- and so that students are used to it (and therefore they don't
panic when they take an exam and can't solve half the problems). I argue for
this because the reality for the most creative, hardest-to-get-right pursuits
is that for 60% of one's efforts to succeed _is_ exceptional.

All that said, I think grading is important, but it shouldn't be started at
such a young age, and that grades should generally be internal (for the
student's and school's benefit) only. Many business schools actually prohibit
their students from disclosing GPA or transcripts, only verifying which
courses were taken and passed. If I were running a college, full transcripts
would be available only to academic graduate departments-- not to future
employers or professional schools. I'm not going to do their job (sorting) for
them.

~~~
pbiggar
So you might be interested to know that universities in Ireland (and I think
England, where we inherited our university system from), everyone aims for a
70% grade. That's a "1st class honours" degree, and is basically the best you
can come out with.

Below that is "2nd class honours, I" (colloquially 2.1, pronounced "two
one")). With a 1st or a 2.1, you're considered a high achiever (like a good
job, or grad school, might require a 2.1 or better). A 2.1 is between 60-70%.
Pass is 40%, and exams are marked harder to make the numbers work. (I believe
harder questions are asked than equivalent US universities, but that's just
rumour, unless you really do get multiple choice questions in university).

It leads to interesting dynamics. In the Arts and Humanities, students are
basically marked out of 80, with scores above that reserved for truly great
work which is seen relatively rarely.

In CS or Mathematics, where you truly can answer perfectly, sometimes you can
get close to 100% in a exam, which throws off the marking scheme. For project
work though, 70% means "great job", and 80% means you've done something truly
excellent. For my undergraduate thesis, a piece of novel research on sorting
and branch predictors that I truly poured my heart and soul into for 6 months,
I got 94%. The feeling at achieving that grade was truly exhilarating, in a
way that it could never be if I people didn't normally get 72% for great work.

~~~
noonespecial
The American grading system has a severe lack of dynamic headroom. The
measurement system saturates at 100% for even mediocre effort and there is no
way to measure achievement beyond that.

I once argued in a paper at university that we needed a logarithmic grading
system like decibels. I got a C.

~~~
duncanj
Brilliant. I hadn't considered the similarity of US grading and grade
inflation to the loudness wars.

------
clobber
Would love to read this if it wasn't for Wordpress using OnSwipe. Why is this
awful startup breaking website usability?

