

Report Cards Give Up As and Bs for 4s and 3s - tokenadult
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/education/25cards.html

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jerf
Everyone's bedazzled by the numeric grades, but I'd like to take a moment and
gawk at the things being graded: "Decoding Skills", "Reading Engagement",
"Basic Computer Skills", "Presentation Skills", "Research Skills".

I question the system's ability to grade based on such categorizations.
"Reading Engagement" aka "Faking Interest In Boring School-Assigned Books" is
particularly distressing of the set I can see.

(Yes, you read some interesting books in school assignments. So did I, but the
bulk were pretty dull. I was and am an avid reader and faking an interest in
The Scarlet Letter would probably have been beyond me. Fortunately, nobody
actually required that of me.)

~~~
chris11
Yeah, it sounds like it is explicitly giving busywork it's own grade.

Teacher to Parent: "Well Johnny has a 4/4 math comprehension right now, so he
knows everything we plan on teaching this year. But his math engagement has
really gone down, to about a 1/4. So Johnny really needs to work paying more
attention to what I'm saying in class"

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codeodor
"North Westall, a fifth grader, got 27 3s this marking period"

I'm glad they're giving a more realistic report and showing specifically what
needs improving.

"while the top grade of 4 celebrates 'meeting standards with distinction.'"

However, meeting "standards with distinction" to me means you haven't met
much. Of the standardized testing I've done (which admittedly was many moons
ago), getting a perfect score wasn't saying much. It was truly a lowest-
common-denominator type of standard. For our future's sake, I hope this is no
longer the case.

However, if this comment is representative of what's happening:

"What happened was the high-performing students said, 'I don’t have to work
that hard' and they all stopped trying"

Then I fear there's no hope in such a system. This was happening even among
the best of the best in my high school, where we often joked about "points per
minute" to see how well you could do on tests or assignments in the shortest
amount of time.

And I hate to say it, but what Dr. Guskey points out about the traditional way
of grading:

"'The dilemma with that system is you really don’t know whether anybody has
learned anything,; Dr. Guskey said of grading on a curve. 'They could all have
done miserably, just some less miserably than others.'"

Is even more true of the standards as I've seen them. You only get a chance to
show you can excel at mediocrity.

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tallpapab
So we grade tests with two significant digits (0-100%). Then we partition
these to a letter grade (<1 significant digit) Then we average the letter
grades to a GPA with three significant digits. So what's a bit more confusion?
Small wonder colleges place more emphasis on the SAT (3 digits).

~~~
tokenadult
Actual quotation from a U.S. News top-25 university admission officer who
visited my town last year: "The G.P.A. has become the most meaningless number
in college admissions." Yes, the test scores continue to play a significant
role in college admission, as one factor among several, because grade averages
are hardly comparable at all from one high school to the next.

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patio11
I once went to a magnet system that did something similar, presumably to
prevent excessive competition for As when everyone was already exceptional.

I think the theory was "We teach algebra to 4th graders but there is _no way_
they'll figure out a 3 to 3 mapping on their own."

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dtap
The advanced elementary school I attended(15 years ago) did numbers. We always
just saw them as a rewrite of letter grades.

~~~
markbao
Exactly. It's like reworking the scoring of the SAT from 1600 to 2400. If you
have ANY kind of scaling system in place (which is integral in any kind of
ranking system), it will always be converted.

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chris11
I see nothing good about this. The only good purpose I can see this much
information having is to split the class into many different sections by
ability. And that will take a lot more resources than the new grading scheme
is taking, so splitting up the classroom won't be a consequence of this.

If parents are really interested in having more information about how their
kid is doing, I'm sure the teachers would be willing to talk with the parents.
But this is just too much information, I mean a 14 page guide is needed to
explain a one page grading sheet. It sounds very confusing.

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tokenadult
I find it interesting that these "new" grades are linked to statewide
standards, but there are still fifty different states setting these standards,
so there won't be any comparability in these grades from state to state. I'm
acutely aware of such issues as someone who moved to another state (twice)
during my secondary education.

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andr
About time. We had quite a few discussions with the registrar in my university
about the benefit of converting a numeric grade to a letter grade (round to
the neared quarter), which would then be converted back to numeric to compute
the GPA.

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Dilpil
The only real change seems to be the removal of the concept of 'D'. This is
understandable, D and F were interchangeable anyway.

~~~
tokenadult
What the submitted article says the change is are two things:

a) division of each subject into several topics, with each topic being
reported with its own grade,

and

b) setting standards for grading not in a norm-based ("curved") manner for
each classroom, but in a criterion-based manner comparable across a whole
state.

