
The pressure to achieve academically is a crime against learning - tokenadult
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/08/when-success-leads-to-failure/400925/?single_page=true
======
sandworm101
I do not think the pressure comes directly from the need for higher grades. I
think it come from how those grades are created.

I my academic history (highschool, undergrad, law school, now teaching) I only
felt real stress where grades were incremental. Take my civpro class. We had
an assignment after only three lectures, an assignment worth 5% of our grade.
I had barely wrapped my head around law school and already my final grade, my
scholarship, was on the line. I did poorly on that assignment, immediately
chopping a few points off my final grade. On the other hand my crimlaw class
had no assignments, just a big exam at the end. That class allowed me the time
to figure things out and was much less stressful.

The highschool kids I talk to today are in a constant panic. ((That's how I
see it. For them it's just normal.)) Grades are ridiculously high, with class
averages well north of 90%. So every test, every graded assignment, requires
the focus of a final exam. They cannot afford diversion or outside learning.
Each week is prep for the next test and each of those tests directly impacts
their grade. Have a bad week, or even a bad afternoon, and it might stick with
you for years. They don't dare read anything that isn't assigned for fear of
not aligning with the teacher's "learning plan". If it didn't come from
teacher it isn't on next week's test and is therefore useless. Imho this
constant "exam mode" is the real source of stress.

So drop the microtests. Give them the one big exam and let them relax and
learn at their own pace the rest of the time.

~~~
zo1
Immediately, you've come up with a solution that wouldn't fit _my_ type of
learning, and my comfort level. I absolutely _abhor_ "final" exams. It's like
a grand-finale that is make or break, forcing you to study a ridiculous amount
of content and make sure you know/understand all of it for a single event in
the future. If you fail, you have to do it all over again. No course-
corrections, no motivational reminders/nudges. Nothing.

The example you cite in the beginning, your fear of the impending results of a
small test. Now multiply that by 20 (as you said yours was just 5% of the
final mark), and that is how anxious I would be for the entire course leading
up to the final exam.

So drop the ubertests. Test students understanding using application and
insight, not giant knowledge dumps that can only be tested in one long-winded
sitting. (I exaggerate a little, sorry about that).

~~~
Folcon
I have to wonder, if the outcome we are interested in is whether students
understand the material, can't we do both? Some optional mid point tests,
where the student can chose to keep the grade or bet it all on that final
assessment?

I mean tests only exist to convince us that they know the material. Why does
it matter how it works, beyond the test being an accurate reflection of their
understanding?

~~~
jsharpe
Why not both? Some of my favourite classes have said, "Highest of midterms +
assignment marks or final exam mark."

~~~
starfis
Almost all of my computer science classes had two grading schemes - one
"normal" one and another which was basically just taking your grade on the
final exam and not counting anything else. That latter option actually saved
me one time, but that's because I was astronomically lazy in that class and
didn't do anything (didn't even show up to some quizzes, I think, when two
quizzes added up to an exam). I definitely think that giving students the
option is good, though, because if you asked me which I'd want I will always
choose the small incremental tests over one huge test.

------
ryanmarsh
And this is why we homeschool. Have a weird fascination with the human eye?
Here's three medical textbooks, knock yourself out kid. Suck at math? No
problem, we will take it as slow as we have to until you _feel comfortable_.
There's no grades and pressure there's just things you've learned and things
you're still learning.

~~~
jaawn
I think probably a better solution is some sort of combination between home
schooling and public school. Homeschooling alone makes it hard for children to
learn peer social skills, and it makes it more difficult for them to relate
later on to the majority of people who have had 13 years of primary/secondary
education in a public school environment (in the US at least)

~~~
waiquoo
I don't understand this response. Whenever homeschooling comes up, someone
always says that homeschoolers are unsocialized. I don't even know what that
means. Do you think homeschoolers never have friends or enemies growing up?
Where did this prevailing belief come from? I say this as someone who was
homeschooled all the way through highschool and attended university and grad
school. Even if homeschoolers are 'less socialized' than public/private
schoolers, have you noticed that there are the oversocialized people as well?
I'm talking about the ones who were popular in highschool, and end up deriving
their self-worth from what everyone else thinks of them. Is that not also as
big a problem?

I don't disagree that socialization is an important part of growing up, I just
disagree with the notion that homeschoolers are savages that live in caves
until they're 18.

~~~
bebop
I think the big difference is not that home schoolers do not have friends, it
is that home schooling does not force you to deal with diverse groups of kids.
In public school you have no choice of whether or not you have to interact
with people that you don't want to/don't care to.

This is not really a bad thing, but learning to deal with people you would
rather not can be a good skill to learn. This is not to say that you will not
figure this out elsewhere.

~~~
jaawn
This is exactly the point I was trying to make. It is technically possible to
recreate this exposure outside of school, but very difficult.

~~~
TheBeardKing
Good cover, but one could argue that the pros of devoted tutorship and
freestyle curriculum outweigh the cons of limited socialization. In my
everyday life as an adult professional, I appreciate more the limited
educational breadth I received in public school over whatever street smarts I
gained from it. Need exposure to a lower socio-economic tiers? Get involved in
volunteer charity organizations. Overall, I think educational breadth and
depth will make one a far better citizen than simply being among other public
school students at the hands of the awful US education system with NCLB.

------
Elte
Ah, yes, this. When I went back to university after taking a break a couple of
years ago I promised myself it would be out of pure interest, because I cared
about the subject, not to get good grades. Of course it didn't work out
exactly that way, pretty soon there's an assignment to hand in tomorrow, and
exam to get points on next week... and again I found myself preparing to
answer the questions I knew I was going to get, rather than delving into that
one subject that seemed interesting, or reading through the proof of a theorem
being used. The grades were good, the learning... maybe not so much.

Right now I'm working on my final thesis research, and I found a good subject.
Everyone keeps asking what my deadline is, when it is going to be done, how
I'm progressing. I don't care. I'm learning, creating and having fun. I want
to be able to spend the whole day exploring a topic I don't understand, or
refactoring parts of my simulation code that I don't like. I know I'll get it
done at some point, and when I do it'll be a valuable contribution at least to
myself and hopefully the field I'll be publishing in. That's what learning's
supposed to be like for me.

~~~
gshubert17
I read and discussed classics at St. John's College in Santa Fe, NM, for 8
weeks per summer for 4 summers, for a master's degree; and there were no
grades. (Yes, the grades are on a transcript which I could request, but
haven't.) It is my understanding that the undergraduate program has the same
grading policy.

It was refreshing to be able to learn without grade pressure.

------
1971genocide
I call this "Too smart to fail".

When I was a below average student, I used to have a lot less stress. The
expectation was so much lower.

Once I started getting As across the board I started panicking.

The problem is we have essentially "privatized" learning.

What that means is once we started attaching money to learning via the
university industrial complex and cheap credit. Your knowledge became a store
of wealth like your house ( which itself is a terrible idea ).

Now their is a pervasive attitude - if you study engineering for example you
pay 4X for tuition compared to humanities.

If you get As you get to go to Stanford and be 10X in debt as someone who went
to a Community College.

It reminds me of the argument by Louise CK, where loans are much easier to get
when you have liquidity already.

This has lead to a situation of "Too smart to fail" among students who get
good grades, when in reality we should be allocating more education resources
to weaker students in society and handing them the most credit, and not
celebrate grades so heavily, but celebrate when that education leads to value
in society.

~~~
hoopd
> Now their is a pervasive attitude - if you study engineering for example you
> pay 4X for tuition compared to humanities.

What? If you want to be an engineer you can go to a state school, work hard
and pass the FE/EIT exam your senior year for 1/4 the price of a private
school.

Half of the top ten engineering schools are public:
[http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-
colleges/...](http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-
colleges/rankings/engineering-doctorate)

The top ten liberal arts schools are all private:
[http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-
colleges/...](http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-
colleges/rankings/national-liberal-arts-colleges)

~~~
avn2109
>> "...work hard and pass the FE/EIT exam your senior year..."

Mostly agreed, except that as someone who studied drastically, overwhelmingly
too much for the FE exam (which turned out to be super easy) that if you have
to "work hard" to pass the FE your education has been gravely deficient.

~~~
bsder
> if you have to "work hard" to pass the FE your education has been gravely
> deficient.

Easier for Mechanical and Civil engineering students since more of the
sections are a basic part of their curriculum.

As an electrical engineer, the EE sections were laughably easy while I had to
study quite hard to get enough points in the dynamics, thermodynamics, and
materials sections to pass. I did well, but I really had to work my ass off
for sections that I never used again.

Whereas practically all of the other engineering disciplines simply blow off
the EE section as you can pass without getting any points at all in it.

------
sanxiyn
Learning is a beautiful thing when it happens, but it mostly does not happen
in education. Learning is a delicacy, a luxury, thing which not everyone will
appreciate.

On the other hand, vocational training is necessary and most people appreciate
the necessity. It is time to officially redirect universal education to
vocational training. Expecting education to provide learning is expecting too
much. By expecting too much we will only be disappointed.

~~~
InclinedPlane
I disagree that learning is a delicacy. Learning is an innate human behavior.
It's what separates us from the animals. It's how we became apex predators
across multiple biomes stretching across the globe. You can see this in
children, they have unbridled curiosity and depthless enthusiasm for learning.
But they have a limited tolerance for tedium and bureaucracy, and those are in
extreme abundance in education today. It's a system that's practically
designed to beat out any hint of desire for learning, intellectualism, and
reading. In some ways it's a wonder that any vestige of those things survive
at all through such experiences.

------
JamesBarney
I always thought it would be better to measure a student by how much they've
learned not how good they are. For example one student would be on algebra 1
and another on calculus. I think it is easier emotionally to think of someone
else as just farther along than better than you. Traditional in room lecture
based learning required all students to be at the same point. This is a
terrible assumption because many times it's not true. Assume a student was not
able to focus during Algebra 1 because of a tragic event during that year,
like the loss of a parent. Without herculean effort that student will be lost
in geometry, trig, and calculus because they lack the Algebra 1 foundation.
One year of missed learning turns into four.

I hope that MOOCs allow for this to be fixed. No longer would the assumption
need to be made that all students need learn at the same pace. This means the
40% of gifted kids won't be bored, and 20% of kids who learn a little slower
won't be hopelessly lost.

The other benefit to the learning being self paced and through computers is
that you could test progress through small quizzes. If a student failed a
quiz, she could simply relearn the material. This eliminates, the TEST, a huge
unnecessary stresser in children's lives. You could also test material from
several quizzes ago to make sure the important points are hammered home
through spaced repetition.

Most teachers I know currently spend 80% of the year teaching to the test.
Self paced materials means that you'll be able to measure performance of a kid
and a teacher by how they do over a year, and not how they do on one day.

Anyway that's my dream of MOOCs and automated learning in the class room :).

------
Nevermark
My radical view on education is that everyone should work at their own pace
until they have an A understanding/test scores in each topic of each class
before moving on.

This completely takes the focus off the grade (its always an A) and focuses it
on learning well.

It also means that nobody falls behind which is a source of a lot of stress.
Slow learners get extra time and teacher attention before trying to move on to
more advanced topics.

Fast learners enjoy racing through subjects at their own top speed. It is
extremely rewarding to be able to skip forward as soon as you are ready. This
naturally develops self-managed education habits.

I got to learn this way for one year in elementary school and it was the best
experience I have ever had in education.

To do this, teachers need organized lesson plans for each class that students
can follow at their own pace, and act more as self-learning mentors and a
learning resource, as apposed to controlling the pace with all-class lectures.
The commonality between all classes is teachers are teaching kids how to learn
by their own efforts, not just topics they will forget.

------
donflamenco
There is a field of study around "mindset". The fairly famous book is called
Mindset by Carol Dweck.

This infographic summarizes the ideas very well.

[http://i.imgur.com/HGBY1tW.png](http://i.imgur.com/HGBY1tW.png)

~~~
dbhattar
My attitude had always been "if it is grades people want, they will get it"
i.e. to get good grades that will help me go up the ladder academically while
at the same time keeping in mind that the grades are not going to help me in
the real world.

This pushed me to learn continuously because at the end of the day, it is what
you know and what you can do that counts rather than your grades.

------
mc32
I'm all for teaching kids curiosity and how to learn and how to prepare to be
ready for a future years hence. Surely we need to question methodology and
results thereof.

Yet for all of one child's failure there are many other successes. So it's
more a matter of what methodology gets your educational system the greatest
results for people entering adult society years hence.

Any system will be a disservice to some. Perhaps for some children tailored or
perhaps less structured home schooling or other alternative forms of education
would be more beneficial to them in the long run.

On the other hand, it's not as if east Asia and south Asia are doing poorly
economically due to their focus on achievement. On the contrary they are very
vital economic engines, china due to surpass the us in ppp GDP. So, its not
clear that this model is that detrimental. Any model will incur casualties,
it's up to us to seek better alternatives with fewer casualties but proof of
the pudding is in the eating.

~~~
aianus
Total GDP is meaningless. China is nowhere near the US in PPP GDP per capita.

------
hoopd
> ....for our willingness to put their long-term developmental and emotional
> needs before their short-term happiness. For our willingness to let their
> lives be just a little bit harder today so they will know how to face
> hardship tomorrow.

Isn't decreasing the pressure to be a perfect student the exact opposite of
letting their life be a little bit harder today?

~~~
crpatino
Not if the preferred way to become a "perfect student" is to go only after the
easier/safer challenges. And to quit whenever the chance of getting any less
than an "A-" grade seems uncertain.

The whole article builds the argument that since adults are only concerned
with the kid's results but cannot be bothered on how those are achieved, all
kids eventually learn to fake it and end up sacrificing their intellectual
curiosity for the sake of self-worth validation from their parents/teachers.

Therefore, making the student's life a little bit harder today means to push
them to tackle real challenges and making peace with the fact that they might
spoil their perfect record in the process.

~~~
hoopd
> Not if the preferred way to become a "perfect student" is to go only after
> the easier/safer challenges.

That's nowhere near becoming a perfect student and it isn't even high on the
scale of parental pressure.

~~~
crpatino
That's what the article said, no how I think things should be.

With my own children, I've never make a fuss about bad grades (which
thankfully have been few and far between). I do care about them giving their
best effort, and let them know in no uncertain terms.

But I know plenty of parents that are minimally involved but nonetheless
demand "good grades" from their kids. Fooling those into believing their kids
are raising academic stars would be extremely easy.

------
wahsd
Although I think the whole "the fear of failure has destroyed learning" thing
is rather dramatic, I realize there is a basis for that perspective that I
think lies more in that academic achievement destroys exploratory, off-script
types of learning that lead to fulfillment. America is rather innovative and
we are arguably innovation leaders, but the quantitative success factor
overlooks the qualitative measure of living life.

Innovation in the USA in particular seems to largely focus on chasing some
sort of target and/or be driven by some paranoia based anxiety. A perfect
example of this whole issue is something I heard the other day, that
technology could be used to solve earth's environmental problems. It's so
schizophrenic if you start even barely thinking about it ... we're going to
invent solutions to problems that we are causing ourselves, at this very
moment? It strikes me as a similar strategy as growing yourself out of net
loss. It's really kind of mind boggling and quite similar to obsessive
compulsive disorder; just clean those hands one more time to make sure they
are clean, just clean those hands one more time to make sure they are clean
.... innovate our way out of the problems that our last innovation caused,
innovate our way out of the problems our last innovation caused ... and on and
on.

------
11thEarlOfMar
The issues raised here are side effects of the discontinuity between how
humans evolved to learn, and how we are taught today.

Fundamentally, the problem is similar to the problems of mass production. The
need is to produce greater volume, with standardized results and less variance
in the end product. But this is exactly opposite of how humans evolved to
learn. We're evolved to learn primarily from our parents, secondarily from
extended family and then from the larger group. This is why children in
general have a desire to please their parents, and parents have both anxiety
about struggling children and and pride when they do well. There is another
force for learning, curiosity, that is the underlying factor for children's
increasing knowledge and innovation, and which drives persistence and
resilience. In a prehistoric environment, teaching and learning were highly
personalized. 2 parents may have to nurture 2 or 3 children at a time.
Prehistoric children also learned quite a bit on their own, in their own way,
at their own pace when no teacher was paying attention. [0]

In today's world, the amount and type of what has to be learned to function
far exceeds what parents and family can teach. Even with homeschooling,
advanced topics may be learned from texts that the student reads, rather than
from tutoring by their parents. Most parents don't have homeschooling as an
option, so we invented schools, which are by their nature, not personalized.
Instead of ~1 teacher/parent per student, we have 30+. Teaching is not
personalized, which goes strictly against human nature.

[0] [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/02/spoiled-
rotten](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/02/spoiled-rotten)

------
lordnacho
My gut feeling is that some of the top universities could change this with no
effect on employment, but positive effect on actual learning and related exam
stress.

You could give the kids internal assessments that don't count. "Here's some
questions that should be easy if you understood the linear algebra course.
It's up to your own conscience to decide how well you know it."

And then have a pass/fail line that is external. "This kid went to Harvard and
did these courses and passed. All our kids are smart, and there's not much
point in you, as an external employer, trying to figure out who is better
based on a GPA."

I get the feeling a lot of the grade stress is unproductive. Kids divert their
attention to exams, which employers have no idea how to assess. Some kid gets
an A in math. How much of a predictor of business success is that really, for
your average consultancy/bank/whatever? The result is the kids end up spending
their energy on something that isn't all that important in the grand scheme of
things.

~~~
gozo
I think it's pretty telling that most courses outside school aren't
structured...

Course: Math, Grade: A-F.

...but...

Course: Math E, Grade: Pass/Fail. Course: Math D, Grade: Pass/Fail. Course:
Math C, Grade: Pass/Fail.

...etc.

I think the former mindset unfortunately can be quite common in the tech
industry. "We need an A grade programmer". When what you really are looking
for is a "C grade programmer with A grade ruby, B grade security, B grade
network knowledge".

------
petewailes
Here's an idea. Drop exams entirely, and examine at the point of job
application. If a person learning understand the material, encourage them to
move to the next thing. If they're still addressing subject matter, let them
continue.

------
netcan
This is a sort of a hamster-ball problem. You have a school that is severely
underperforming, an children are not learning at all. You have a big
achievement gap in the classroom, where a good chunk os students are
illiterate. Then we try to solve this with grades, as a way of holding
teachers and students responsible and provide a feedback loop. Then the grades
inform the learning process, changing everything.

It's an example of a wider problem that I think I've heard it called
"legibility." It can exist police departments, for example. You know that half
the cops are lazy, so you measure arrests and such. Then cops' job becomes
arresting people rather than maintaining peace. All sorts of damaging dynamics
play. Even if a measure (eg arrests) might be good at telling you who's a good
cop, optimizing for the measure does not necessarily make cops better. It's
demoralizing to the good cops, who are now judged by stupid measures.

Schools have this problem and lots of others too. Lets start with the fact
that a 6+ hour schooldays for 8 year olds is nonsensical. More hours does not
result in more learning. You could halve the hours (double the teacher/student
ratio for the same price?), but schools need to be babysitters too. A big
group of kids of equal age is an unnatural environment for juvenile humans to
interact and learn in, causing (among other things) emotionally turbulent self
judgement constantly. Everyone is your yardstick.

Overall, these are problems we hit as we create institutions. I think it's a
problem all over the modern world. Our anemic & sanitized work culture
isolated from our home life, and the split personality people develop living
in these two worlds. The anonymity and isolation of the oversized and
transient "communities" we live in. We develop "unnatural" institutions to
deal with life in these inorganic world. Formal reviews and targets in a
company instead of the normal peer pressures you would find in a more organic
setting like a family farm with a dozen workers (or a hunting party if you
want to take it that far). We replace school discipline, grading and such with
children's innate desire to learn and discover.

I have a hint of a grand historical theory floating around in my mind that I
don't understand well enough to articulate:

It's becoming very clear that technology is developing much faster than
culture and psychology. Comment trolling and the even more common emotional
overreactions and general emotional idiocy of our online selves are an obvious
example. But, I suspect it might go much deeper and longer maybe to the
paleolithic revolution.

Early civilizations were (we think) these slave societies with god kings and
terrible oppression. They had seeds in our natural (even prehuman) instincts
for dominance, status, subordination. But, they were really pathological
worlds where people couldn't thrive. They built institutions like slavery and
priesthood out of the existing "natural" dynamics (say tribal shamans and
chieftains) but most of the brickwork was this clunky new stuff barely holding
together this new way of doing society: slavery, cast hierarchy… When we think
of the "Charles Dickens World" of street urchins, poorhouses, filth and urban
poverty we're seeing people living in a newly constructed industrial world
with cobbled together institutions and culture.

Organic cultural takes time, generations. The alternative is an engineered
culture with its legible, formalizable logic and none of the nuance.

It's particularly sad though, when it comes to small children.

