
Singapore abolishes school exam rankings (2018) - arunbahl
https://citinewsroom.com/2018/10/singapore-abolishes-school-exam-rankings-says-learning-is-not-competition/
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shripadk
This is brilliant! Learning should not be a competitive.

EDIT: Why would you want to have children compete with each other on learning
abilities? How does it help anyone? If a child is going to take a tad bit
longer to understand than another child, I would rather the child take a bit
longer to master than force the child to acquire the knowledge within a set
duration. If they score 90% of the marks would you be happy that they scored
90% or unhappy that they could not master the remaining 10% and will never be
given a second chance to do so? And what if your child crosses the passing
marks of say 40%? Would you be happy that your child scraped through with
passing marks or be unhappy that it never got that extra time to learn the
remaining 60%? Not every child has the same grasping power. And by making
learning a competition you are taking away the right to learn from a majority
of these young children.

I would rather the child compete with others on what it has learnt on a
practical basis rather than theoretical! Currently, scores only determine how
much of the theory the child has been able to master. There is no process that
examines how that theoretical knowledge has been used effectively throughout
the lifespan of the learner which is actually more important.

Let them learn at the pace they are comfortable with. By making sure more
children are properly educated we will, as a society, automatically reap the
benefits of their future contributions. With competition, you are restricting
the scope to the "gifted few" who will then have to bear the burden of the
rest.

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JeanMarcS
That’s exactly why my wife and I are still hesitating to bring back our kids
in school in France.

Some of the teachers give back tests in grade order, allegedly to value the
bests, but it has a bad impact on the less advanced kids. And comparing to
each other is the norm.

Regardless, France education system is bad rated comparing to other
countries...

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zeitg3ist
My physics teacher in high school gave back tests in grading order, starting
from the lowest. Really humiliating for a 13 year old.

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JeanMarcS
Thinking of it, just the fact to give back the tests and saying the grade out
loud isn’t a good idea

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zeitg3ist
He didn’t say the votes out loud, but since the tests were sorted it was clear
who did well and who did not.

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lordnacho
Makes total sense. If the kids are able to solve the problems at hand, why
would there be a need to separate them? Just make sure you test whether people
have learned what they're supposed to.

Along the same lines, why punish someone for being in a class with another
competent kid?

As for worries about places in further education, it's easy to make things
hard enough that your lecture halls aren't stuffed. Doesn't require you to
rank everyone.

I think I'd have learned a lot more if everything had been pass/fail. Not just
because it's easy to get to the pass line, but also that I'd challenge myself
more with more advanced stuff.

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prepend
Without rankings how do you determine how to allocate scarce university spots.

I think there’s much more potential for bias when every position is just based
on some committee’s prerogative in a way that is very difficult, if not
impossible to measure.

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cup
Why are University spots scarce in the first place.

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CleverLime
Not everyone should go to University. It makes it's value smaller

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bubblewrap
If the value becomes smaller, wouldn't it automatically result in fewer people
going to university?

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AndrewDavis
That sounds logical but it doesn't typically work like that. Instead you need
to then do even more than get a bachelors degree.

Also known as education inflation.

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muzani
I helped to set up a syllabus for a part time coding bootcamp. One of the
things we did was to eliminate any grading, although students who completed
the project would get to graduate with honors.

The idea was that when I was in college, I found a lot of students avoiding
the electives where they would learn a lot, in favor of electives where it was
easier to get good grades.

The good part was that we could push them extremely hard. There's a point
where most of them feel like it's not the right career choice and we can push
them past that plateau. Since a lot of them are doing it at night and
weekends, they don't always have a lot of willpower or commitment. The drop
out rate is a little lower than expected.

The bad part is that they don't push themselves hard enough. A lot of the
difficulty is in things that they can just grind through - loops, arrays,
functions, conditionals. But they don't work hard enough at it, and don't
become 'literate' enough to solve some basic problems.

The other downside is that a diploma sells certification, and not necessarily
education. Something that's easy to pass is 'not recognized', even if the
students learn more in the end.

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vajaya
I'm rather skeptical of this news and perhaps just some typical PR effort by
singapore government.

Remember Singapore has a notorious education system of sending children in
different tracks at an age as early as 8. That is, in your 3rd year in primary
school, you'll sit an exam that would probably determine your life trajectory.

If you do well, you'll be enrolled in better programs, better school and would
go to college. If you don't, you'll be wrapped up and sent to classes with
little resources and guidance and often times incompetent teachers, and what's
more, you would not be qualified to sit an college entrance exam, which means,
the best you can achieve is Polytechnic schools. In singapore's caste system,
a Polytechnic student is at the very bottom.

The intention and justification of this system is that people are born with
different levels of intelligence. To allow all people to have a college
education is not merely a waste of resources, but also not useful and
meaningful for those who are just average.

How do people cope with this system, well, rich people can either hire tutors
or have mother work as full time educator(often in case when the mother is
highly educated). Their children would win out in that race at age of 8 and
would continue to win and would go to the same several elite high schools,
which ends in a situation where the transportation minister has never taken
public transportation ever in his/her life.

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corrode
> says learning is not competition

The children are still graded. Grading, or at least its interpretation,
depends on the students performance. How is this not a competition?

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chirau
So did Zimbabwe for the very same reasons 2 years ago

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NotPaidToPost
Competition is a good motivator. At the same time the feeling of continuously
"losing" is not, so rankings should be used carefully as part of a wider
pedagogical approach.

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em-bee
competition can be a good motivator, but generally it isn't. especially not
when it comes to something as complex and vaguely defined as learning.

competition matters when there is something scarce to win. but if we apply
that to education we already have a problem, because education should not be
scarce. hence competition is not the right way to decide who should get access
to it.

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NotPaidToPost
Competition drives people to push themselves, and can therefore play a useful
role in education.

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em-bee
it can be, but it sets you up to learn for the wrong motivation. it would be
better for students to learn to push themselves for their own sake and not for
sake of competing with others.

it also will hurt them in the long run at work. while in many companies
employees do compete, these kind of workplaces are always toxic and not a good
place to work at.

in a good workplace people cooperate, and that is something they need to learn
in school.

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LoSboccacc
something I don't understand of this approach, how can one strive to get
better if there is no better to get?

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dmos62
If you're learning to drive, or program, or whatever, is your objective to be
able to do it efficiently, or to do it better than another person?

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wlkr
Both, I think but it depends on the situation. For many things in life
competency is enough (although there are still tests involved in demonstrating
this) but there aren't unlimited jobs in any field so being 'better' certainly
makes you more desirable. A racing car driver is measurably better than me at
driving but then driving is not a job for me and so proficiency alone is
acceptable.

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wltprgm
yet company has to pay a lot if they want a better candidate, technically
speaking

or any country from 3rd world country can afford hiring silicon valley
graduates at $300k per year just for a senior to tech lead level position?

