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.
Were kids held back for receiving "needs to improve" in a given subject?
If not, then this isn't really the same idea. I totally agree that having "did great" and "did not so great" as your two types of grade is rather ridiculous if there are no consequences/benefits either way, but basing advancement on mastery rather than age seems like a no-brainer to me.
In the US it is next to impossible to hold kids back. One of my son's classes (7th grade) a 65% is still a C. If kids could be held back on some subjects easier while moving them forward in other subjects that would be great. It might not work out but they admit in the article things are so bad they don't know what else to do.
I'm a little confused what a percentage could mean, in this context. Does it mean you have a good understanding of 65% of the material you need to move on? Because that's not good, if you need an understanding of 100% of Foo to learn Bar, which incorporates Foo... this isn't to say that you shouldn't start teaching Bar in order to motivate students to go back and finish learning Foo, just that a % is a measure lacking in meaning.
I think a better way to gague knowledge is the A/C/F system a lot of my professors used in advanced math courses at Rutgers. An 'A' means you have a solid understanding of the material, a 'C' means you don't really understand it, but have a good enough grasp that you can move on and back-track to finish learning it as necessary. 'F' means you don't understand it well enough to move on, and should retake the course.
This requires a lot more thought on the side of the professor, but the motivation for students becomes a lot more clear: understand the material, and move on.
I had a class where a 40% was an A. It was tough to get 40% in that class.
What a good %age is can be dependent on how hard the work was. It's not trivial to make all the things being tested such that you can easily see where people need help AND you simultaneously get the traditional >90% = A.
Now, I think I'd rather the teacher knew where I hadn't grasped enough. When you're doing it though, trying hard and only getting half the stuff right can be frustrating.
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.