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Students Are Always Half Right In Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh Public Schools officials have enacted a policy that sets 50 percent as the minimum score a student can receive for assignments, tests and other work. District spokeswoman Ebony Pugh said, the 50 percent minimum gives children a chance to catch up and a reason to keep trying. If a student gets a 20 percent in a class for the first marking period, he or she would need a 100 percent during the second marking period just to squeak through the semester. The district and teachers union issued a joint memo to ensure staff members' compliance with the policy, which was already on the books but enforced only at some schools. At this rate, it won't be long before schools institute double extra credit Mondays and Fridays to ensure students don't take three day weekends.
Really, I have no problem with a "lousy start" policy of some sort, but to guarantee 50% while other students are giving and earning 100% annoys me to no end. How about simply this, guarantee that all quizzes and tests can be made up after hours (before/after class) that were taken in the first half of the semester for a maximum score of 80% of the total points awarded (gotta at least give a small late bloomer penalty)? Higher of the 2 scores will apply. Thoughts there?
...in bed
Back when I was in grade school they didn't HAVE numerical points... everything was a letter grade so, yeah, you couldn't go lower than an F which is the equivalent here. Once I was in the upper schools, you STILL couldn't get lower than an F (59 in my school system) on the report card, no matter how low you were. I don't see why you need to "flatten" individual test grades, so long as the value to determine the grade is "reset" every grade period.
Or maybe now we could finally discuss my Spanish language class (In the US and taught by a native German who was visiting for a year?!?) who gave ONE quiz for one grading period comprising 4 questions (2 5 pointers and 2 45 pointers) and I had to explain to my parents why I was flunking Spanish because I missed 1 question for 45 points!
Also, if students make... oh say... 150 points on a test are they allowed to skip a later test or get A++++++ because they obviously have earned it? Or are they gated as well... what happens to THEIR self-esteem when this occurs?
I would argue that gym is different than academic courses, and therefore should be graded differently.
That said, I do assign a grade of zero to the students who simply don't bother to do the work. I would have issues with any school district that mandated that I give a grade no less than a 50, because that removes the option for me to assign a zero if I believe it's warranted. At any rate, we just need to scrap all this grading scale granularity and assign pass/fail grades: Either you have subject mastery, or you don't. No subject (not even math) is so objective as to ensure fairness for all students operating at the same level of content mastery.
And maybe you should get exactly that? Seriously? Why the hell do bright students have to waste their time sitting on their ass while morons take all the teacher's attention?
Starting from grade 8 or so, you should be able to challenge any course. If you know your stuff, then you know your stuff, and you could use your time to do something productive, like university prep, sports, or volunteering... Something that'd be much better for your life and career than wasting time with idiots.
There is one course that I took that made us write down not only our answers in the test, but also our certainty for our answer. The scoring was a logarithmic scale such that if you say you are 100% sure of an answer but get it wrong, you get Negative Infinity for that question and you end up failing the class. Oddly enough, this course was in CMU at Pittsburgh.
If you're thinking about the way pilots are (or ought to be) evaluated, or you think grades are a good stick with which to beat kids, this probably sounds like utter crap. But if you're really concerned about how to motivate kids, the picture is much more complex.
If you've never read it Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has an interesting passage related to this subject. (It's one of my favorite books--you really should just read it in its entirety.)
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Given the fact that one makes a successful career in America by gaming the sociopolitical system at work, I see nothing wrong with teaching kids how to game the system. Successfully manipulating through your environment to your own advantage is one of the most important skills a kid can learn to do good in life.
Yes, I think this indicates a teacher problem more than a school policy problem.
If bad teachers are the problem, then good teachers are the solution, however, so many bungled ideas about how to attract quality professionals to education have made it impossible to attract quality applicants in many, many districts across the country (here in Indiana it's worse than the national trend)
If you want quality professional teachers who know when to "pull a kid aside" and give them some targeted help to pass a class, then you have TO PAY THEM.
Why would a quality teacher leave the serenity of the university town they lived in for school and go to some backwards dysfunctional derelict school district for half the pay as they could get at a functioning district?
The only solution is to have a national teacher's minimum wage, subsidized by the Fed. Gov't if necessary (some red states would rather pardon child murderers than raise teacher salaries).
Anyone who disagrees needs to think hard about what teachers are asked to do in today's america. They are expected to do so much but paid like unionized factory workers.
$50,000 is a good starting figure. You could pay for it by ditching NCLB and all the wasteful bureaucracy that it created.
Fed, state, and local gov't wastes millions on ineffective programs that try to do systematically what a good teacher will do intuitively.
For the record, IANAT...I used to be until I realized I was carrying the burden of absent parents and ignorant policy makers.
Thank you Dave Raggett
100 questions T/F like "You can get pregnant your first time" vs all those slideshows of diseased genitalia...hmmm, tough choice. Yeah I studied real hard for that test. Not.
They closed the sex ed loophole after me.
The government, 10th grade english, and algebra were respectably representative though. Even had to write essays in advance and read some stuff for English.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Better yet. Make the grading percentile distribution more like:
A - 100% - 81%
B - 80% - 61%
C - 60% - 41%
D - 40% - 21%
F - 20% - 0%
At least then they will have coherency between letter grade and percentile of accomplishment. With their current distribution, they have no coherency because a student that performs 50% is equal to one that performs nothing.
As far as the admitting colleges go, they will quickly draft their own plans to adjust for the new grading policy, probably relying even more so on the SAT and other measures to determine their admittance criteria. As far as the school is concerned they just doubled the number of "A" students, even if it was only done by lowering the bar for an A.
If what they were suggesting was padding everyone's score by 50 percentage points, then it would be fair (if awkward). Instead what they are suggesting is padding the worst performer's score by 50 percentage points. In statistics, this would be called "cooking the books", and I'll bet they're cooking the books for more than just "a second chance, whenever the student tries to take it". I'll bet that the new point system is presented to performance boards as equal to those school systems that let a student hit dead bottom zero.
If you want to provide a "second chance" to achieve, do what other institutions have done. Let the student take the course again, with the new grade replacing the old grade. It costs the student an elective and another four months of their life; that makes sure it won't be abused by the student body: time is precious. It maintains the current standard of the school because the course will likely be taught the same way.
What they are doing is unconscionable from a statistics point of view; basically they are taking the numbers they don't like and changing them to 50. The "average" will likewise jump (even thought no corresponding jump in work will be performed). Kudos for them on learning how to lie with statistics. Shame on them for doing it by substituting undesirable values with those more palatable.
If the kid can pass the class without being in it, why are we forcing them to take it anyway?
Because you value your time more? My experience (as a teacher) is that effort doubles between grades. So a D is twice as much effort to get as an F and a C is four times as much effort. I don't have a problem with some students recognizing that they don't want to spend lots of time on everything and making some cost/benefit decisions.
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
My sister used to teach at a well known private school in Melbourne (Australia). Her first semester there she had a number of the reports she wrote returned for rewriting. One in particular was bounced twice with the comment that you can't call a student's performance on a test as "disastrous". Her response was "What would you call 3%?"
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World