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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.
Or they could work on policies that reward significant improvement throughout the year. A rough start can be just that. Mandating that everything is at least 50%, even when a student gets a 0%, is a terrible idea.
"And she said one teacher she knows already worries about how awkward it will look when a student correctly answers three of 10 questions on a math quiz -- and gets a 50 percent."
That's just preparation to work in the American financial sector.
BTW, a decent idle story??? Idle still sucks and quote tag doesn't work???
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Well, it would be if I lived in Pittsburgh. Even if I only do half of my homework, I get 75% credit! And tests? If I don't feel like taking it that day, I won't! It won't make that big of a dent anyways.
I'M SURROUNDED BY ASSHOLES!!!
Yep, the Idiocracy is well on its way to becoming a reality. Let's not grade on a child's actual performance in school, let's make certain they can at least "catch up." Yep, way to go. This mollycoddle society just irks the living shit outta me.
No, it isn't. In every school I've been in, you need at least a 60 (for a D-). -- J.P.
Let me warn all of you right now, if you do not live in Pennsylvania and you have any thought that it's a state that you would like to try to lead a productive life in, especially the south-western corner, please abandon those thoughts. Pennsylvania is a black hole of taxation and asshattery. Our governor isn't worthy to hold the position of a used cars salesman and the city of Pittsburgh is a financial and logistical burden for anyone who lives anywhere close to it.
Not to even get into the fact that Dan Onorato and Luke Ravenstahl are both self-serving bitches.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Yes of course, and while we're at it, let's make it the law that everyone gets at least $50k/year, whether they actually work or not. That way we all get a "chance to catch up" and a "reason to keep trying".
Caveat Utilitor
There isn't a teacher out there who wouldn't pull the 20% kid aside and say "Look. You bombed. But, over next quarter/semester, if you do all/most of your homework and manage to get a C/B/whatever, I'll pass you."
My school district is looking at a similar policy, and I'm not happy with it. I don't mind putting a "floor" under students in freefall (especially when there are out-of-school forces in play), but its something that you do on a case-by-case basis according to the needs of the student.
If a district's teachers are not looking out for their kids this way, you have a deeper problem than a grading policy.
I gots to haf ebonics
This indicates a broken grading system with a bad kludge of a hack on top.
If someone gets 5% at first half, and then majorly improves during the second half and gets 80% - and would easily be able to redo the tests of the first half and get 80% on them too at this time -- then of course the final grade should be around 80% - and the first grading should be ignored completely.
It's the actual knowledge at the end of the semester that should be graded - not the performance throughout the year. It's the knowledge one possesses at the end that is important.
Bleh.
Broken sysem with a bad hack .
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
The goal here is to avoid reducing the difficulty of tests. At my school, some teachers would have each test count more than preceding ones so that you could recover from an early failure, and also drop the worst (weight*score)* test to prevent one later bomb from killing you. I found it increased the incentive without making it feel hopeless.
Some teachers would let you retake a test (not same questions obviously) and average the scores together. At the time I thought it was very reasonable.
I'm completely okay with rewarding students for improvement and for avoiding making them want to stop trying. Though dropping classes is also an option.
I don't agree with the way they're implementing this, but their principle is correct. If you pull a 0 on the first of four tests your best possible grade is a C. Maybe this is appropriate in grad school or college (hell, I'm grateful for my C's in college, that's a lot of hard work), but not for high school.
The one thing is that in college I noticed I generally knew things well about a week after I was tested on them, so maybe my school built bad habits. Or maybe I just go to a really crazy school (Caltech)
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Our district has had this policy for a long time. As a teacher, it's not too much of a hassle because the whole point of education is to get the kids to learn. If it's impossible to pass the year because of what a student scored the first quarter, they'll give up for the rest of the year. With this policy, there is still hope. In our district, they get their actual scores for midyear and final exams and for the 4th quarter, so they will get killed eventually if they do nothing.
By the way, the bigger problem is with kids who do the work but don't think. I have lots of students who copy their friends' work, so they have great homework grades, but bomb tests because they have no clue what they're talking about.
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?
Calvin and Hobbes
So, the problem is the teachers can only be bothered to test twice per class... Meaning a student getting 20% on the first test has to get 100% on the second to get a 60% average.
As a radical suggestion, somewhere in the long summer vacations, after the 2pm finishes... Get off your lazy asses and come up with say ten tests throughout the course.
Now a 20% on the first test only knocks 8% off the total grade, not 40%, and is quite surmountable without needing pity grades.
I realize this is clearly advanced rocket science so take your time to fully digest the idea. I'm freely offering it for the good of ull duh stoodnts in pitsbug.
Let's try not to make their being even stupider any more acceptable. One of these kids could end up becoming president one day and the last thing we need is a moron spending eight years in the whitehouse, driving the country, its military and its economy in to the ground. Let's keep that an unthinkable impossibility people!
Education is too important to be left to the state.
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.
Much like the current economic crisis, shouldn't failure be allowed? As some banks should be failing for bad investments, some students should fail to allow them to do-over.
I blew off a year of math and I went to summer school, once. I'm not proud, but it was a motivational experience. Summer school sucks.
SMU Dean David Chard In support of DISD's new grading policy
On a more frightening note, public education now seems to be king, in California at least. Homeschooling Banned in California
Does anyone else notice that things are going downhill? And they're speeding up?
"Lame" - Galaxar
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.
You can do this and make the pass mark 75%. It makes no real difference, it just re-scales everything, and the students who get 50% won't understand anyway!
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
No, 50-59% is an 'E'. However, 75% is a solid C, and the way that it was written says that individual assignments will be recorded as 50%, not just the quarters' overall grades. that means you can pick and choose individual assignments. In my district growing up, they mandated that 70% of the grade had to come from homework, since a lot of students had troubles with tests. If Pittsburg has a similar policy, they can skip every test and either choose to get 85% on each of their homework assignments, or just skip 1/5 of their homework and still get a C overall. That's fucked up.
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."
Dallas (Texas) Independent School District is doing the same thing.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/081508dnmetdisdgrades.48e6cc22.html
DISD is exceedingly dysfunctional (can't manage a budget, kick-backs, and so on). So this idiocy is small potatoes compared the the problems of the district as a whole.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
As someone who typically earned either As or 0s on assignments I can see some advantages in this scheme. The problem is in how we grade.
Because the difference between "good" and "bad" is so small (say 90% vs 60%) does it really make sense to have a range from 60% to 0%? And with it, trash any hope of achieving "average" marks if one bombs (or doesn't do) a few assignments?
Look at it this way:
100% (A) + 0% (F) yields a 45% ave. (F)
but 4.0 (A) + 0.0 (F) yields a 2.0 (C)
Get one 0 and the student needs four 100s just to hit 80%. That seems kind of harsh to me.
w/ the new system the same student would earn a 90% which seems about right to me.
Do I even need a comment?
Abdiction of responsibility, folks, whether you want it or not.
Like anything else in government accomplishing goals is not a priority. Even when it comes to edcuating children. Or ensuring the future needs of a country.
Everyone wants a cushy job, nice pension. So, if the children are underperforming, it either the kid's fault or the teachers. Now that kids can't fail and all get 50%, well its probably a lot harder to fire a really lousy teacher, huh??!!!
I mean this one seriously to boot (sadly enough):
1) Let Students get at least 50%
2) ????
3) Profit!!!!
American college is a whole different ball-game, and high school hardly prepares people for it anymore. There are already plenty of Americans coming into college unprepared and failing most if not all of their classes in their first semester. What do you think will happen as we loosen the standards in the public school system? If we keep relying on imported intelligence to pass our universities, we will be left with nothing as the rest of the world's universities catch up.
Also, if people have so much trouble with catching up after getting 10% or 20% on a major test, then I think it is better to just change the grade distribution than to create another artificial grade inflation mechanism. Make everything a lot harder (and grade things without fluff), but make 80+% an A, 60+% a B, 40+% a C, 20+% a D, and anything below than an E/F. That will make it easy for failing students to catch up without the educational system having to rely on ever-increasing grade-inflation schemes.
Member of the 7 Digit UID Club
The correcting disinformation is really smart. Good way to make sure your students speak up if they think your wrong. And they know you want it and will lie at least once:-) I wish my instructors would do that.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
As long as its all True/False tests
Table-ized A.I.
This actually happened to me in middle school. I had two good semesters and one bad one. I got a B, B+, and an F, and I barely squeaked by with a D- for the year because the teacher averaged together the grades by their numerical values.
So, maybe I'm an idiot and should have been held back in 8th grade English, but I would support fixing this broken aspect of grading.
Just because you can't give a kid a grade that is phenomenally lower than an F doesn't mean that you can't still choose any grade from A to F.
I'll take this new policy. I just need to make an adjustment to my syllabus:
The US public education system is screwed. It has been, and now they are just stripping out the hole. That's it... Just turn up the torque on your drill, and watch as the screw just turns freely now.
These policy makers need to stop being wimps and let teachers hold students accountable instead of cowering to students' self-esteem.
Calling atheism and agnosticism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.
Has anyone thought of what this actually means? Mathematically?
For example, let's say there are 5 assignments and 2 tests. The tests are worth 25% of your final mark.
The assignments are worth 10% each.
Additionally, let's go with the ABCDE scheme, and the student needs a 60% to pass with a D.
What's the minimum mathematical grade needed to pass?
First the tests: 0% on either test.
We've now got 25% on the course.
Then the assignments:
3 assignments: 0%
We've now got 40% on the course.
2 assignments: 100%
We've now got our 60%, D grade for the course.
That means even though the student received a mathematical 20% when their entire coursework is taken into account, they would receive a D.
That is definite grade inflation.
Based on my behaviour in high school, I would have most definitely gotten 100% on the first two assignments, and then skipped the rest of the term, walking out with my 60%. Would I have known the material? Definitely not. Would I have known 60% of the material? Definitely not.
I would have loved a policy like this in high school. During my first 2 years in high school (at a different school than I completed the last 2 years), most of our grade was weighted on homework and not work done in the classroom. Classroom work ended up being a very small portion of the grade in comparison to homework. We're talking about 40% homework, 40% tests, and 20% classwork. It was a weird weighted system that overburdened students with making sure they were doing their homework.
Terrible idea. In most cases, I didn't do homework. That wasn't any measure of my aptitude as being a student. I aced my tests, aced my classwork, but even 100% acing every test and 100% every classwork assignment, it would mean tops of a 60% grade in the class. And I admit not every single test was aced by me, some of them I didn't do as well on here and there.
I'm in favor of this simply because it means the student has a chance to pass even if they aren't the type of person to do well in certain "method" than the other.
Yeah, all you smart overachievers and concerned parents can whinge about it.
But for us smart underachievers, this is a promise that if we work hard the first 9 weeks, we can totally not do anything the next 9 weeks and still fly through with a C average. AWESOME!
And if you think students won't do that, you have never met 4/5 of my friends.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
This teaches a great life lesson and ethic. Let's see how well it carries over into the working world!
Not leaving the struggling behind is noble and all, but when the rope pulling up the strugglers is tied around the neck of the non-strugglers the nobility ends and the entire system is degraded.
If you blow off a test you damn well deserve a zero. If you don't turn in homework then you damn well deserve a zero.
If you just. can't. get. chemistry then the teacher should be willing and have latitude to help you.
Why should someone who works their ass off for a 55% be completely marginalized by someone who skipped class to get 50%?
Government intervention in the housing market has royally screwed things up. School administration intervention into teaching will royally screw things up. In both cases we lose as a whole.
:wq
You want these students to try? Well, if you want to educate them in anything, why don't you tell them the truth: Trying is the first step towards failure.
How can anyone be bashing this?
We've gone from not ever telling little Billy that he's wrong (because it might hurt his self-esteem) to allowing him to fall all the way down to 50%
Soon, we might even bring back the wood paddles too... it's school like back in the day before our test scores plummeted...
'a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM DATA WHERE name LIKE '%'... if you're reading this, it didn't work.
Yeah, might not be a bad idea 40% of "sick days" are taken on Mondays and Fridays.
If you can only get a 20% in a grading period, you have no business going to the next grade level anyways. Give 'em an F and tell them that if they don't get their act together, they'll stay in that grade until they do.
Why go with the nonsensical 50% == somewhere between 1% and 50% ?
All they have to do is rework the grading scale to look more like IB or AP, where 10%-30% is a D, 30-60% is a C, and so on. I think it would also let teachers grade a lot more honestly, since my experience was that they tended to 'pad' grades with crap like homework to make up for the fact that half the students got 60-70% on so many of their tests.
A course tends to have easier concepts in the beginning than the end. So, I can get 100% on the first exam, and not even take the 2nd exam and pass the class. It's like they halved the school year.
The no child can get ahead act.
God spoke to me.
A is 80%, B is 60%, C is 40%, D is 20%, F is spelling your name wrong.
.
A far better grading system is perhaps the simplest: rank the class. Then there can be no debate about grades because there grades don't exist. Rank is immutable. It eliminates politics and grade inflation altogether.
.
Randy
So, I guess the saying would now go to "Our country is being defended by the lowest 50% of our school system?"
Oooh, Im not so good at this advice thing...is it ok if I give you a sarcastic comment instead?
My high school did almost the same thing. If you failed any of the first 3 marking periods with a grade below 50%, it would be bumped to 50%. For the 4th marking period and the final however, the grade would not be changed.
I don't see an issue with this grade bumping. It prevents one bad marking period from completely screwing a student over. I know it saved my ass a couple of times (English and French...blah....)
Ok, no scores less than 50%. But I get to apply any algorthm to add up the scores.
foreach score {
if score ==50 {
total_score+= 100* (score/100)^4;
} else total_score+=score;
}
avg_score = total_score/number_scores
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I once had a college professor with a similar rule. At the end of the semester, I realized I could literally do NOTHING for the final paper and still get an A. As such, I asked the professor if was OK if I just skipped it. Whoah. Big mistake. He flew off his handle swearing about people using the system.. etc. etc... of course I was asking to find out if it was acceptable, so I did the paper (and did it pretty well honestly). Of course, it comes back with a grade of %50. And.. he gave me an overall grade in the class of a B.
I decided to fight it and took to the Dean of the department.. and he actually overrode the teacher on the grade and told me to be careful because professors can be temperamental. Ha.
Get rid of the system all together. It is just a tool of coercion and has nothing to do with education. Replace the whole shitty thing with prereq exams at the beginning of the semester. If you don't pass the prereq exam, you don't get to take the course it's for until you can pass it. Nothing to do with gold stars and shit, just whether or not you're prepared. With this model there's also no allowing knowledge to evaporate off your brain end of semester, because you're going to need it going forward. And of course if Johnny screws the pooch through the first third of semester, he's not screwed for the rest of it.
Loose lips lose spit.
Pittsburgh seems desperate to prop up their graduation rates by any means necessary. The right way to increase graduation rates is to make sure every student comes to school ready to learn. Our prisons and jails are being flooded by high school dropouts. Standardized testing isn't the answer either. Read the following PowerPoint presentation: "There is Life After Tests ... And Before" by Pat Cooper
http://www.cimh.org/Learning/Conferences-Training/Handouts/2008/Mental-Health-Policy-Forum.aspx
This reward system sends the wrong message to students in an already faltering education system and it will cause system dependence later in life. The effective message is students do not have to do anything to receive half the benefit they would have received had they performed their work to the best of their ability. There will also be unintended consequences to an automatic 50% grade: the lower tier students will have no incentive to work harder for a free handout (grade) and top tier students will be discouraged by a system that rewards apathy over achievement.
I give the idea 50%
I can agree with their reason behind it, but not the execution. This is just like the "Everyone take off their shoes in case they're bombs" rule--it has a background, it has a "good" intent, but it's a horrible answer.
I know that many times in college, getting a very low grade early on struck a blow because I thought I might not be able to understand the rest of the material and pass. Even if everyone failed along with me, that wouldn't do much to perk me up. And often times the professor would state that there is a curve, but it's still a horrible one. A few times I just decided to withdraw rather than risk an F.
So I can get behind their idea that those who start failing early on will lose hope, and so need some sort of assurance to continue working. But auto-grading at 50% is a bad idea; how do you easily distinguish someone who tried but just doesn't get it and someone who didn't care and decided to just flake it? They both need help, but help of a different sort. This answer says "Well they should both just try harder".
Unfortunately, I don't know what a better solution might be. Many of my college classes had a policy for tests/quizzes where the lowest one would be dropped or the weights would change depending on how you did between them. Homework was graded normally. I think this works better-- they still get an accurate grade on assignments and so know what they have to work on, but it won't hurt them in the long run.
On another note, why the hell is this in Idle? Idle is for worthless shit and slashvertisements. This seems something better fit for Politics (maybe Science?). And what the hell is up with Idle's newline formatting?
Wouldn't it make more sense to just drop the passing grade level down to a 15% or so?
Any one of those low numbers would do really, 10%, 25% 33%.
This would preserve some sort of balance, allow the kids to pass and not know anything, and still accurately reflect how they preformed.
Not that the original idea is a good one, it just seems to me that they are mucking up the wrong gear in the system.
So if passing grade is 60 (as indicated), all I need is a 70 for the first half of the course and I can take off for the rest of the year and still pass. If that was the policy when I was in school, you bet I would have taken advantage of it.
I mean seriously, all this is doing is making:
A 90-100
B 80-89
C 70-79
D 10-69
F 0-9
Well, not that bad, but you get the idea, because if you do nothing at all for the first quarter, and then just get a 71% the second, you have a passing grade for the semester. Why not just change how you calculate a passing grade for the semester or year? All I wonder is how this will affect what college entrance boards rank students from Pittsburg schools compared to other students from school districts that are not monkeying with their grading systems. I mean a 88% in Pittsburg could really be a 75% from somewhere else (if there are 4 tests a quarter), so you are giving potential C students a B+ grade boost. You have to expect that college boards will take this into account and basically ignore completely their GPA and instead only look at their SAT scores, or require more tests that cover more subject matter than the SATs (since this is only science and math), but now will require "CLEP like" tests (more appropriately HSLEP, for High School Level Examination Program, as opposed to College Level) for every major subject like science, history, etc.. This is just going to hurt the good students even more since they now have to prove that much more to the college boards that their B was really a B and not a C.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
So, at what point do we just start handing out diplomas and degrees to newborns? I mean, we would not want them to try and fail at an education; that might scar their delicate self-esteem. At some point in the near future, mediocrity becomes the standard, and there is no initiative to achieve or strive for excellence, because doing so makes you a show-off, elitist, or you take more than your fair share of the accolades.
Timmy got an F, you got an A. Well, let us just average that together and you both get a C+. OMFG.
You know, I have to wonder if all these stupid putzes that pass rules like this ever had problems succeeding as children and are trying to make up for some neurotic after-effects of a childhood of low achievement, or if perhaps they excelled and feel guilty for having done so and this is some kind of catharsis for their academic guilt.
Either way, it is pretty fucked up. More and more I lean towards home-schooling when I finally find a woman who will have sex with me and, $_DEITY willing, bear a child to me that looks suspiciously like the bag-boy at the local Publix.
honest question for you (even though I have strong suspicions that you are flamebaiting for kicks or a paid GOP troll):
In your ideal scenario, would you advocate privatizing k-12 education, with no taxpayer supported public schooling?
Thank you Dave Raggett
Most U.S. high schools divide a semester up into six or nine week periods, each with its own average, and possibly a final whose weight is equal to a grading period. Each grading period would contain two tests, not each semester. Hence, you don't get as many chances to raise your semester average, and the semester average is what determines your GPA. It's a different level of grade consolidation, which you would know if you read the summary.
It's not a stupid policy, just a bad implementation. The idea is to keep temporary disruptions in students' lives (like their parents getting divorced or something) from turning into a longer-term handicap. If you don't do any work for a grading period, you still fail -- despite the hand-wringing in the other comments, this does not help the mediocre. But that one failure (six weeks) doesn't screw up your whole semester (18 weeks). Students aren't stupid -- they can do enough math to figure out that if they normally get Bs (80-89) and score a 20 in their first period, getting three 85s after that still leaves them with a failing semester grade of 68. Who's going to do a semester's worth of work for a failing grade when you'll just have to retake the class anyway?
Remember, the purpose of grades is to make an accurate assessment of students' learning. If you let an outlier dominate your assessment, your assessment is broken. All that being said, a better version of this policy would be to cap the grading period average rather than the individual grades, which is IMHO way too fine-grained.
Visit the
Seriously. How do you justify automatically awarding credit for work that isn't even done yet? Instead of Uneducated students falling through the cracks, we decide to include breathing as 50% of your grade so there are no more cracks.
What's up with this box everyone has to think inside of or outside of? Why does there have to be a box?
All students left behind. Why not refer every student to one of those websites that sells fake diplomas?
All of our students are above average!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Old school solutions to this old school problem have existed for decades (and perhaps centuries).
A student that doesn't like their grade in a class can retake the class in lieu of an elective. The new grade replaces the old one, even if it is lower
This has been used with success at many an "upper crust" university for years. Students that don't / can't / won't apply themselves won't waste time retaking classes. Few people can afford the extra time to game the system for higher grades. In short, no new solution was needed.
So why did they come up with a completely new solution? Because now that the school doesn't have that small percentage of 0% students dragging them down, they probably appear to be a whole letter grade higher (on average) for their review boards. Odds are that other schools will either protest until this one changes policy, or quickly follow suit so they don't appear to be behind in comparison to the "new improvement" of a cooked statistic.
Considering what I fear, I'd wager on them matching the policy. That way they can (in their own minds) appear to have improved too! Don't tell them that when everybody improves equally then there's no change in the ranking. That would just spoil the game for everyone.
Rather than fudging the numbers, we should be figuring out how to teach the children better.
Better solutions:
- Raise the bar on minimum standards for teachers, and pay competitively
- Make computer literacy the fourth "R". At a minimum, students should be fluent in spreadsheet formulas and have experience with at least two procedural languages.
- Make science the fifth "R" (and I don't mean "(R)eligious views of science")
- Combat home life issues that make learning difficult (noise, poverty, despair, lack of healthcare, idiot parents)
- Replace the broken and expensive textbook system with open-sourced, peer-reviewed, live texts and tests.
- Emphasize problem-solving and writing skills over test-taking and rote memorization.
- Challenge the students, and move the stragglers to another class.
- Divorce public education from the influence of intermural athletics. Sports should be relegated to city leagues and taken OFF school campuses. If you want school pride, have it in your school's rankings in intellectual pursuits, not how fast some idiot can run without dropping a ball.
- Year-round school with three one-month breaks, so families can take vacations, but children don't lose pace like they do over summer break. This also gives children who fall behind three "catch-up" opportunities.
- Add two years of vocational training to high school. Leave college for those who actually need a degree rather than a place where everyone goes to learn what they *should* have learned earlier.
- More language skills. At a minimum, conversational knowledge of ASL, one non-English spoken languages.
The more I think about this the stupider an idea this change is. Does is suck that if you bomb the first quarter that you pretty much can't recover? Probably. Should this be the fix? Absolutely NOT. What should happen is that they are removed from that grade level class and put in the appropriate grade level course. This actually has a two fold effect on the students:
1st: It removes poor performing students from the group and lets the students who can learn more do so at a faster pace since time isn't wasted repeatedly going over the same material 2nd: Poorer performing students are placed in focus classes which are designed teach the fundamentals that the student doesn't understand (or for some students who have no opportunity to study at home or do homework), a slightly restructured class which focuses on in class participation and less on homework.
But even in this system, there would need to be some kind of GPA modifier to show which class you are a part of, for the terms of ranking students. Would this work? Possibly. Would it be more difficult on the school? Yes. Would it be more difficult on the teachers? Yes, at least in the beginning until well established tier levels are created to accommodate the majority of the students that were failing. Does this work with the No Child Left Behind Act? Probably not, because there will be a group of students that clearly leave behind the rest. But you know what? That is something that we need to let happen, and encourage to happen more often. Really the best idea would be to let the students who can work at a faster pace to have that option and remove the whole grade levels from the system. Move to a more lecture based learning where lectures are available via a computer assisted video setup where students can watch and review the videos at school or at home, and have the students be able to go to focus sessions instructed by a teacher during the normal school hours which allow for students to ask questions about things they are having problems understanding. When the student feels they are ready, let them take a test to finish the chapter/section and move on to the next chapter/section.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Sometimes I feel that the educational ideologues in the university education departments are sabotaging the system. Their actions and ideas are in effect lowering standards in the public school system. I'm not sure what their motives are. To raise the level of general achievement? Possibly. To create the impression of increases in achievement through improvements in overt grades. Quite likely. What many education professors don't seem to realize is that when their efforts result in lower educational standards, they are in effect sabotaging the public school system. Parents of brilliant children will go elsewhere, to private schools. And thus our elite, those students who are brilliant and who will become future leaders will be increasingly educated outside the public system. This will in turn lead to a weakening of democracy, as our leaders will not have the broad view of society that public education instills.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
1. There are better ways to handle even that than, essentially, faking percentages.
E.g., let someone take the test again later. (Of course, not with the same questions.) If they worked on it and this time they learned that first half of the subject, ta-da, they don't flunk. There you go, that's your way how someone can pull themselves out, if they're willing to work to that end.
2. Children are good at gaming dumb rules. Heck, by high school they're biologically young adults. They're past the age when, in a different time and place, they'd be perfectly equipped to lead armies or fight for survival. Technically not all links in the brain are formed yet, but that's really how memory works, so that only says that they didn't fill their biological "hard drive" up there yet. At any rate, they're just as equipped to recognize a dumb rule and game it, as an adult is.
We've seen it before too. E.g., schools applying "the curve" to shift everyone's grade, just created the mentality that your grade could have been higher if it weren't for the damned nerds who pegged the upper point. Their learning lowered your grade. Cue open hostility.
I expect the same to happen here too. Because:
3. For most people, if the penalties for failure are negligible, then so is the incentive to even try.
See people who'll fuck without a condom, just because they think HIV is curable now. Essentially they, yes, plan to fail, because they think it's fixable later.
So I expect the same to happen: some people will plan to get that 50% the first time, so they can fix it later. Or, more rarely, don't even bother showing up in the second semester, because they did well enough in the first one, and that 50% is enough.
Especially because...
4. If you can put in some effort at some nebulous time in the future, instead of right now, most people will do just that.
See people who'll stuff their face now, and swear they're going to start exercising next month. Honestly this time.
5. A good intention that produces bad results is, nevertheless, a bad idea. There is a reason why most cultures have some saying or another to the effect of, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."
Doing somehing dumb in the name of a good intention, is, in the end, an application of the fallacy:
X="We have to do something about that."
Y="This is something."
therefore
Z="We have to do this."
Even if it's not formalized like that, that's really the glue that links a good intention to a dumb solution. They have to do something about that good intention, this is something (regardless of whether it works or not), so, hey, it suddenly sounds like a good thing to try.
Personally I'd say: screw that. If you can know in advance how it'll fail, or calculate it on a napkin, there still is no excuse to do something dumb.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
... just change the grading scale from 90% A, 80% B, 70% C, 60% D, 50% F to 95% A, 90% B, 85% C, 80% D, 75% F.
I'm all for it. More stupid kids means less competition for me. I think it would be superb if we could figure out more ways to make our children less competitive in the world at large. Really, rewarding kids for success and trying hard is so 20th century. This is a new era. Lets all drive down to the walmart and celebrate!!!!
Every time I hear someone barf up the old call for 'more education dollars' I have to ask how much is enough to do the job? It seems that 12.5K per kid per year is not enough in Minneapolis but a fraction of that is enough at a Catholic school..
The difference is parental involvement. You can double spending or you can cut it in half and you'll get the same results, parents are the key not federal dollars and if this is not enough evidence that many school districts don't know sh*t from shinola then there is never going to be enough.
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
The 50% policy has been in use by teachers for a long time. It's not news, and it's not a symptom of the decay of our education system. Sure, our system has flaws, but this is not one of them. As usual, people love to mouth off about things they know nothing about, especially on the Internet. As a college teacher with nine years of experience, I can tell you that the 50% policy actually makes no difference in terms of whether a student passes or not. There is never, and I mean never, a situation in which a student fails miserably in one area (such as assignments) and excels in another (such as tests). This goes back to the simple aphorism, "Either you know it or you don't." Most teachers I know have a simple policy: late work receives a grade of zero. Work submitted on time receives a minimum of 50%. At my school, a passing grade is 65%. For my part, I don't allow a 50% minimum on tests, and I have a reputation of being somewhat tough. So I've been using the 50% policy, in slightly modified form, for the past nine years. I can honestly say that I have never given a passing grade to a student who did not achieve the bare minimum competencies as outlined in my school's course descriptions. Actually, I've never "given" a grade to anyone... I've only recorded the grades that they earned.
In my grade school we had a system where the class would get a pizza on friday if the class score was high enough. This led to peer pressure to get a decent score. yes there was some complaining and even negative peer pressure but there was also positive peer pressure such as study groups.
Overall it led to higher scores by individuals because they knew they were being held accountable by their friends and being supported by their friends. The losers suddenly had a lot of attention from those who needed to be the best.
Additionally I seem to recall having Class vs Class competition for best scores... same idea just longer term and bigger stakes.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
This is a consequence of government education. You give your child to people who can't even properly build roads and are frequently corrupt, guess what: they'll get educated the SAME way. The "No Child Left Behind" tag is certainly incorrect though. This isn't NCLB (which is idiotic too), this is just idiocy and political correctness run amok.
I can't believe we continue to believe giving these people more money, thinking it is going to solve the problem. Isn't the saying that "The definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over expecting a different result?"
Derek Greene
As a former Pittsburgh Public Schools student, I don't recall ever having to worry about the 50% minimum grade - but I do remember taking advantage of the 80% mandatory attendance policy that they had when I was there which with careful management allowed me to take 4 * 3-day weekends and a week off every quarter to do more important things.
What the hell is this? people complain about the low quality of education today, and people who come out of the school system are dumber than they were10 years ago, and yet they make it easier and easier to pass. If you want to produce high quality students, then raise the bar to make sure that a passing grade actually conveys that they have some knowledge.
Move sig!
A better solution that several teachers I've had have used is this. They simply discard the highest and lowest score.
There were variations on this. A couple teachers did it if it improved the grade. One of them repeated removing the highest and lowest test score if it further improved it. Another teacher had a bit of complex formula for deciding how much of the top and bottom to remove.
The basic idea was that it compensated for a bad day. One teacher removed only the lowest score and didn't remove any high scores. This involved cases where there were at least a few scores to work with. If they are talking about the scores on semester exams only, the sampling is poor.
I'd like to know why the HTML in my posts on IDLE don't work (it works in other Slashdot sections).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It's the students that are trying hard and only getting 60% that could be hurt by this.
A 'free' 50% means their is little reward for their hard work and little incentive to continue putting in.
I can certainly see that giving students an incentives not to give up is a good idea, but it's something that needs to be done carefully.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Say there are 1000 possible points for a given class, lets say this is a math class for fun. A student could ( a good one ) could get a c in the class by getting a perfect score on the first 400 points and then doing nothing the rest of the term.
A more reasonable assumption would be that a poor student scores an average of 70% on tests. This poor student could pass the class after scoring a 70% on the first half of the assigned work and tests and then do nothing the rest of the semester.
assuming 1000 possible points
(500*0.7= 350)+(500*0.5=250)=600=D
Though in a wierd twist, the students probably cannot figure this out out.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
Stick a fork in them, they're done.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Where all the children are above average. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon
I teach ICT in the UK, and the US system of assigning grades seems completely alien to me. Would anyone familiar with the US system care to explain for us non-USians?
In particular, who actually decides the curriculum in US school classes? I am under the (probably mistaken) impression that it is up to individual School Boards. Who sets the standards of the tests/assignments and where the grade boundaries are? Is that down to individual teachers, or is there some coordination across schools/districts? Are all grades other than F 'passing grades'? How much room do teachers have for taking into account the personal circumstances of each child?
Over here in the UK, the government (in the form of the Department for Children, Skills and Families - how Orwellian does that sound?!) sets the curriculum that is taught in all subjects (although teachers are of course responsible for interpreting the curriculum and constructing their own Scheme of Work). Attainment levels for pupils aged 5-14 are also set by the government, and teachers are expected to continually assess pupils' progress against those standards and assign a numeric level for each pupil at regular intervals. In some subjects (English, Maths and Science) , tests that are set and assessed by the government are sat by all pupils aged 11 and 14.
In 14-19 education, pupils follow courses set by one of a number of exam boards (although exam boards have to follow guidelines set by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority to ensure some degree of consistency between different courses). Although some coursework is normally assessed by teachers, the exam board typically asks for a random sample of pupils work to ensure teachers are marking to the correct standard. Again at the ages of 16 and 18, most pupils will sit a number of examinations that are set and assessed by the exam board. If I understand how things work in the US correctly, our education system appears pretty inflexible in comparison, and offers less opportunity for teachers to use their discretion when assessing a pupil's progress. It would seem however, that the UK system does allow results from different schools/parts of the country to be more easily compared. But perhaps I'm misunderstanding exactly how things work over the pond!
Ah, the old can't fire bad teachers argument...it's still a red herring...bad teachers get fired all the time
Bad teachers can be fired for poor performance or with no cause. It's not like the tenure system in colleges that affords liberal amounts of 'Academic freedom'...some school districts have something akin to 'seniority' for long-serving teachers, but even then those teachers can be fired for no cause or for poor performance.
You parrot a common misconception perpetuated by anti-union people for decades.
If you continue the grand parent's analogy, if a teacher is unfairly failing kids left and right with no regard for his/her duty to adapt to particular situations (aka, they patently refuse to "take the student aside" and work out a plan), that teacher could be fired for bad performance after basic guidelines for notification and probationary periods have elapsed.
When bad teachers keep their jobs, it's almost always b/c of an overly politicized school board or an incompetent administrator unwilling to show leadership.
I'm not calling for teachers to get fired arbitrarily, not at all...poor teacher performance is usually easy to spot. Admin's and school boards need to show leadership when it happens.
Thank you Dave Raggett
uhm... i can't really understand this...
...but, to be fair, we have other problems here, like parents getting angry if kid gets low mark (!!!), teachers with big and lots of classes (so they don't really want to have more next year, you know...) and other little things.... like not really following the good students, and concentrating on the "bad" ones... and giving few money to teachers and school in general...
in Italy if you don't get 60% you don't pass to the next class...
if you don't get 60% in the first semester, you have to follow after-school classes, and if at the end of the year you still don't have at least 60%, before next school-year, you have to take a test, which will determine which class you are in (next or the same as last year)
but 3 years ago we didn't have this system. people could still pass even if they hadn't 60% in some classes.
what we are seeing now is that teachers do not really want to make a lot of people repeat the year, so the are more reluctant to give 50% score to someone, the votes get a little changed at the end of the year, and so on....
this didn't make our scool system any better, it simply shifted the problem from "kids with low grades" to "teachers don't give low grades".
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know." -- Mark Twain
Having just graduated college with lots of friends beginning their teaching careers, I see a major shift in education during the last 3-8 years. New teachers today are not being taught how to teach. Instead they learn how to read one of a select few publisher's curriculum to instead of teaching a subject, teach a test. If students are having a hard time with a particular subject, many teachers do not have the option but to move on because they have to cover everything on an extensive test or lose funding from kids failing based on material that wasn't able to be covered.
While I do agree that it is good that more and more teachers are becoming trained on how to work with special needs children, I don't believe universities are actually preparing their students to exploit curiosity and bring forth ingenuity. I had planned to teach highschool Computer Science but got out of it simply because of the level of legalism in the classroom and having to worry about being sued or losing my job because poor little johnny didn't want to do his homework.
Personally I would love to see the trusty solid oak "board of education" get brought out of retirement and smack my own kids when they get out of line. I'd also love to see more parents stand beside their educators by getting more involved with their child's education through organizations like the PTA or just making sure kids do what they need to do to understand a subject and complete the evaluation requirements of a teacher.
And for anyone who says there isn't enough money going into the school system, you're right in some cases but not all. My local school system is dirt poor and big, while the district one town over is rich simply because of how the money is divided (mine is based on the yearly change in property values of the city). But simply shoving money at the problem doesn't make it go away, so the monetary argument is moot anyway.
I am wondering if this isn't about avoiding financial penalties built into in No Child Left Behind (No Child Gets Ahead if you ask me) for schools which don't have enough improvement etc. This may be a way to engineer around some idiot feds trying to turn off the money spigot for some schools that are actually trying to improve.
All you need are two equations.
Having marked normally the teacher says
politically_correct_score = real_score / 2 + 50;
Or receiving a score the brighter kids can apply
real_score = 2 * (politically_correct_score -50);
This way mediocre Mike can congratulate himself on 55% while brilliant Beryl knows that she has to work harder having scored 75%.
Instead of clamping the lowest possible score to 50%. It would be better to just give the kids two or three times as many assignments. A few bad grades early on won't really put a dent in the huge amount of work ahead of them.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Next time that bully is beating you up for your lunch money, it won't be because he feels academically challenged and has all this repressed anger. It will be cause he is an asshole.
Though this policy is 100% stupid *all* the time.
It's trying to address a real problem, which most of you are too blind to recognize. Many schools make it easy for a student to quickly get into a hole that they can never escape. If I'm guaranteed an F for the year, no matter what I do or what I know, why should I show up at all? Is the school there to educate people, or is it just a detention facility for young people?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Actually, you may be touching on something interesting here.
"Getting an A" was remarked to require some 8 times the effort as getting say a "C". But in the business world, "Effort" = "Labor Salaries".
Microsoft seems to have perfected the art of releasing their Grade C-Minus work as "Version 1.0" to get market share, scrape-by sales, open logistics channels, etc.
Then they literally buy themselves another chunk of years to (sometimes) get out a B-Plus version. "Version 3.11". I understand popular wisdom to be that Windows hit the zenith with the combined pair of Win2000/Xp. (They traded advantages, but those were the Op systems people really went with.)
Now they're back with a C-Minus entry in the next class, aka "Vista". "Windows Seven" will probably be another mediocre improvement, and presumably "Windows Eight" or such will be that next Platinum Standard.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
First of all.
Most students who fail will still fail or stay in the lower range of grades. D or C if they improve.
Most of the failing students do so because of incomplete. Or 0% Yes in real life if you don't do your work you get fired. But remember this is education with kids who are not fully developed. There were many times in school I remember forgetting to do my homework or doing the wrong problem or misinterpreting the question and getting a really bad grade on it. For the kids who normally get B's on their work then they normally get B's and having one stupid mistake per quarter drop their grade down to a C is kinda stupid.
When a Kid gets into a death spiral with grades and knows he can't make it out. They will stop trying and turn off and become more of a trouble maker in class., disrupting others.
It doesn't make a huge difference overall.
Most of the people who fail the class will still somehow pass as failing a student means parents complaining to the principal and the principal telling the teacher to make him pass by some method. It happens way more then you will think.
I bet if you analysise the real world data you will probably see by implementing the policy will probably just push people up a check mark on the lower levels.
F students would be D
D- Sutdents would be D+
D Students would be C-
C- Would be C
C Would be C+
C+ Would be B-
(The B and A students tend pass most of their tests anyway and do their work rather regularly would probably lessen the effect so it may improve some rounding up to the next grade for some however more of a minor impact on those.)
I am sure you many slashdotters who have bullied by some way or an other by these guys wants them to fail miserable in school and have no prospects in the future. But lets face it we are actually better off if everyone can get a chance.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I can understand the motivation for the 50% minimum proposal (avoid situations where it is mathematically impossible for a student to pass a course based on poor performance early in the course), but the execution is a bit silly.
Perhaps adding a provision that any passing grade (say, better than C) on the comprehensive final will automatically result in a passing overall grade. Students who performed badly earlier in the term will always have an opportunity to show that they've learned the material and will be able to pass the course if they get their acts together. This scheme still rewards students for working harder (in order to get As and Bs), and doesn't coddle poor performance like the 50% scheme.
It's a messed up system no matter how you look at it, but there are legitimate problems it can address. There are teachers and professors who are not as professional or don't always have the students best interest in mind, and this limit's the ability to screw over a student based on personal bias. I've seen and heard of many occasions where "participation" was up to 40% of the grade. The student turned in all of the assignments getting grades in the upper 80s, lower 90s. Got 90s on every test, and then given a 0% for participation, due to some personal bias via the professor, failed the class, GPA shot down the toilet etc.. Do I think this is the best solution, hell no. There should be a greater system of accountability for students to be able to challenge grades. Have one test or project to show they actually learned the material etc.
"I have not had any complaints. We do parent surveys every year," Ms. Clautti said.
"50% of parents are in favor of the new grading scheme" she added.
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So, stupid people are criminals in your eyes. People who have simple jobs, are criminals because it is well known that no honor student ever became a criminal. Why not show your true colors, have everyone who fails the grade put down humanly so they don't bother you. Only one thing to worry you. The humanity exam, you just got an F. Please report to the execution chamber.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
My uncle used to teach helicopter mechanics at college level. He once told me one of the largest obstacles or issues they had was getting across the idea that they would not pass you unless you had a 98% average minimum, and the course instructors would not recommend you for a job unless you had a 100% average, and this was a *real* 100% mark, no playing with the marks whatsoever. When I asked him why, he looked at me almost angry and asked "Do you want to be five or ten thousand feet up in the air and find out the mechanic who overhauled the engine only know 80% of what he was doing?" This makes me wonder and ask, for the future, do we want the engineers who design our bridges, the pharmacists who dispense our drugs, the welders who fix tubing on our nuclear reactor (I know a guy who does that kind of work) all to have a "Pittsburgh 50?" You never know, it might come to that some day.
I think these students have a golden future awaiting them on Wall Street.
As street and office cleaners.
Dear IRS, This letter is to inform you that I will be applying this policy to all future tax returns. Sincerely, -K seriously what is this teaching kids? It's teaching them that you can fail for a few months then pull it out. That doesn't fly here in the real world. If your work quality is that low at any time you will become unemployed (unless you are a member of the teachers union). This is setting a dangerous precedent.
This sounds like the same kind of philosophy that said that "everyone should be able to go to college" and "everyone should be able to buy a big house."
Just plain stupid.
Life is hard, folks. A quality life is going to require a lot of hard work. If you cannot pass your classes in high school, there are still jobs to had, but don't expect that you deserve that 65" plasma TV and the S-class Mercedes.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Nitko & Brookhart's excellent text, Educational Assessment of Students has a section on "The Deadly Zero" and ways to mitigate its effects. About one-third of my graduates students teach in districts with this policy.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
This is absolute crap, and why America keeps falling lower and lower on the list of intelligent countries. When are thy going to realize that no child make it worse for everyone. There was a reason that even my kindergarten was devided into differnet learning levels. WE ARE ALL DIFFERENT! If they are consistantly getting a low grade, it may be because they are not being taught at the right level, the right content, or with the right method. Fix the system, don't cover up the flaws!
When my wife was teaching, she would often drop the lowest grade when computing a student's final grade. This would let a student have an off day (or a bad start) and still recover. That's a much better policy than mandating that all scores below 50% get scored as 50%.
Of course, it would be best if it was left teacher-to-teacher and not enforced school policy. However, if you *have* to enforce a policy, Drop The Lowest Grade is much better than Lowest You Can Get Is A Fifty.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
There is also a new fad among schools to ban red pens for grading. They say it hurts the egos of the students and the schools are requiring purple pens instead. This next generation of kids is going to be the biggest bunch of sissies and cry babies to ever come out of public schools.
Although on the surface this looks like a foolish dumbing down of the grade, the size of the grade range that constitutes an F poses a real problem as a teacher - generally not handing in an assignment devastates a competent student's grade as badly or worse than incompetence devastates an incompetent student's grade.
Shrinking the F range is something I've long considered in my grading (though what I was going to do was make F 0-20, D 21-40, etc.)
Philip Sandifer's academic website
Q: But how will universities possibly calculate your relative academic value to the rest of the world?
A: /2
good luck with that.
If you don't believe me, run the numbers yourself. The Green Party wants a minimum wage for a single adult of $42,250 in year 2000 dollars (or $53,753.68 in 2008 when adjusted for inflation). This is for a 30-hour workweek. If I am factually incorrect, please show me how.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
This is all an attempt by the teacher's unions to cover up the fact that a good portion of their members are less intelligent than the children they are entrusted to teach. Many Federal assistance programs to the schools are tied to performance, so the better the kids do the more money they get. Yes, we need to pay them more to attract better candidates, but we also need to be able to fire bad teachers and properly discipline bad kids (and yes, there is such a thing as bad kids...usually with bad parents). Bring back reform and technical schools and stop letting the smart kids be dragged down just because some brat's self esteem gets dinged.
The point of having the smart children in the same classes as the regular children is peer interaction. Just a couple of very talented students can raise the level of achievement for the entire class. There is a point for having honors and AP classes in high school. But every class and subject does not have to be separated. I did not require honors typing or even honors computer literature to get the basics.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
From the article:
My gf teaches English composition, in college classes for both native and non-native English speakers. She usually grades papers as A, B, or R for Rewrite. (There are pluses and minuses too, and there's the C now and then when the student has really done as much as she can.) Students get a lot of extra practice writing, and her grading load is higher than most because of it, but students leave her classes with much-improved skills.
So I understand the usefulness of the "Not Yet" grade. It can be a great teaching tool, if it's used to mean: "You can do better than this. Go back and study some more."
You know when I was in school, and kids failed a test or homework, they were often allowed to retake a test, or to redo homework with a reduction in the total possible points but still enough to get a decent passing grade. Mandating no one gets less than 50% is just a dumb idea. Welcome to the dumbing of America. At least now the French will be right when they call us stupid Americans. Here's a novel idea, for those who have grades below the 50% mark and are trying, give them tutors. For those who are below the 50% mark and aren't trying, fail their sorry asses. That's fair. I know that in any job I've ever worked at, those who did less than half their job got fired. I'd like to see how many people would be willing to pay half-price for a half completed car.
"Buy this brand new 2009 Ford Mustang for only $17,995 (engine and wheels not included)."
And we wonder why the rest of the world is starting to eat our lunch economically. We're quickly becoming the world idiot. This is *exactly* why I send my kids to private school.
Either use progressive marking (later tests are worth more marks). Or allow student to repeat tests. My Electronics II prof did something like the latter. There was a test every month (4 in total plus final exam). Each test had 5 sets of of short questions. You selected the 3 sections you knew the best. In order to pass the test, you needed to get 85% or better on your sections. If you failed a test, you had a chance to redo them on the final exam (the questions were modified). This seemed to work well. Each test is small enough such that you didn't feel swamped when studying. This did make for a long final if you are a lazy student. Typically, there are 2 ways to borderline pass a course. You either have a very good understanding of half the material, or half an understanding of all the material. Our prof's reasoning was this "I'd rather you had a good handle on some of the topics,as opposed to a half-assed approach one everything in this course. Why? Because one day one of you may design my pacemaker, and I want the damn thing to work!"
I remember several classes where we did everything in points. You still had a percentage at the end, but everyone knew up front the total points and where they all where at any given time. You could get rid of the entire letter grade thing and give each teacher a set amount of points that students can earn through out the year.
Of course, I'd give it five minutes for that to be thrown out for the letter grade just because we like the ABCDF thing.
From TFA, here's an even "better" policy: "In a recent article in Harvard Educational Review, Freedom Area School District Superintendent Ron Sofo recounted an experimental program that he said helped to dramatically raise the math scores of struggling sixth-graders. Among other features, the program included `A, B, Not Yet' grading, in which students were required to redo work until it merited an A or B."
So all work has to be at least a B - a mark which means "above average". I guess this experiment was done at Lake Wobegone high school?
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
What ever happened to letting the stupid kids fail?? The world needs ditch diggers too.
(sarcasm) Just make the passing score 1%, nobody has to game anything and "no student will get left behind". (In fact, lets just RAM them through the school system.) (/sarcasm)
Thankfully none of my children will ever set foot in an American school. The NEA should be abolished. It's nothing but a bunch of 1960's, burn-your-bra types, that are trying to socially engineer our children into accepting mediocrity. It's okay if you're a loser...the government will bail you out if you can't find a job, afford your home loan or just want to sue someone for something asinine. We spend far more on "education" than any other country and yet we have the dumbest kids in the world. (well soon to be...we're what number 19 in the world now academically?) We used to be number 1!! We used to be the model of which other countries chose to emulate. Now they are using our previous standards for teaching to educate their children while we dumb down the materials so "Mommy's Little Monster" can play "catch up". Get rid of the social engineers and stop pandering to under achievers....till then I will continue to home school my children.
Couldn't find a lot of articles on this, but this article seems to contradict the one you posted. What is the current interpretation now? I'm honestly curious.
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/sep/07/california-court-reverses-decision/
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
All above average.
Disagree. Parents are not the end-all-be-all of why a kid passes or fails. I, as a teacher, have plenty of parents who want their kids to do well; many of those kids don't. I have plenty of parents who don't really care; however, some of their kids do well. While parents influence the results of their children, it is UP TO THE INDIVIDUAL to make the decision to do well academically. As they say, "you can lead a horse to water..."
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
Does this mean, if I don't go to work, don't do my job, and don't care, I can now demand 50 percent of my paycheck?
I can't wait until some lawyer gets ahold of a flunky janitor with the school district (that graduates during this "grading scandal") and doesn't understand why giving 0 percent doesn't give him at least 50 percent back.
As I said somewhere else in this thread, I'd give my student a 0, and when the Edu department started to come down on me, I'd blow a whistle to the US Dept of Education.
It's grade tampering, and it's illegal. Period.
--Toll_Free
...when do the brilliant kids get their special treatment? If they are excelling, shouldn't something be done to help *them*?
Keep dumbing them down. Maybe they should just show up and pick a suitcase with their grade inside. How about you let them do extra credit work to bring their scores up from the 20 they get in their first marking period allowing them to bring it up to maybe 50-70? At least that way the ones that actually want to learn might actually learn something. That achieves the same goal.
At my school:
A - 94 or higher
B - 85 - 93
C - 70 - 84
F - 69 or lower
I attended Pittsburgh Public Schools - and I still remember getting "Scared Straight" when I got a 30% on a test one day. If it was a 50%, I might have thought that wasn't so bad and not tried as hard. Pointless.
I'm sorry, I never learned to read because I didn't really have to.
As another SW-PA resident I can tell you that east_coast is absolutely correct. Sadly, it looks like things are only getting worse around here. The local administration is getting closer and closer to joining the City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny county as one. If so, you'll have idiotic policies like this 50% minimum-grading going county wide.
Actually, our state governor Ed Rendell (both looks and) acts a lot like a used car salesman. He seems a great guy until you actually have to deal with what he's sold you. I've met people from out of state who almost idolize the man. If they moved to Pittsburgh, I bet they'd reevaluate that. (Philly not so much. He certainly favors that City more.)
For others' information:
Dan Onorato: Chief Executive of the county - has never lost an election, will most likely run for state governor soon.
Luke Ravenstahl: CoPittsburgh's mayor.
This town can really make you want a drink at times. Perhaps the loss of hope and the 10% drink tax were engineered.
No one would have blinked if the headline was Pittsburgh switches to letter only grading system, which is basically what they did.
Here's a much worse way to solve the "problem" the Pittsburgh school board is addressing. When I took Intro To Logic, my professor for that class believed that if a student got an A on one test, and an F on another, the average should always be a C (this is basically what the Pittsburgh school board believes). His solution was to give you the first 50 points on the test, and you earned the next 50, so the lowest score you could get was a 50. What he apparently failed to consider was that you only needed to get 20% of the questions correct to get a D, 40% to get a C, 60% to get a B, and 80% to get an A. And this guy was teaching logic...What is more amazing to me is that I'm pretty sure not everyone passed that class.
At least the Pittsburgh Solution doesn't lower the bar to get an A on an individual test.
My other sig is extremely clever...
I guess this means I'll never hire anyone that graduates from the Philadelphia Public School System. Certainly at work you're not assumed to be "50%" all the time. I don't want anyone coming in with unreasonable expectations, and that's exactly what this system creates.
And what about the students who are actually trying? Seems to me by motivating the slackers, you're creating a system whereby those who work hard are suckers. As a previous poster said, you could slack off at the beginning of the semester and still end up with a B by working hard in the second half of the Semester. Why should Student A try hard when Student B who sits next to him doesn't try at all for half of the year and can get a similar grade.
DISD is the perfect example of how NOT to run a school district. Anyone commenting on this story should followup by seeing how poorly DISD manages to function. This overall story doesn't hold a candle to Dallas' "educational" problems.
There are horse shows that score from 60-80 because when they scored from 0-100 all the scores fell into the 60-80 range anyway so they finally codified the "scoring range" to the numbers that were actually used.
There's nothing wrong with changing the scoring so that 50 is the lowest score - as long as they don't lump in all the students who score from 1-50 in with the student who actually scored 50! If they are going to set the base at 50, then the student who scored 0% right gets a 50, the student who got 20% right gets a 60, the student who got 50% right gets a 75, etc. If this improves student self esteem and the result is that kids keep trying to learn, then the goal is achieved.
Just don't call a 0% score "50%". Take the % sign off and just call it a "50". :-) Besides, [barbie voice] this % stuff is hard[/barbie].
"I'd much rather be mistaken as a lesbian by a bigot than be mistaken as a bigot by a lesbian."
Hey, how about this: We deduct the points that all those nasty over-achiever students make above the student average, and award them to the lazy^h^h^h^h proud future members of the Proletariat! It that not even more Progressive?
Regards;
If a student gets a cumulative grade (not an individual assignment grade) early in the semester that would make it impossible for them to "catch up" so they could pass the class (other than getting 100%-110% as their grade for the remainder of the semester), then they should be pulled out of the class and either placed into another remedial class (or perhaps a back-level class if needed) or told to give up. There is certainly no point in keeping that student in that class and pulling all the other students down, is there? Would they even bother to attend if it was virtually impossible to pass? What would be the point? If the point of education is to educate, then educate. If someone is failing so radically that there is no hope, start again or just give up. The person is either in the wrong class (erroneously placed in a curriculum beyond their ability), is in desperate need of personalized tutorial attention (assuming they are serious about their education), or is some disruptive hooligan not serious about their education for whom other measures are appropriate. But the "50" thing is just an example of broad sweeping "reform" that doesn't serve anyone in the end but sounds like it's helping. Still, all those complaining that "I never got that preferential treatment in school, I worked for my grades and I resent all the blah blah blah" are just whiners. The fact that their education system produced in them this pseudolibertarian arrogance and anticompassion towards others demonstrates that their edcuation system didn't really teach them that much about the world that was worth knowing.
It looks like the minimum passing grade is still 60%.
Some people mentioned this hurts the students who come in, do the work, and get a mark in the neighborhood of 50%.
But is this necessarily a bad thing? A student who gets 55% probably isn't trying that hard, this is sending a message of either "if you're not going to put in a good effort don't bother coming in" or alternately "it's not enough to do the work, you actually have to apply yourself".
If that message gets across maybe some students who are wasting their time at school will put some more effort in. Of course this relies on teachers not taking the obvious action of deciding the student who came in and wrote a 40% test deserves more than the student who didn't show up and bumping the 40% up to a higher mark as a result.
I stole this Sig
This is an excellent idea!! I mean, this is how it works in the working world right? If you don't perform, your boss won't get mad; he will recognize that you are trying and automatically give you a 50% for effort (or lack thereof). Pretty soon, if this is not already the case, our education system will be cultivating a bunch of idiotic losers who have never experienced defeat.
Shit like this makes me feel embarrassed to admit I'm American when I'm traveling.
It seems that 12.5K per kid per year is not enough in Minneapolis but a fraction of that is enough at a Catholic school..
Catholic schools are also generally sharing facilities and probably some staff with a church.
My son's school charges twice the tuition of the local Catholic schools and struggles to get by.
A lot of posts here are approaching this from the view that the 50% floor is a 'reward' or giveaway of credit to slackers. That's not really the point, or the real world effect, of this type of policy.
What happens in percentage based grade scales is that the typical range of student performance usually falls in the upper half of percentage points, and school systems (somewhat arbitrarily) set grade marks across that typical range.
In other scales (think straight A,B,C,D,F letter grades, or a 4 point grade point scale, or AP/IB ratings from 1-5 or 1-7) the range of student performance more exactly matches the range of marks, and is directly evaluated according to those levels of performance. Most performance or writing rubrics, for example, work that way.
Usually, the lowest performance results are not 5 times at bad as the next highest level. The student who submits nothing generally is not 5 times dumber than the student who submitted something and got the lowest grade. In most grade scales, this is reflected in the range of marks available, but not in the percentage scale in which there are 60+ variations of failing grade that will equate to an F.
Not only does this make it harder for higher grades to have a balancing effect and help the student pass, it means that the overall grade AS AN INDICATION OF STUDENT MASTERY will over-weight the poorest performances and dilute the results of any improved or proficient understanding. It also opens the way for arbitrary teacher behavior regarding how Fs are assigned, and tends to over-value following school procedure over real learning in grade outcomes.
The 50% 'floor' is an effort to bring some sanity and consistency out of this situation, especially since, in most cases, the percentage scale is so entrenched that it is the default in most software applications and teacher have to use it in some manner due to district reporting requirements.
Praising mediocrity and condemning truly exceptional people in the process is exactly how this country has gotten as fucked up as it is.
No, having our entire economic and regulatory system set up so the top 1% can make more money than Midas at the expense of the other 99% of the country is why are are screwed right now.
It sounds like utter crap anyway. If you think grades are useful, then it's obviously a stupid idea. If you think grades aren't useful, then this just makes the system even dumber without letting people ignore grades. Either way, crap.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
It's not funny. It's insulting. Treating people like this is why we can't have nice things (like Sara).
[FUCK BETA]
And here I am sitting in Carnegie Mellon, 24 hours away from scoring what will probably be below 50% on an exam. So close, yet so far. *Sigh*
This space reserved for administrative use.
Suppose instead of saying "the minimum grade is 50% on any assignment" they said that "for purposes of calculating a final grade in the class, a minimum score of 50% of each completed assignment will be used." That is the more accurate representation of at least the motivation for what is occurring. It isn't clear to me if the grade written on an assignment with 30% right is 30%, 50%, or just "E."
It's just that the "E" range is very broad - and it should be. As a society, we don't want 60% work to be a passing grade. This just serves to effectively narrow the "E" range, making it possible for an "E" and and "A" to work out to a C average.
We can argue about whether it's fair to the other students - but I don't especially care. The smart kids shouldn't need to compare themselves against the ones at the other end of the bell curve. I care about the result for that particular student. If they had a terrible first quarter then pulled their act together, I think they should ultimately get a passing grade in the class.
Let's say Johnny had 12 grades over the course of the year. He started out really weak and picked himself up, so the grades were as follows:
10 20 30 40 50 70 75 80 80 85 85 85. (that's 5 E, 2 C, 5 B.)
Under the "strict average" method, Johnny fails with a 59%. With the "50% minimum" method, he passes with a 68% (a D, but a pass.) That D, by the way, is the same result as if you say "E =1, D=2, C=3, B=4, A=5" and average based on 1 - 5 instead.
Johnny went from barely failing to barely passing. He learned the same stuff either way, so it's down to a question of whether you think a kid whose grades look like this should pass. I say he should - something happened with him over the course of the year that got him going, and he was doing good work at the end.
I loathe the "self esteem in education" crowd, but failing the hypothetical Johnny is giving a kid who has probably been working hard a kick in the teeth for his efforts because of stuff he did 6 months ago.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
I don't agree with a blanket 50% policy on failing grades, but I think teachers should give students incentives to perform better. Rather than adding to the imbalance that is the grading system, why not invite teachers to motivate students to learning the material? Grade replacements, dropping the lowest grade, and extra credit are all better alternatives than capping the failure ratio and letting students slip by with a mediocre education.
Speaking of mediocre education, I wonder if the school is suffering from a low graduation rate and is using this as a solution to the problem.
What are we teaching our children?!?! First, it was 'no child left behind'...now that was just a fabulous idea...NOT! I don't know what their intent was with that initiative, but in practice, it seemed to say to anyone that really wanted to achieve..."you should always try as hard and you can, but don't expect anyone to help you reach your potential". I know that not everyone has the same level of intellectual prowess, but let each and every young person progress at their own pace. Set achievable goals based on someones capability, not the lowest common denominator. And yes, I know that means teachers have to work hard...are they not part of the professional workforce too? Now, with the 'half right' rule, we are saying to those that can and want to achieve greater than the average..."You don't have to do all your work...you can still get a good grade" and "I know the other people passed without much effort, but they deserve to pass just the same". I can tell you, that type of work ethic won't fly when they enter the workforce. I have had to fire people due to lackluster performance and a less than stellar work ethic. I blame a lot of their attitude toward work (not all of it) on the education system. We cannot continue to teach young people that they will get what they want whether they make an effort or not. Its bad enough that you, more often than not, receive poor customer service when you go to a restaurant or shopping, but the underachieving majority believe (and are being taught) that they will get a professional job making $50K to $100K a year with the same level of commitment. At the rate we are going, this country is going to be in absolutely abysmal condition in a very short period of time. -dismount soap box
Why is this article tagged "Republicans" ? This is a liberal, typical NEA type notion, if anything.
Isn't Harrisburg a democratic majority?
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
As a blatant fuckup of a student (emotional difficulties, a difficult family life and difficult neighborhood mostly contributed... let's just say i listened to a LOT of nine inch nails), I would often go from messing up somewhere near the first part of the year, to realizing that it would be almost impossible to get back on track and just blowing off the rest of the year. I would have certainly pulled through with enough ass beatings by the folks in charge if it was actually possible.
Was it my fault? If by fault you mean 'responsibility to complete the schoolwork' then yes, it was my responsibility to complete the schoolwork, and I didn't. Was it my fault that I was a hopeless teenager in a tough situation in a toxic environment that didn't see the value of the schoolwork (or the HS diploma) presented? Some of it was, but mostly it was not.
I could have (and actually did a few years later) absolutely whipped ass in those pathetically easy high school classes if I had actually tried. It probably would have been the difference between telling them all to fuck off and just not attending school for almost a year (what I did) vs reluctantly getting back on track.
I'm assuming that the high school experiences of the overwhelming majority of people here were probably in mostly non-violent areas with at least mediocre schools and fairly supportive families... I'm not saying that lacking these things is an excuse for dropping out of high school or getting a free ride, but you probably don't realize just how different of an experience high school is when you've got lots of other negative (but attractive to a fucked up teenager) options around, without support from the people who you really need it from both inside and outside of the school.
What these kids have to face is fundamentally harder than what you had to face, and frankly your success or failure in your high school experience shouldn't dictate the rules for theirs. Does that make rounding up to 50 the right answer? Probably not... but something needs to be done to address this.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Kids should be getting more frequent updates on what their average grade is. There's no reason a student should suddenly find themselves at the end of the first marking period with a big "oh shit" mark of 20%. They should have known exactly how bad they were doing well before that, and not only that, but been pushed towards extra help.
This is all assuming the student even cares if they pass.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Pennsylvania still has some catching up to do in the anti-intellectualism department. Pennsylvania still has honor rolls unlike Massachusetts where honor rolls were banned and students are not allowed to be over 90% right.
You have got to be kidding. This in no way resembles real life. If you miss an entire week of work you get paid for 50% so you don't have to work the rest of the year 100% to make up for it!!!! We all know what would happen to us in the real world. FIRED with no pay. End of story. This is nothing more then dumbing things down even more for the children in school. This policy wasn't in effect when we went to school. You had to work to pass the class. Now you can slack for 50% then work the last 10% and get a passing grade. What a joke!!!
I was interested to read today exactly how DISD ended up with a surprise budget hole of $64 million:
This is coming from the same school district that gave staff district-backed credit cards with absolutely no auditing or oversight of what people spent money on. It's the same district where the IT director received large gifts from contractors who sell to DISD.
That, of course, just touches on some of the regular financial shockers. Academically, their solution to kids not doing homework is to make homework optional. And of course, they are following the same 50% grading rule described in the Pittsburgh article
Obviously if we had to evaluate the district administration, we would have to give them, wait for it, 50%. After all, we wouldn't want to say anything that might discourage them,
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
My father teaches (admittedly on the college level), and in a number of his classes, he refuses to accept homework that is non-passing. Thus, in this situation, you would not have to assign 50% to those homeworks, since they are not turned in yet. Or, say that a requirement for a grade above F is to turn in at least 60% of all homework.
Now whether I'm right or wrong I'll be delighted to take my 50% Insightful now please ;)
"Three eyes are better than one" -- Lieutenant Columbo
If I wanted to skip him ahead, I would have done it already. He's asked, even begged.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
FACT: By 2015 China will have more than twice as many people as the US & Europe combined.
Were that I say, pancakes?
I need +2, Meta-Funny.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Won't take long for institutions to "correct" for this:
All you're hurting are those 60-80% students who are actually trying, but will now be more likely to be punished (since the assumption will be that some of their mark was freebie 50s)
They said marking periods, not tests or quizzes. So what they are saying is that if a student gets 20% for the first entire quarter ... then they have to work harder to squeak by in the second quarter. Exactly! We are not talking about kids taking two tests and that is it, or two assignments and that is it. We are talking about a kid AVERAGING 20% for an ENTIRE QUARTER. If you average the semester grade based on an average of averages, that is another fault in the existing mechanism or teacher policies. When I have taught, or was being taught, our semester grade was a weighted average of ALL graded assignments, quizzes, and tests.
Time for a statistician to give an exposition on how dumb averaging a collection of averages is vs. averaging the whole from the beginning. Come on slashdot, you can do it!
Where was the teacher in the prior couple months? If the teacher did NOT find a way to help the child for two entire months, something is wrong. If the kid is just not trying, then his or her arse deserves their pathetically low score. A side effect of this will be to hide the actual performance of the student not just from themselves, but from the teacher as well. Then they have a "plausible deniability" case that they just didn't know Johnny and Marie were doing so bad.
This is not about kids, it is about the teachers ... and the administrators, the school board, and the teacher's "union".
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
It's as truthful as your unsubstantiated claim. Particularly since:
a) you seem to be assuming I was including Eastern Europe
b) you failed to recognize that the larger point was to flip your sensationalist claim around.
Quality not quantity my friend; though of course we are losing some of our lead in the former,
*not* falling behind (yet).
Were that I say, pancakes?