Slashdot Mirror
School District Drops 'D' Grades
Students in one New Jersey school district will no longer be able to squeak by in class after the Morris County School Board approved dropping the D grade. Beginning in the fall students who don't get a C or higher will get an F on their report card. "I'm tired of kids coming to school and not learning and getting credit for it," said Superintendent Larrie Reynolds in a Daily Record report.
How about just not giving credit for D's? Am I missing something here?
If done the way TFS says, it's a good thing.
The problem is that teachers don't want to fail students, so the D students will get Cs instead of Fs.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
With the crazy rash of pansying up our youth over the last few decades, I welcome a little ass-kicking.
Soon enough it is going to be Pass/Fail only.
Why bother with grades at all...either you suck, or you don't. THats at least what these educators seem to be getting to.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I always thought 'C' was supposed to represent an average grade. I think one of the biggest problems today is that everyone is expected to get a B or above, so teachers are more pressured to give B's or above. Now people are getting through class at a B average, when they haven't done anything above average at all.
Now, with this, it seems as if the D students will get bumped to C's, C's to B's, and B's to A (well, maybe not so drastic on the upper portion).
I never understood this, if a student is substandard then they are substandard. If this superintendent knew what the definition of average was he would realise that, by definition, some students HAVE to fall below a 'C' mark. Teaching everybody to a minimum standard is a very noble cause but it isn't possible for everyone you teach to live up to that standard; so instead we end up with these bitter drop-outs who are essentially labled as unemployable just because they can't tell you what the capital of Nebraska is.
...is to pay wages and pensions to those inside the system. Actual education is merely a side-effect.
Sometimes the best teacher in the world can't get a stubborn little jackass to learn anything. You want to point the finger? Point it at the parents who do nothing to help or encourage their kids and expect the schools to make up for the daily 4+ hours of TV and gaming that the kids get. Crappy schools need to get fixed, sure, but I'd say that crappy parents are a far bigger problem. They expect the schools to do everything so they don't have to lift a finger.
Do people not understand that a normal distribution would be a bell-curve? Some will get A's and some will get F's a few more will get B's and D's the majority will get C's. If you are shooting for everyone getting A's,B's,and C's you are possibly over-challenging those that would normally not achieve C+ and possibly causing them to fail instead. Plus, all of the A students are being even more underchallenged in an effort to put everyone on one side of the curve.
I mean, from what I understand, schools just plain do not hold anyone back because they fail...they just continue to promote them on to the next grade regardless of their level of learning the material.
Can't hurt Junior's self esteem you know...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Considering my wife is a 3rd grade special ed teacher, I assure you that I know what you're talking about :-) Still, I don't blame teachers so much as the curriculum. Public schooling in this country is designed to teach kids how to pass a standardized test, not to expand their knowledge.
Regardless of crappy teachers, crappy parents, or crappy students, you can't expect people to learn if you are training them to pass a test.
Living With a Nerd
and start accepting the fact that intelligence is not evenly distributed. Not in groups, not even in individuals. People of average or below average are never going to be engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc. They're not going to compete for jobs in high-paying, intelligence and education-heavy fields because you cannot educate a mind of low capacity.
The fact is that our policies are being set by a bunch of arrogant elitists who think that if they cram down enough education, they can make a clean, office-dwelling, never-get-your-hands-dirty, middle class hipster society and outsource all of the menial labor, manufacturing and other jobs that people of average and below average intelligence used to do. Well, you can't because most people aren't cut out for that work, and our society cannot continue to maintain the facade of so many people who would have been working in the fields, working in factories, etc. being middle and upper-middle class professionals.
Part of the reason we are so close to national bankruptcy is that we don't respect hard-working blue collar workers. Whether they are digging ditches or doing intricate plumbing work, their work is as necessary as 95% of the white collar labor force. How about instead of cramming down unnecessary education, people start actually respecting each other for what they do with their lives rather than a bunch of pieces of paper for diploma mills like the average high school or college.
I think part of the problem is that it is no longer OK to have a standard bell curve for student achievement. Why couldn't A's strictly be meant for the students that truly excel? Instead we are left A/B students that can get by with just doing their homework and studying for ~30mins a day.
It is entirely possible and fair for a class to get all A's if they all meet the criterion (>90% on exams and so on). Yes, you might then argue that the tests were too easy, but if the tests covered the material you want the students to learn, what's the problem? Maybe the students were all very smart. Maybe the teacher is excellent.
Why the hate on the AP program? You dont have to be "affluent" to be in it, you just have to do well in school. The fees for the tests can be waived or reduced if your family is low income. Does your hate maybe stem from not liking the type of people that are in the program? That's understandable, some are pricks, I know b/c I was in many AP classes in HS. However, dont label everyone in the program as such, it makes you look like a douche. AP classes are a great way to get college credit before college, so don't knock the program itself.
In the last days of this congressional session, our elected reps faced two urgent spending requests. One was for ongoing combat in Afghanistan. The other was to keep several thousand public school teachers from being laid off in the fall. One of those got funded.
They should have both been defeated. It's not my responsibility to pay for California's expensive regulatory regime (which drives up the cost of their teachers' salaries).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I went to a college prep high school and we had no "D"s. A (92-100%), B (84-91%), C (75-83%), F (0-74%). The logic behind our school's system was that since we were a school for gifted kids, if you weren't at least average, you failed.
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
"I'm tired of kids coming to school and not learning and getting credit for it," said Superintendent Larrie Reynolds in a Daily Record report.
If the student didn't learn anything does that not mean they failed and should get a failing grade? "C" is Average and "D" is below average but still passing. I fail to see the problem with that. "F" means you failed to learn the course material well enough to pass and do not get credit.
But then, I'm not a power hungry, attention seeking, small penis administrator that needs to "shake up the box" for no other reason then to get noticed.
-[d]-
If the parents are spending those 1-2 hours teaching their kids that "dat edumacashun thang" isn't worthwhile it won't matter what a teacher tries to accomplish in their 6-8 hours.
What I'm having trouble wrapping my heads around is that there are schools that use fixed percentages as grade markers. That means if you make a test you need to precisely target the questions to achieve an 85% average. That probably means you need to make 50% of the questions so easy that nobody could get them wrong. It also means you can't make any significant fraction hard enough to test the knowledge of the people in the A range. Maybe teachers aren't allowed to make their own exams anymore?
It also means (and I've seen this and heard reports from friends) that these students will have no idea how to handle grades in college. When I teach I like to target exams at an average of 50 out of 100. College freshmen from these schools will panic when the get a 30% on an exam, even if that turns out to be an A. Then they call their parents and their parents call me explaining why Johnny really needs to get into med school. In my dreams, I explain to them why Johnny should drop the class if he can't understand that an A is a good score.
Hard exams are a good thing. They tell you how everyone in the class is doing, not just the below average people. I had a multiple-choice/multiple-answer exam when I was in college where the high was 9 out of 100. I got a -6 (which was an A). The average was -28. It was a damn hard exam, and it really tested our knowledge, but 15% of the class still got an A.
Support SETI@home
Ok, I can't say how this works in other countries since I'm from the US.(And I'll probably get marked as a troll by some stupid moderator. Oh well, the benefits of having Karma to burn.) That being said there's nothing "magical" about 70%. I mean I understand how you go to school for over 12 years and they always use 70% so you automatically assume that "Oh of course 70% is a C" and that no other number can be a C. The most obvious example of this not being true is the SAT. Average is 500 out of 800 which is 62.5%. What this means is that the person writing the test can make it harder or easier to get alot of points even if they are testing on the entire subject area. (And theoretically any question is "answerable.") They can move the average up or down as they see fit by including more or fewer tricky questions while still testing in the target field. The reason to do this is that if you have a bunch of grades all pinned up at 95%+ you basically can't tell which student is really better than another. You also can see what a student doesn't know. (I mean you could just make the test really easy and then everybody gets 100% ) Think of it this way. If I tell you it's 30 outside is it hot? What you should say to me is you can't tell since you don't have a scale to determine what that 30 actually means. If I asked is it hot when it's 30C you'd know yes it is and 30F is cold. Without some scale to tell you what a number means you can't tell. The same is true for percentages in education. Without a scale to help you interpret what 70% means you can't tell if that's a good or shitty score. (The professor could have made the test such that only a great student could get above 50%. Note, yes I've had courses like that. I had a physics course where the prof made it so hard 30% was passing which shows that yes a professor can put average anywhere he likes.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.