If you're happy with assessing mastery based entirely on the grade achieved on the second test, maybe you should assess the grade based entirely on the grade achieved on the second test.
Or maybe the whole grading scale needs to be revamped. In France, for example, grades are put on a scale of 1-20. A grade of 10 is considered average. Students are extremely happy to receive a grade of 15 (which would only be 75%, a C, in the US!). Truly excellent work might receive an 18, and a 20 basically means that you have channeled annus mirabilis Albert Einstein for that assignment or test.
However you cut it, a grading floor is simply the wrong solution. It reminds me of the modern security mantra:
Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this must be done.
Just because there's a problem with grading, and a grading floor does something about grading, does not mean that a grading floor is anything like the right answer.
Sounds like you yourself are guilty of working (handing out homework, grades, tests) without thinking (talking to kids who are doing horribly before it gets too late, working out extra credit assignments for those who want to work hard and catch up). Setting a grading floor is a horrible solution for this problem.
Why? GPA is supposed to be indicative of how much you've learned. If you want to know about dedication and hard work, look at somebody's work experience or something.
In college I had the rare ability to not study, put in the minimum needed effort on homework, and still ace classes. I graduated with around a 3.8 GPA having done very little actual work. Of course I still built my projects and all that, but I mostly slacked off and didn't even go through the effort of cramming it all in one night. I simply showed up for the exams and aced them.
Now of course I realize that this is an extremely unusual ability, and of course I could have done even better if I had put effort into it. But are you really saying that my GPA should have been, say, a 1.5 just because I was able to learn and internalize all of the knowledge being presented without having to spend a lot of time studying?
I couldn't agree more. I also listen mostly to music from the 70s and 80s. When I listen to more modern stuff, it's often the good bands from that period who continued to perform.
Certainly good music is being produced today. But not being a real music buff, it's not worth my time or money to search for it. I'll listen to music from a time where other people have put in all that time or money, and wait for them to do the same to today's stuff.
Most of the great performers of yesteryear made their bread and butter off of concerts anyway, and the financial incentive for those isn't going anywhere. Record sales basically just gave them enough money to get hooked on drugs, fly to their concerts in private aircraft, and think that they were better than they really were. We'd probably be better off without all that if you ask me.
Many Slashdotters believe that production costs are next to nothing, and that record companies don't have significant costs for marketing, salaries or overhead. This helps foster the notion that each download is cost-free to the record label.
No, what fosters the notion that each download is cost-free to the record label is the simple fact that each download is cost-free to the record label.
Do not confuse up-front costs with per-item costs. Just because a track cost an enormous amount of money up-front to produce doesn't mean that any of that cost applies per download.
If you're going to fail anyway, then anyone who isn't a total idiot is going to realize that putting any sort of effort in whatsoever is a big fat waste of time. There's no reward for that effort.
That is insane. What gives them no reward for effort is giving people a minimum grade even when they haven't done anything. In the traditional case there's always a reward for effort. Maybe they still fail now, but if they've learned a lot then they won't fail when they re-take the class again. And if you think re-taking the class is harsh, exactly what do you think should happen when you utterly bomb an entire half of a class?
If you're worried about students being suddenly surprised at a low grade when it's too late to correct, then the answer to that is to report their grades earlier and more often. If you're worried about students failing after they've fucked up half the class, well to me that's a perfectly reasonable consequence!
Thanks for the dictionary reference. As it happens I do know what it means. I was not asking what the word means, I was asking how you thought I was being hyperbolic. So you do think that more than 10% of computer users carefully read warning dialogs and never click the affirmative button to a warning dialog that they should be refusing?
What's hyperbolic, exactly? You think that more than 10% of computer users do not click "OK" or "Confirm" or "Yes" when presented with a confirmation dialog where the affirmative choice results in malicious code execution? It's a common threat that people succumb to, and the countermeasure of choice doesn't work with the vast majority of the population. Forget this particular study, it's common knowledge that people simply do not read these things in any great detail.
One could also argue that this proves the standard OS prompts can be duplicated closely enough to fool users online into performing bad operations.
This is just a continuation of the same point. Confirmation dialogs don't work. They don't work because people don't read them, don't understand them, and don't know when they're getting a fake one.
Thanks for the info. Unfortunately it seems like Virgin has rather poor coverage. Kind of funny, really. On their coverage map page they start off with "Virgin Mobile has a great coverage area.", then shows this teeny sparse network which leaves out entire states. I guess you can't win them all. The cheap guys seem like they always have bad coverage, and the ones with good coverage are more expensive than I want to pay. Guess I'll have to decide just how much that coverage is worth to me.
I think that may be the sparsest coverage map I have ever seen. I guess it's a good price if you happen to live in one of the handful of cities they serve and never leave it, though.
"Craptacular.app" is an application which was downloaded from the Internet. Are you sure you want to open it?
Safari.app downloaded this file today at 19:63 PM from www.craptacular.com.
[Show Web Page] [Cancel] [Open]
This happens the first time I launch every single application I download or receive as a mail attachment, and as I mentioned, quite a few things that aren't even applications.
The problem there is that trusting self-signed SSL certs is not an inherently risky or unusual action. The solution to a crappy dialog on an action like that is not to make it vastly harder to take the normal course. So it should be fairly obvious why people didn't like it.
If 90% of drivers crashed their cars, then yes, it would be the fault of the auto makers. Such is the situation with warning boxes. It is not the case that some small percentage of users screw them up, as is the case with drivers crashing their cars. Everybody fucks up warning boxes. Thus it is logical to conclude that they don't work, and that any programmer who relies on them to work is simply divorced from reality and not doing his job.
But in most cases, it's easy to determine what the right thing is, but the programmers just take the lazy way out.
Case in point: Mac OS X pops up a scary box the first time you try to run an app that you downloaded off the internet. The purpose of this is to prevent an attack where a web site causes an app to download and then tries to run it through some sort of automatic mechanism, like opening an URL that the app is registered as a handler for.
So far so good. Except the implementation completely sucks. I get that warning when I intentionally double-click a downloaded app in the Finder. I get that warning when I open a freshly downloaded.php file in a text editor. I get the warning when I open a downloaded.html file for the first time. It's completely stupid.
Computers are full of these worthless, stupid warning boxes. All it does is train users to blindly click the button that says "do what I just told you to do, stupid". And then when a real, important box appears, they do what their computer has spent months or years carefully training them to do. Big surprise.
That's still a failing of the programmer. In the case of a large project like that, "the programmer" is just shorthand for anyone responsible for creating the project. Point being, a confirmation dialog that users constantly screw up is the fault of whoever created it, not the fault of the user.
I don't buy it. I'm telling people who are being jerks that they're being jerks. That may also make me a jerk. I don't care. It's hardly just as bad, and in any case I never expected it to actually work.
Programmers continue to use them because they effectively move responsibility. Yes, they fail, but when they fail it's suddenly the user's fault, so the programmer is happy with the result.
Of course this is bad UI and the failure is ultimately that of the programmer, but this is not how it's perceived now, so programmers will continue to use them even if they know full well that they don't do the job.
I couldn't disagree more. I'm interested enough that I might watch it live, but would never hear about it anywhere else. Please post to Slashdot a few hours before they launch!
There are people in this country who call other countries. I'm aware of no cellular provider which has anything like reasonable rates for international calls.
As a small business owner, I'd expect you to have more empathy and understanding of the fact that different people have different tastes. Yes, even different from yours.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're happy with assessing mastery based entirely on the grade achieved on the second test, maybe you should assess the grade based entirely on the grade achieved on the second test.
Or maybe the whole grading scale needs to be revamped. In France, for example, grades are put on a scale of 1-20. A grade of 10 is considered average. Students are extremely happy to receive a grade of 15 (which would only be 75%, a C, in the US!). Truly excellent work might receive an 18, and a 20 basically means that you have channeled annus mirabilis Albert Einstein for that assignment or test.
However you cut it, a grading floor is simply the wrong solution. It reminds me of the modern security mantra:
Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this must be done.
Just because there's a problem with grading, and a grading floor does something about grading, does not mean that a grading floor is anything like the right answer.
Sounds like you yourself are guilty of working (handing out homework, grades, tests) without thinking (talking to kids who are doing horribly before it gets too late, working out extra credit assignments for those who want to work hard and catch up). Setting a grading floor is a horrible solution for this problem.
Why? GPA is supposed to be indicative of how much you've learned. If you want to know about dedication and hard work, look at somebody's work experience or something.
In college I had the rare ability to not study, put in the minimum needed effort on homework, and still ace classes. I graduated with around a 3.8 GPA having done very little actual work. Of course I still built my projects and all that, but I mostly slacked off and didn't even go through the effort of cramming it all in one night. I simply showed up for the exams and aced them.
Now of course I realize that this is an extremely unusual ability, and of course I could have done even better if I had put effort into it. But are you really saying that my GPA should have been, say, a 1.5 just because I was able to learn and internalize all of the knowledge being presented without having to spend a lot of time studying?
I couldn't agree more. I also listen mostly to music from the 70s and 80s. When I listen to more modern stuff, it's often the good bands from that period who continued to perform.
Certainly good music is being produced today. But not being a real music buff, it's not worth my time or money to search for it. I'll listen to music from a time where other people have put in all that time or money, and wait for them to do the same to today's stuff.
Most of the great performers of yesteryear made their bread and butter off of concerts anyway, and the financial incentive for those isn't going anywhere. Record sales basically just gave them enough money to get hooked on drugs, fly to their concerts in private aircraft, and think that they were better than they really were. We'd probably be better off without all that if you ask me.
Many Slashdotters believe that production costs are next to nothing, and that record companies don't have significant costs for marketing, salaries or overhead. This helps foster the notion that each download is cost-free to the record label.
No, what fosters the notion that each download is cost-free to the record label is the simple fact that each download is cost-free to the record label.
Do not confuse up-front costs with per-item costs. Just because a track cost an enormous amount of money up-front to produce doesn't mean that any of that cost applies per download.
If you're going to fail anyway, then anyone who isn't a total idiot is going to realize that putting any sort of effort in whatsoever is a big fat waste of time. There's no reward for that effort.
That is insane. What gives them no reward for effort is giving people a minimum grade even when they haven't done anything. In the traditional case there's always a reward for effort. Maybe they still fail now, but if they've learned a lot then they won't fail when they re-take the class again. And if you think re-taking the class is harsh, exactly what do you think should happen when you utterly bomb an entire half of a class?
If you're worried about students being suddenly surprised at a low grade when it's too late to correct, then the answer to that is to report their grades earlier and more often. If you're worried about students failing after they've fucked up half the class, well to me that's a perfectly reasonable consequence!
Thanks for the dictionary reference. As it happens I do know what it means. I was not asking what the word means, I was asking how you thought I was being hyperbolic. So you do think that more than 10% of computer users carefully read warning dialogs and never click the affirmative button to a warning dialog that they should be refusing?
What's hyperbolic, exactly? You think that more than 10% of computer users do not click "OK" or "Confirm" or "Yes" when presented with a confirmation dialog where the affirmative choice results in malicious code execution? It's a common threat that people succumb to, and the countermeasure of choice doesn't work with the vast majority of the population. Forget this particular study, it's common knowledge that people simply do not read these things in any great detail.
One could also argue that this proves the standard OS prompts can be duplicated closely enough to fool users online into performing bad operations.
This is just a continuation of the same point. Confirmation dialogs don't work. They don't work because people don't read them, don't understand them, and don't know when they're getting a fake one.
Thanks for the info. Unfortunately it seems like Virgin has rather poor coverage. Kind of funny, really. On their coverage map page they start off with "Virgin Mobile has a great coverage area.", then shows this teeny sparse network which leaves out entire states. I guess you can't win them all. The cheap guys seem like they always have bad coverage, and the ones with good coverage are more expensive than I want to pay. Guess I'll have to decide just how much that coverage is worth to me.
I think that may be the sparsest coverage map I have ever seen. I guess it's a good price if you happen to live in one of the handful of cities they serve and never leave it, though.
Let me guess: you're still using Tiger?
On Leopard, I get a box that looks like this:
"Craptacular.app" is an application which was downloaded from the Internet. Are you sure you want to open it?
Safari.app downloaded this file today at 19:63 PM from www.craptacular.com.
[Show Web Page] [Cancel] [Open]
This happens the first time I launch every single application I download or receive as a mail attachment, and as I mentioned, quite a few things that aren't even applications.
The problem there is that trusting self-signed SSL certs is not an inherently risky or unusual action. The solution to a crappy dialog on an action like that is not to make it vastly harder to take the normal course. So it should be fairly obvious why people didn't like it.
Well you convinced me to change my game, anyway. I decided to be more forthright about my opinion of the general Slashdot population. Enjoy!
No, that doesn't make any sense. Logic fail.
If 90% of drivers crashed their cars, then yes, it would be the fault of the auto makers. Such is the situation with warning boxes. It is not the case that some small percentage of users screw them up, as is the case with drivers crashing their cars. Everybody fucks up warning boxes. Thus it is logical to conclude that they don't work, and that any programmer who relies on them to work is simply divorced from reality and not doing his job.
But in most cases, it's easy to determine what the right thing is, but the programmers just take the lazy way out.
Case in point: Mac OS X pops up a scary box the first time you try to run an app that you downloaded off the internet. The purpose of this is to prevent an attack where a web site causes an app to download and then tries to run it through some sort of automatic mechanism, like opening an URL that the app is registered as a handler for.
So far so good. Except the implementation completely sucks. I get that warning when I intentionally double-click a downloaded app in the Finder. I get that warning when I open a freshly downloaded .php file in a text editor. I get the warning when I open a downloaded .html file for the first time. It's completely stupid.
Computers are full of these worthless, stupid warning boxes. All it does is train users to blindly click the button that says "do what I just told you to do, stupid". And then when a real, important box appears, they do what their computer has spent months or years carefully training them to do. Big surprise.
That's still a failing of the programmer. In the case of a large project like that, "the programmer" is just shorthand for anyone responsible for creating the project. Point being, a confirmation dialog that users constantly screw up is the fault of whoever created it, not the fault of the user.
I don't buy it. I'm telling people who are being jerks that they're being jerks. That may also make me a jerk. I don't care. It's hardly just as bad, and in any case I never expected it to actually work.
Programmers continue to use them because they effectively move responsibility. Yes, they fail, but when they fail it's suddenly the user's fault, so the programmer is happy with the result.
Of course this is bad UI and the failure is ultimately that of the programmer, but this is not how it's perceived now, so programmers will continue to use them even if they know full well that they don't do the job.
I couldn't disagree more. I'm interested enough that I might watch it live, but would never hear about it anywhere else. Please post to Slashdot a few hours before they launch!
There are people in this country who call other countries. I'm aware of no cellular provider which has anything like reasonable rates for international calls.
As a small business owner, I'd expect you to have more empathy and understanding of the fact that different people have different tastes. Yes, even different from yours.
I've been looking into prepaid phones to save money. Which service do you use that costs only 5 cents a minute?
See subject line.
Sure thing! Just stop using it, and I'll stop complaining about it.
Sorry, but you're not going to get me to stop criticizing such a stupid and offensive meme that easily.
Wow, that joke is great! Nobody has ever come up with that one before!