<p>Making it optional permits high-performing students to exempt themselves from the assignment, which is efficient since the purpose of the assignment is to improve the lot of low-performing but hard-working students.</p>
<p>These students have academic difficulties that should not ruin their lives. Ruining the lives of less intellectually well-endowed students is not the purpose of public education.</p>
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<p>Extra credit is that help. Besides, as acknowledged, it only bumbs grades up slightly. Not enough to erase signs of problems, but enough to prevent a fail. Extra credit allows teachers to save students in a way in accordance with their mission as teachers. </p>
<p>It’s motivating, it’s meritorious, it’s good.</p>
<p>“In the real life, there’s often no incentives for doing extra/something more”</p>
<p>I disagree with this. The simple facts are when you do extra and go the extra mile, you get recognized. When you get recognized, opportunities or rewards come your way. When you have a job, going the extra mile gets you promotions. When you are an undergrad in college, going the extra mile with projects or assignments makes you get noticed by professors and can get you some decent letters of recommendation from that alone, or even help you get research or something because they see you do more than is required just to make things excellent.</p>
<p>By the way, definitely agree with what Philovitist has said above.</p>
<p>“Not enough to erase signs of problems, but enough to prevent a fail.”</p>
<p>Why is preventing a failure necessarily a good thing? A lot of the time, someone who failed a class would benefit from taking it again. Making students look better on paper through grade inflation is not helping them in the long run.</p>
<p>Grades don’t matter in the long run. The difference between a borderline A and a borderline B doesn’t matter in the long run.</p>
<p>What a kid gets from completing a hefty EC assignment, though.</p>
<p>My god, this is so boring. I am crossing educational policy off of my list.</p>
<p>What I’m trying to say is that in real life, the extra little things/initiative will be rewarded, but it isn’t often tangible or immediate. By dangling assignments that students would only do for extra credit could dull them to the point where they only do things with a reward. Could. It could also introduce them to doing extra things. But I see it as the former. </p>
<p>Too often extra credit is abused. I see many students who, knowing there will be extra credit and such, do not give their best efforts. And especially in AP courses. Too many +5 extra credit points to get 89.5%-90 yay an A. </p>
<p>People who are working hard and still not doing well need help. It is their and the teacher’s to work together and discuss what’s wrong and how to fix the situation…</p>
<p>But if every student has the opportunity to get EC, it’s just grade inflation and no one is penalized and hardly benefitted.</p>
<p>I think mandatory work motivates students far more than extra credit does. Many students neglect to do EC because it is optional. But if mandatory work is assigned, everyone will somehow find a way to finish because the impending “deadline.”</p>
<p>But I stand by what I said; social Darwinism or not, motivating or not, extra credit is unfair to students who understand the material, and is not an accurate judge of performance. The fact that EC is a convenient way to help underprivileged students doesn’t make it right that it adversely affects the upper percentile of students. </p>
<p>It hurts meritocracy. Certain people shouldn’t get a “boost” because of their circumstances. Each person should be treated the same, regardless of race, socioeconomic status, etc. </p>
<p>Extra credit is a way to not only inflate grades, but to create a disconnect between GPA and capability, leading to the necessity of tests like the SATs/ACTs. If GPA’s were purely performance based, we wouldn’t need standardized testing. It also falsely implies that a student truly understands the material, and changes the grade from a performance measure to a subjective and less useful measure.</p>
<p>It encourages politicking: sucking up to teachers, trying to improve your impression in the class in order to give an appearance of effort and create pity in the teacher. It gives a student’s ability to act a bearing upon GPA.</p>
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<p>Maybe I’m just overly cynical, but extra credit doesn’t motivate students to learn more, it makes students try to show that they’ve learned in order to extract maximum points from the teacher. This leads to a system rife with copying, academic dishonesty and inflated grades, hurting students who actually understand the material and are exempted from the assignments, getting lower or equivalent grades to those students abusing extra credit. It decreases the value of a grade.</p>
<p>As for social darwinism, that is the nature of meritocracy: the fittest rise to the top while the rest sink below. That’s how the world always has been, and that’s how it should be. Those most capable in society should be given the most opportunities and do more, given that they have more to contribute (academically, of course: I’m discounting the other ways of contributing in that statement).</p>
<p>snoorreee</p>
<p>Mandatory work is nice, but not necessarily superior to EC work. Making EC work voluntary frees the teacher to pose challenging and transformational assignments without penalizing those who don’t need to go above/beyond to do well in a course.</p>
<p>EC is an equal opportunity benefit that is open to all students. It penalizes no one. Every percentile gets a shot. It’s intrinsically meritocratic. Drop the bull.</p>
<p>The SATs/ACTs are always necessary because there is no universal standard for how deflated or inflated grades should be. The metric of GPAs will always very from administrator to administrator.</p>
<p>Good EC assignments are those that drive a student to develop and demonstrate true understanding of the material. Your argument that ECs don’t is actually just an argumrnt against bad extra credit practices.</p>
<p>Test scores are only one metric of student comprehension of material, and tests more than comprehension of the material (including testing skills).</p>
<p>Politicking isn’t a bad skill to develop, and as long as its consequences are fair, it’s better than harmless.</p>
<p>But real life doesn’t work that way. Yes, we live in a meritocracy, but it’s not a real one-- how one acts and how much one is liked goes quite a long way in the real world, for the good or not. </p>
<p>You also seem to be of the opinion that grades and assessments are all objective, which is not at all the case. Teachers are human. Even multiple-choice tests are biased, especially if the same test is given across different teachers. Some teachers may teach to the test, and some may teach content. The access of that information was inequal, so even an ‘objective’ multiple choice test is unfair, because students were exposed to the material differently. Even among different periods, teachers may vary their teaching presenations for the day, and again, you no longer have an objective test. I also once had a physics professor who justifeid extra credit in the following way: He was not perfect. He fully admitted that he might have been grading harder on a free-response question from one paper to the next, or that a particular multiple-choice question was worded in a confusing manner, or any number of things like that. A student should not be penalized because of that. Pure meritocracies only work in perfect systems. Everywhere else, you need a plus/minus admustment. Even ‘objective’ standardized tests really represent a range of likely scores, because they’re not perfect.</p>
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That’s not the reason standardized tests are used. Even if grading did not take into acount extra credit, a 3.0 student at a large, suburban public school is not necessarily worse than the 4.0 student at a small, rural school. The educational rigor of those schools is different, and standardized tests (SAT/ACT/AP) provide a way for colleges to measure across schools, not just within them.</p>
<p>“Those most capable in society should be given the most opportunities and do more”</p>
<p>So how do we decide who’s most capable? People are not born into equal circumstances. People are disadvantaged based on race and socioeconomic status. You can’t treat people equally at school but unequally everywhere else and then assume that the most talented or otherwise meritorious will succeed because of survival of the fittest.</p>
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<p>All of this is either false, only works as a criticism of ‘bad’ EC, or can be extended to any teaching method gone bad. But most EC assignments don’t effect any of this. At all.</p>
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<p>What you describe is not meritocracy, but elitism. Education is not and never has been about culling the dumb/unmotivated from the bright and hard-working. It’s about providing to as many students as possible the skills required to solve problems in the future — for both those who rise to the top and for those who, by birth circumstances, alone, fall to the bottom.</p>
<p>“The way it should be” does not involve ignoring the welfare of less fortunate human beings. That is both immoral, and ignorant of basic economic principles.</p>
<p>Now that we’re talking broader social philosophies, I somehow feel less bored…</p>
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<p>Alright, I concede on the standardized testing point. I actually realized that the second I hit “Post.”</p>
<p>As for the query on EC being meritocratic, it is available to every student, but it is intended for those performing lower. It serves a greater boost for them, inflating their GPA’s, while forcing the high-performing student to do extra work (or fall behind and lose ground on GPA relative to peers). It provides an unfair boost to low-performing students, while forcing extra work on higher performing students, inflating GPA’s and taking away from GPA as an objective measure.</p>
<p>And the consequences of politicking are students getting grades that are far above their actual performance. It leads to students getting GPA’s they don’t deserve because they “sucked up” to teachers. It penalizes the introverted student and gives the extrovert a way out of testing. It does everything your argument is fighting for: takes away from equal opportunity.</p>
<p>EC does not represent fully the testing material: it doesn’t show the student’s ability. Doing a problem set at home, without time pressure in a relaxed environment, is very different from a testing room. The testing room scenario is far harder, even if the technical difficulty of the EC assignment is harder. But that is what tests us; that is what makes us think. Anyone can solve a difficult problem given enough time (well not everyone, but you know what I mean); it’s our ability to think under pressure that shows our understanding. Testing may not be the perfect way of measuring performance, because it isn’t completely objective, but it is as close as we can get, and it is much closer to objectivity than EC.</p>
<p>“It’s about providing to as many students as possible the skills required to solve problems in the future”</p>
<p>I definitely agree with you here.
But the idea isn’t that the fittest rise to the top and everyone else fails completely. It’s more of a gradient - the absolute best students go to HYPS-esque schools and the slightly more average ones go to state flagships and others go to less selective public schools or community colleges. And many of them will end up with jobs and generally be happy in life - not just the absolute top students.</p>
<p>I did not mean less fortunate human beings, I meant less “capable” human beings. I meant those that are less academically successful, and thus, have less to contribute (academically) to society. Higher achieving students are more able to take advantage of new opportunities presented to them, and thus are more able to contribute. Lower achieving students, in many ways, lack the initiative to take advantage of their opportunities and would benefit less from them; thus, they should be given less opportunities. That is exactly what the College Admissions process does. </p>
<p>There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but it tends to work generally.</p>
<p>Never did I say that we cull the less capable (or if I said it, I misrepresented myself). I meant that we provide each student the level of opportunity that he/she can take advantage of. Just as you don’t provide a physics textbook to a 6 year old learning about “simple machines,” you don’t provide a research opportunity to a kid who struggles in regular physics. You instead provide him with tutoring. Each student should be able to get their own intended level of education, and achieve his/her own place in life based on ability.</p>
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<p>Nothing in here justifies the asserted point. Extra credit does not disproportionately benefit the underperforming. Everyone’s (who participates) grades get inflated. Whether you’re high performing or low.</p>
<p>GPA inflation does not decrease what little objectivity it has. And EC assignments are just as subjectively developed as tests and essay questions.</p>
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<p>When a teacher institutes extra credit, it is made available to all students, extraverted and introverted. Therefore, the latter is not disadvantaged. Everyone gets the same opportunities. EC just gets added to the arsenal.</p>
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<p>Testing scenarios may be harder, but you haven’t shown how they are more meaningful. It seems that the additional difficulties you’ve noted — time pressure, especially — only obscures, not vindicates, metrics of concept mastery.</p>
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But objective m/c tests don’t actually measure performance or student knowledge. There’s a reason why more and more LACs are going test-optional. Standardized tests are often criticized, especially in math, for being too rote. Many students can memorize the answer, but they cannot explain how or why the formula is dervied (which is a deeper level of analytic thinking). In college, there are upper-level social science courses where the entirety of your grade is based on, say, forty pages of formal writing, all of which was done at home, and reflected a whole lot of thinking and grappling with difficult topics.</p>
<p>A lot of educational pedagogy is moving away from ‘objective’ tests for exactly this reason-- they don’t measure knowledge accurately and result in short-term storage of concepts. Forcing students to work through the concept and be able to explain it forces students to be able to actually understand the topic. That’s why the movies/presenations/projects-- because forcing students to work with a topic is far more reflective of personal ‘understanding.’ And in the “real” world, your success is based on actions and projects you undertake and initiate, not assessments others create. (For an example of understanding without assessment, look at standard-based grading and project-based learning.)</p>
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<p>Hahahaha. Yeah, I probably went overboard with the word “cull”. Lol.</p>
<p>Fortunate and capable are kinda synonymous in this context. People who turn out to have the intelligence, initiative and opportunity to succeed got all of those things by luck. We all could have been born as Zimbabweans. We all could have been born with lower potentials to obtain a high IQ. We all could have born with a weaker achievement drive, or without a social network to push us. We CCers are blessed with a mind and environment that enables us to contribute things of great value to the world. Other people aren’t so lucky, and that’s a tragedy like any other.</p>
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<p>Sure.</p>