How to deal with bizarre situation with teacher, affecting daughter's grades?

What is LMS? I can guarantee Canvas is correcting nothing in my child’s school. There is very little multiple choice, anyway, but teachers correct their own tests at our school.

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Agreed. There is a lot of difference in high schools-ours never used a multiple choice format for any exam in any subject.

Using Canvas, auto grading, and not allowing students to see full exams after taking it is not unprofessional.

Following school policies for both testing and grade appeals are required for both teacher and student.

The student in this case got their numerical score.

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Lms stands for learning management system.

Some popular LMS in colleges are Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, and D2L.

LMS = Learning Management System (Canvas is one). Not sure about the high school level, but at the college level…auto-graded mc tests are the norm.

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I am still unclear on the "demographic group: being “pushed down.” At this point I don’t expect to hear what this refers to.

Teachers can make mistakes loading the answers on Canvas multiple choice. Is that relevant?

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If the grade is not correct, I suspect this is what happened.

If different class periods or groups of students were given different versions of the test, a mistake on one version could affect one group of students and not others.

That’s one reason why I don’t like systems where exams are never returned and there is never an opportunity to review answers. At our local school, it is common practice to review exams (other than year-end finals) with the class after grades are entered, and it is common for the teacher to realize only then that an answer was incorrectly marked wrong or for the students to successfully make a case that a different answer is also correct. It usually does not result in a C rising to an A, but scores do change. Even if not, students better understand where they went wrong.

I think it is unfortunate to have a system where there is no built-in quality control and students must rely on individual (often overworked) teachers to reliably catch all their own errors.

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It’s a red herring. Ignore it.

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I’m an educator. It’s most definitely unprofessional.

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The LMS is supposed to be a neutral grader. However, as many have noted, the system is only as good as the input given. Errors can be made.

I get OP a bit. My S23 has had a couple teachers who straight up did not like him (and the feeling was mutual for my son). I however don’t blame the teachers for not liking my kid as he can be a handful.

Without accusing a teacher or racism or homophobia, I just don’t see a situation where a teacher gains anything by changing a students grade. I can’t imagine a scenario where a student AND parent went to admin where the teacher was not told to review the answer key to ensure it was correct. In a scenario where a student AND parent raised concerns about grading on a test, I would imagine that administration would glance at ALL students scores in the class to see if the one student’s was significantly lower than others.

Going through the formal grade appeal process allows for proper documentation. If the school does not have a formal appeal process, this is the time to talk to the school board and advocate for a process to be created.

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Not teaching and engaging your students and helping them learn from their mistakes is unprofessional. Not allowing them to see the final exam is not.

Granted the program I teach at is only a T50 not a T20 but I don’t know of any colleagues who allow students access to exams after completion.

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Is reuse of exams the norm in your program?

This is off topic for this thread…but sometimes teachers also reuse some questions from previous exams when they redo their exams for the new year. Some cycle exams on a three year cycle, for example…still tweaking some of the questions with exam rewrites.

Yes. Most of my colleagues have test banks of questions they rotate. Due to the changing of our national licensing program, it takes quite a bit of time to create good test questions so colleagues are reusing them at the moment. And many of my colleagues teach the same course 2-3 times a year.
What many of them then do after the exam is review the most missed questions with a “muddiest points” clarification to the entire class so all students have access to the information.

Canvas actually gives the instructor access to a thorough statistical analysis of the test questions checking for reliability and validity of each test question. It also does allow for student statistics as well however in my version of Canvas, it prints out with ALL students and I cannot just choose 1 single student to print out.

If people are curious about learning more about Canvas and the scoring, see if this link works.

Admin would be able to review these statistics as well. So if the questions were statistically valid and reliable questions and the majority of students scores were within a certain range, I dont see admin being suspicious of any teacher wrongdoing.

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I don’t know a teacher that doesn’t appreciate a student working things out on their own with them…is there a chance parent/OP jumped in too early? Seems the student could have approached the teacher with, “You know a C is out of the ordinary for me and I thought I did well on that test…I know you are really busy with end of the year, but would you mind taking a look at my test and let me know the kinds of things I missed? It’s really bothering me that I did so poorly.”

Has the ship sailed on the student asking that question?

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I agree with all this. Having also taught (college) in a large program that involves national licensing, we often reused exam questions. It was important that we maintained a very specific grading regime from year to year, so that the students were prepared to move onto their next courses. We were tasked with “delivering a consistent product” to the professors that would have them for subsequent classes. When it gets inconsistent (either too many passing or too many failing), it causes major problems down the road. Keeping exams similar helped enormously with that difficult task.

While the task in high school is somewhat different than in college, there are many outstanding high school teachers who reuse questions from year to year. Good teachers can also have Canvas auto-grade multiple choice questions. Maybe in schools with way more resources they don’t, but in a typical large public high school that is very common. Some of them allow the students to see the questions afterward, but many don’t! This is true of my own high schooler at a large public school.

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Back when I was in high school and college (all public), tests were pencil and paper… The graded tests were returned to students after grading was done. In high school, it was common for the teacher to review the test questions and answers in class to help students know what they got correct and incorrect.

If the tests are kept secret or confidential, how do students find out what they got correct and incorrect?

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Where I am…all tests during the term are returned. It’s the finals that are not.

I said it is not uncommon for instructors/teachers to go over question topics that seemed to be incorrect the most. In my experience, students tend to remember questions they stumbled on or were uncertain about without seeing the test. Students often talked to each other after the test as well.

In my program, it is very common for students not to know that they got “#11, 15, and 24” wrong. Instead they know that “ugh, I really struggled with that question about xyz topic and after talking about it in class and with my friends, I chose the incorrect answer for that one question.”

Back in my parents day they had to walk to school uphill both ways. Back in the day schools were 1 room buildings with multiple grades all together. Different does not mean worse.

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Please refrain from OT conversation and get back to the OP. What they do in your school is not the issue. Of course, it would also be helpful if the OP answered the questions users have asked as follow-up instead of simply restating points in his original post. Then other users might be better able to provide meaningful feedback

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