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<p>Oh, I don’t know. The author of the article been hearing these complaints for three decades, which is probably about as long as he’s been working. I suspect professors have been making these complaints about incoming students for about a thousand years.</p>
<p>teachers are so overwhelmed with getting every kid to pass that everyone’s scores are tending toward the mean. it’s a total disservice to bright kids who go to public school. private schools are the ones raising the future entrepeneurs and businesspeople of our country at this point. i wonder how the study speaks about private schools and scoring.</p>
<p>Here is the problem:
Our system of assessing students based on their grades is causing the problem.
People want to go to the honor classes, and don’t want the B+, because if you don’t go, to selective classes or get the A, you are out of selective schools.<br>
What if you flourish later? What if you are capable in other areas? Dunnot matter. Your bad grade in HS will hunt your college admissions, and your bad grade in college will hunt your graduate school admissions.
–Hey, but I took that course in Plasma Physics because I was very interested and it is a hard class.
–Sorry, we here at admissions need to keep the high average GPA of admitted students.
What I think is that society reached a point that students are tracked to a point, and grades became so important, that it is detracting from the learning experience.
I do not see a solution to this problem, unless there is some major federal regulation that specifies something like this: All schools are forced to exclude the bottom x% of each student’s educational record. This would be great because students could self select to take risks, and some classes could indeed be made rigorous without the risk of damaging a student’s record for the rest of their lives.</p>
<p>^+1. As long as there was a way to make sure kids still take all classes seriously, it’d be great for students to not get punished because they take a more difficult class. It’s so sad to see how many students shy away from classes they could learn a lot from, just because they’re scared of a B or a C.</p>
<p>Get rid of grades.</p>
<p>Too late now for a country with over 300 million people but if they could standardize high school classes then you could be compare grades. Also I’m in favor of being able to ‘hide’ or get rid of 1 grade in high school</p>
<p>A lot of homeschoolers provide evaluation by portfolio to their school districts. We never did the grades thing with our kids. I’d just talk to them to see whether or not they understood something. Or they tell me about it if they knew more about it than I did.</p>
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<p>Hmm, doesn’t arithmetic suggest that the students moving down are equal in number to those moving up? So couldn’t you spin this just the opposite way – that the school experience is good for 30 to 50 percent of students?</p>
<p>I’ll throw my hat in and guess that it is less about ability and more about motivation. Myself being an example, I was in advanced math classes, the only advanced classes available, throughout elementary school and was one of the top in my class. Then middle school hit, and I had no motivation because I knew those grades didn’t matter later in life, unlike high school ones. Stupid, I know, and it got me a 1.3 GPA. Then in high school I did much better. Much, much better. Anyway, I feel like motivation either diminishes or increases as year go by, and the fluctuation leads to shifting “top students”. Just my opinion.</p>
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This is so true. I am continually frustrated by the amount of busy work given to my child, even as a senior in HS.</p>
<p>I have seen it time and again in our elementary, middle, and high schools. The most intelligent students are the ones who read early, ace standardized tests, and sound like much older children when they speak. However, by late elementary school and middle school, they often do not make the top grades in their classes because they are disorganized, forgetting to write down homework or leaving it at home. They forget that they have tests or they study the wrong material or they forget to bring necessary materials home to do work. Their backpacks are stuffed with crumpled papers and they can never find anything. Many teachers have told me that the most intelligent students they have are usually the ones who daydream and who are the most disorganized.</p>
<p>I’ve seen some of these students learn enough coping skills that by high school they excel again. I’ve seen others who never quite get it together and barely scrape by or drop out.</p>
<p>Very intelligent students who are absent-minded and can’t find anything in their backpacks may not do well in schools that emphasize day-to-day homework over class discussion and standardized tests. Sometimes the less brilliant, but hardworking, students become a school’s academic stars.</p>
<p>A lot of the time management and organizational stuff can be taught by the parents but the parents have to recognize it and know how to fix it. Or the school has to recognize that the student has the potential and realize what the problem is and then fix it. That can be pretty hard for a teacher to do with a lot of other students to manage.</p>
<p>In a one-on-one teaching environment, it’s pretty straightforward to fix this.</p>
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I largely agree with that, except that there’s a lot more to school than either busy work, class discussion, and standardised tests. There are essays, reading assignments (like, read this Shakespeare play for English, which isn’t a busy assignment), labs, normal tests, and research projects. I loved writing essays, because I could make my thesis as complex and nuanced as possible, and I could revise my work until it was almost perfect. I also liked capstone-type research projects, which required integrating material from the entire year into one project. Busy work was never my thing.</p>
<p>Law school hit a lot of the “good at doing busy work” people hard, since the entire thing is based around doing the work until you understand it, then acing a single test at the end. There is almost no busy work, and functionally no busy work that gives you extra points on your grade, which some students loved and others hated.</p>
<p>When my son was in 8th grade his science teacher, at a parent-teacher conference told us that, in his opinion, my son was by far the brightest kid in the class, but unfortunately because his grades and his behavior didn’t show this, he couldn’t recommend him for the 9th grade honors class. I think he spent his 3 years of middle school staring out the window daydreaming and was the classic forget to turn your homework in - if he remembered to bring home the book to do it in the first place. His grades were dismal, in all his classes, and I would scream and yell and nag enough so he would buckle down when push came to shove but that only got him so far grade wise - he would bring his 60’s into the mid 80’s. Rinse and repeat for 3, very long, years. </p>
<p>We also tried all the organization tips, carrot & sticks, too, but those things never worked for long, either.</p>
<p>Perhaps professors have been complaining about incoming students for three decades, but today, these are real and serious concerns. </p>
<p>Many freshman do not have the skills and backgrounds to hit the ground running. Some of the University of Washington professors are attempting to change this through a program called Where’s the Math?</p>
<p>I’ve seen gaps in writing as well. I’ve looked over numerous essays for bright, hardworking students. Some valedictorians. Some are cringe worthy. Class sizes are large and time is limited so these students have not been taught how to write concisely and clearly.</p>
<p>I disagree that intelligence wanes from elementary school to high school and beyond. Some kids blossom late. But that doesn’t mean their intelligence just popped in over night. Their grades may have been poor, but their innate abilities have always been there.</p>
<p>Many bright kids are bored out of their minds and burned out by the time consuming and mind numbing work. As OP have mentioned, this too often take place of real learning and critical thinking.</p>
<p>Marsian and Ariesathena, your comments together describe a certain sort of gifted kid: the one with both spectacular achievements and barely passing grades and often in similar sorts of subjects. I chuckle, remembering meeting a colleague at a meeting and asking after her son. She shook her head and responded, “He’s driving me crazy. He comes home with As and Fs.” Yup. I know how that works. When the kid is working on the research paper that allows him to work beyond the class or has the math teacher who is willing to provide mentorship, the kid sails. When the kid is handed a mass of busywork, he shuts down. (Yes, yes, I know that everyone will have to put up with less than challenging work when he hits the workforce but these are still developing kids we are discussing and when it’s the bulk of their experience with very little reward, it can be oppressive.) </p>
<p>I had a childhood friend who was literally failing 6th grade because he paid absolutely no attention to his schoolwork. It turned out he was working on his own at home, completely unbeknownst to his bewildered parents. His parents objected to his being held back a year and had him formally tested and the kid ended up going to college at 13. I don’t know if it’s a matter of disorganization or disengagement or a combination of the two, and of course it can be a different phenomenon in each kid. I have seen some of these kids thrive again once they reach college and beyond.</p>
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<p>This.</p>
<p>I was in the gifted programs at my elementary school (got a pulled out of class for a private IQ test in 4th grade), honors classes throughout middle school on into a private boarding school (one of the MAPL’s). I still ended up not ready for college. I was unprepared for the smack in the face of a top program and instead of buckling down, I just stopped caring.</p>
<p>I worry every day about how I’m going to teach my daughter to be self-disciplined and develop a healthy work-ethic.</p>
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<p>Pretty much describes me.</p>
<p>This is a very good article. Thanks for posting.</p>
<p>hmm. Interesting article. Thanks for posting.</p>