“Going back to the first page, @roycroft, you entirely missed the point of the teacher giving all A’s. HIs goal was to get kids to forget about grades and focus on learning.”
Ok but roycroftmom makes a good point, why not just give everyone Cs? If they were motivated solely by their love of learning, surely a C would have been fine. But maybe the teacher knew giving Cs would demotivate the class, or at least most of them, because guess what, they cared about grades. Or make it pass/fail and say everyone passes.
I always have a number of students whose only goal is to check off a box on the requirements form. If they were told they automatically had an A, they would sing for joy and never be seen in the course again. Now, arguably they don’t actually learn anything as it is, but at least going through the formality makes it appear as though we are trying to do what we say we are.
I guess it would save the students a lot of money if they could just sign up for 20 courses at a time and finish checking all those boxes in 2 semesters!
“But we’re talking about an academic process - perhaps your accountant was not in Accounting I at the time of your meeting nor your Architect in Houses 101?”
And perhaps my accountant didn’t learn in Accounting 101 (or anywhere else in college) how to extrapolate from the syllabus on tax breaks to address my specific situation, and the architect didn’t learn in Houses 101 how long and thick (and costly) a steel beam will need to be in a house 1 mile from the San Andreas fault in order to build a large open plan living area.
My point was that in the real world, you don’t just recite the syllabus or plug and chug the numbers, you apply it to other unfamiliar situations under time pressure, often using tricks and short cuts. That skill is an important life lesson, and its one that students ought to possess and be taught to improve in college. Indeed its the entire basis of any Oxbridge interview (and their subsequent exams).
You’ve lost me. Grade thresholds are completely arbitrary. You can peg them at whatever you want, but I don’t see the point in setting an exam that is so difficult that the class median is 40% and then call that an A. In fact forget letter grades completely. Just assign a numeric grade commensurate with the knowledge and it’s application that the student demonstrates relative to the course material. Assignments, tests, and exams should be reflective of the intended learning outcomes for the course. If a student demonstrates high proficiency relative to the course expectations then they should get a grade or mark that reflects that fact. The key here is that the course expectations have to be reasonable. It does not require dumbing down the curriculum or giving points for attendance or completed homework.
Colleges these days encourage collaboration on homework, so homework alone won’t be able to tell professors the strength and weakness of their students. Only tests and exams can, and only if at least some of the problems on these tests and exams are constructed with increasing degrees of difficulty, with the most difficult problems perhaps only a few can solve.
This varies tremendously based on your field of work and position. I work in engineering. There are many issues that need to be understood quickly. For example, maybe a team member asks your assistance and they are hoping for you to solve/assist with their problem immediately, rather than taking days. Maybe people want to discuss a high priority issue in a meeting later that day. Maybe a customer is actively testing the product and a slow support/resolution would cost business. Maybe the product went offline with thousands of end users impacted, and you are remotely trying to find a solution, with each minute of downtime without a solution is costly. There are many situations were persons request regular updates about progress towards a solution each x minutes or hours, rather than days or weeks. In the vast majority of situations, time to complete work is important, even when days or weeks is expected.
That said, in my experience, engineering work has little resemblance to college tests. College tests are generally designed to have a straightforward solution that is largely independent from previous work, and independent from other students. Real life problems are rarely designed to have a straightforward solution. There may very well be no good solution at all. Real life problems are usually heavily dependent on past work and usually involve interaction with a variety of team members. It’s more like a huge multi-year group project than a college exam. As such, it’s relatively common for a student who does well on engineering tests to not do as well in a work environment, as is for students who do not do as well on tests to perform well in a work environment. This relates to why engineering (and most other field) employers tend to emphasize relevant experience in a work environment and skill sets, rather than college GPA.
I disagree with the part on weeks. In most situations, I would want to respond to an e-mail from a customer within a few business days. If I can’t provide a complete answer, within a few days, it’s still expected I provide the 70% or 80% solution, rather than telling the customer to wait weeks to have their issue addressed.
@gwnorth What you said. My S just finished a class with a 53% and an A. What’s the point of this? He didn’t get half of the material presented, but most of the class understood even less? Shouldn’t the professor calibrate the coursework a little better? Seems really stupid to me, but it’s very common – all three of my kids took classes like this, especially my older S who was EE and applied math.
The harder problems are there not to measure whether the students have learned the basic materials, but to see if the students can creatively use the knowledge learned to solve never-before-encountered, more challenging problems. Don’t we want our kids to be challenged to think more creatively, and to be pushed beyond their comfort zone?
On these forums, it can seem like calculating a basic unweighted high school GPA is like a “never-before-encountered, more challenging problem”, based on the number of posts by students who have no idea what it is because their high school does not calculate GPA or only calculated a weighted version.
It’s wrong to look it as “he didn’t get half of the material”. That’s totally not how it works. It’s not like they asked him 100 questions covering all of the material and he only got 53 of them right and the others were wrong. If 53% was an A, then he didn’t do all that badly. He understood the basics of the material, but didn’t necessarily extend the application of it to more complex problems. Or he may have had partial solutions to problems without getting through all the steps. That doesn’t mean that he can’t or won’t in the future. Likely he will with more experience.
So much discussion. Is anyone else bothered by the thread title premise that everyone should be able to get an A? My understanding is that an A means above and beyond the masses. Too many A’s and it becomes a useless measure. btw- when honors classes have high percentages of A’s that is likely because students self select- the lower tier students choose a different version.
It can be better to remove the ceiling and allow the very few to show work of their ability rather than make a test where it is expected the majority of questions can be answered correctly/completely addressed. How many students never realize how much there is to be known because they are never challenged to go beyond the basics?
I agree with hard work does not equal mastery or deserving of a good grade. I suspect grading quizzes and homework is a device to show students what they still need to learn.
How can there be excellence when the majority has it? Doesn’t that just redefine average? If everyone can get an A it becomes a meaningless marker.
I don’t think everyone should get an A in every class. But say you are teaching Calc 1 and you are a great teacher. The test is on Calc 1 material. You don’t put Calc 2 level questions on it which advantages kids who are retaking it even though they took Calc BC in high school for the easy A. Why shouldn’t everyone get an A if they all get the question right.
Isn’t it more important that kids learn the material we want them to learn in a course, than to sort them?
My son had a second grade teacher who got every kid in the class reading above grade level by the end of the year. He was the only teacher in the school to do that. He was amazing. I ran the Reading is Fundamental program at the school and every single kid in his class was excited to pick up a book.
There’s a time and place for that - maybe not during their exams at a level where they are still mastering (or trying to master) the basics. When your child was learning to walk, did you stand them on a 4-inch balance beam 3 feet above the floor and insist that they do all their walking there? Because how would they ever realize how much more difficult walking opportunities there are?
“Why shouldn’t everyone get an A if they all get the question right.”
Not sure how to say this gently, but if you teach a college calculus class and everyone gets an A, you won’t be teaching much longer. You can try and convince the dept head that your class is full of Eulers, Gauss’s, Riemanns, Hilberts et al, but they won’t buy it. Instead, they’ll wonder why everyone has signed up for your class and avoided the professor who gives the hard tests.
Calculus is a serious class with a lot of subtle concepts, not meant for easy As.
Unfortunately, as with many journalism articles the title is not reflective of the article. If you read it, that is not actually it’s premise. The premise is that students should be judged based on their mastery of the material and not relative to their peers. That competition in academics should not be the goal but rather content mastery.
Exactly. The point isn’t that everybody SHOULD get As, it is that everybody should BE ABLE to get As. So, if my requirements for an A in a class is to go beyond the material that I taught, and demonstrate excellence is use of the the concepts, that means that everybody who does so will get an A. In graduate level classes I have had that happen. I taught a graduate level, project-based course, and I can say, confidently, that every single one of those projects was amazing. Every single one taught me something I did not know, the research into the background went well beyond anything I would have thought to ask (including sitting in town-hall meetings, meeting with local activists, meeting with city officials, etc), beautifully designed work, extremely well written, etc. The easiest grading I have ever done, since every projects was a joy to read.
Should I have “curved” them" Should I have only given only 1/4 of them As, because giving an entire class As would “cheapen” As?
Grade distributions should be the result of a distribution of levels of mastery.
Grading mostly in comparison to peers reminds me of the old joke, in which two friends, walking through the woods, see a bear, one quickly changes to sneakers, and his friends asks him why he;s doing that, since he’ll never outrun the bear. his friends responds “I don’t need to outrun the bear, I need to outrun you”.
