Let me step up on my old soap box for just a second. On their Self-Reflection papers, written at the end of the semester, many of my College English students wrote something like, "This class taught me that I am not as good a writer as I thought I was." Mr. Chaffee says, good! That is the point! It's "College" English, after all, not "High-Level-High-School" English. However, some also griped about their grades. Mr. Chaffee says, that is why we should get rid of grades! The goal of education should be learning, not scoring and ranking. I shall now step off the soap box (thud) and return to your regularly scheduled student sentences. As always, these are from student work and my comments are in ( ).
- They forget to realize the meaning of life. (I hate when I forget that.)
- One reason of his unhappy bits...
- Although the title, "Great," is given to Gatsby by gossip and rumors, although there is.
- Tom and Daisy... show their true colors on how corrupt and carless they are. (No, no, I think they had a car.)
- The sister is at fear with her life.
- Sherlock is brought a case from a woman whose sister had pasted two years before.
- Father Brown is quite a blended man.
- Myrtle lives in a world full of allusions.
- Scott F. Fitzgerald (Syntax you here error have.)
- Daisy knows about the affair that Tom is doing. (Does she know about the Myrtle that Tom is having?)
- The filthy rich use cars as... a symbol of their garnish success.
- ... his wealth came from a long line of pharmaceuticals. (He must have worked for Big Pharma.)
- Ultimately in the end... (You know that's redundant, right?)
- Wilson shot Gatsby before going suicide. (Word. He went all suicide and what not.)
- Slavery was huge in this time period. (As opposed to that time period when it was wee?)
- One example is the position paper and the persuasive paper. (So, two examples?)
- Coarse Reflection Paper (I kept waiting for a dirty joke or ribald story, but no, she just reflected on the course.)
- Selfish is the opposite meaning of selfish. (And dark is the opposite of dark, up is the opposite of up, and true is the opposite of true. Mind blown?)
Here's to the start of a new semester. Until next time...
J
"The goal of education should be learning, not scoring and ranking."
ReplyDeleteThe problem is without scoring and ranking there is no means to compare students and professors. Grades are a latent variable, trying to measure the intangible which is how much knowledge a student has. Grades might not be the best metric to ascertain this but they are the metric that has been chosen. Grades also serve as a motivator for students. Although a lot of times this motivation is to get a good grade and not to learn and grow, I would argue that there is still a positive correlation between trying to get a better grade and growing in your understanding. There is an out, however, to the grading scheme, and that is found in Pass/Fail. This puts less stress on some of the middle of the pack students on "getting a good grade" and allows them to focus more on their personal growth. However, this also can lead to some students trying to just skate by and get that passing mark to continue on. I would say that while this is true, in a high school setting this is their own decision, if they choose to build a house of cards so be it. Certainly you can warn them and try to motivate them, but if a student does not want to learn and does not care it is going to be an uphill battle.
If there were no grades though, how would we determine if a student should continue on, or repeat a course? We could certainly try and rely on the professor to ascertain this on an individual basis, but it opens up the door for bias, litigation, and more mistakes. Grades provide a firm and tangible report, a student got such and such scores and that places them here on the grading scale, which is not good enough to continue on. I am not sure how a system without grading would work. Grades seem to be a necessary evil.
Mr. Kohn makes a good case here: http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-grades/
ReplyDeleteWhy do we need to compare? Why the deep need to rank and rate and make sure someone is number one and someone else number 1,000? Grades do try to measure the intangible, which is why they are irrational. From Neil Postman's book Technopoly: "In point of fact, the first instance of grading students' papers occurred at Cambridge University in 1792 at the suggestion of a tutor named William Farish... his idea that a quantitative value should be assigned to human thoughts was a major step toward constructing a mathematical concept of reality. If a number can be given to the quality of a thought, then a number can be given to the qualities of mercy, love, hate, beauty, creativity, intelligence, even sanity itself... To say that... this man's esay on the rise of capitalism is an A- and that man's is a C+ would have sounded like gibberish to Galileo or Shakespeare or Thomas Jefferson. If it makes sense to us, that is because our minds have been conditioned by the technology of numbers so that we see the world differently than they did." And yet schooling goes back thousands of years. Cambridge was founded in 1209; I doubt that they never evaluated their students until 1792. There was certainly a set of criteria in place in schools and universities whereby teachers determined if a student should move on or repeat a course, but in the past the judgement of the teacher carried much weight; today we cannot possibly rely on the judgement of the teacher; that would be unscientific and too, perhaps, human. Litigation may indeed be the lynchpin, but the idea that the teacher is more biased than the grading system I don't buy. Anyway, I am not saying we should not evaluate students, but that grades are not a very logical way to do it. What they are is easy and "efficient," and they offer us the illusion that we know a great deal about a student by looking at one number or set of numbers.
If grades are "the metric that has been chosen," as you say, I would point out that this is passive voice and begs the question, chosen by whom? And Why?
I would refer to Daniel Pink's book about motivation, and suggest that extrinsic motivation, which is what grades are, is far less powerful than intrinsic motivation. How many students already just "skate by" within the grading system? Many, and some of the best students I have had skated by because they didn't need to make much effort to get good grades. There will always be students who do not put in much effort, no matter what evaluation system you put in place. There is no perfect system, but I think grading a system fraught with pitfalls and full of holes. And while I agree that in high school students often fail of their own volition, when they do fail I can tell you as a teacher that too often it is made out to be "the teacher's fault."
The tangibility of grades is an illusion, as is the idea that grades are "objective." A system without grading would rely on the teachers, in concert, not individually, discussing a student's work, its strengths and weaknesses, and making a determination. But there are too many students for this to work today. In any event, grades may be a necessary evil, but they are more evil than necessary, and the idea that they measure something like intelligence, which cannot be measured, is an illusion.