Baltimore to ban grades lower than 50%?

[fuelair]

You most certainly did not make it clear that you were only considering examples of courses where there were only two equally weighted assessment items. It is just too unusual.

OTOH it is not so unusual for a course to have a final exam that is worth up to 50% of the course total. Of course, if you are going to give that much weight to a final exam then you can't complain that it has a disproportionate influence on a student's final marks. The solution is to not give so much weight to just one assessment item.


Is the concept of "ordinal data" too complicated for you to grasp? If the "points" are not being added together then if makes no difference what numerical value you attach to each grade provided that A > B > C > D > F. All such scoring systems are equally valid and a fail is a fail is a fail.

Let me try this and wonder if you were teaching high school: in all of the systems I worked in and all that I have discussed with other non-local teachers, the grades, their values and (where the computer is god) etc.are weighted (tests, quizzes, homework, projects - being different weights with tests usually the heaviest weight) and those are required of all teachers of the subject(s) to follow.

The systems tend to have requirements also re: make-up work, attendance effects and related matters. While it may not be to our or your liking, them are be the rules if one likes to stay in the education game. College tends some differently, so, if you are teaching college these rules may well not apply, but in public school they very much do. If this is insufficient please let me know which points you take umbrage at or think we/I are/am making up to cause you distress. I do assure you that nothing I have posted is untrue in the systems I worked in more recently (now retired)

 

[fuelair]

Oh, the highest test weights in my last two systems (which covers app. 22 years) were required Semester Exams which counted 20% of the students semester grade in any course.

 

[Minoosh]

More harm is done to the average student by the policy of allowing bad students to continue their mission to cause as much disruption in every class room as possible than anything else.

Their lack of motivation might not be my fault, but it is my responsibility to try everything I can to motivate them. Setting the baseline at 50 percent is potentially more motivating because the student is in sight of a D. They do want to pass, most of them.

I'm wondering, what would you do with these children? Whose responsibility are they, if not the teacher's?

The difficulty of a test is (or should be) set such that a satisfactory student will easily pass it.

"Should" has nothing to do with it. Standardized test are specifically not graded on a curve.

I have had university lecturers who's policy was to make a test as difficult as possible so that they could sort out the brainy students. The pass mark on those tests necessarily had to be less than 50%.

Universities are a whole different story. Those students are adults. I'm talking about children, though. What would you do with them?

 

[psionl0]

Let me try this and wonder if you were teaching high school: .....

You are the second person to accuse me of making things up.

The last incarnation of high school education that I was involved in was "Outcomes Based Education". Scoring had been abolished entirely in favour of "leveling" (from 1 to 8) students on a variety of "outcomes". The problem was that the outcomes and the methods of leveling were so poorly described and incomprehensible that no two teachers could agree on what level a student was at. It was a complete farce! A lot of teachers quit in disgust at this bureaucratically imposed nonsense.

Prior to that we had a "Unit Curriculum". Each student was graded according to a weighted mean of the scores they achieved in the assessment tasks they were given in the unit. However, the scoring was not done at state level. Each school did its own individual assessments. (Tertiary entrance exams continued to be administered at the state level).

Since students had to pass a stage before continuing to the next stage, it was much more sensible. Students who were not capable or willing to do the standard units were put in special "Maths for living", "Science for living" etc units instead.

I do assure you that nothing I have posted is untrue in the systems I worked in more recently (now retired)

I believe you.

 

[psionl0]

Their lack of motivation might not be my fault, but it is my responsibility to try everything I can to motivate them. Setting the baseline at 50 percent is potentially more motivating because the student is in sight of a D. They do want to pass, most of them.

I'm wondering, what would you do with these children? Whose responsibility are they, if not the teacher's?

In one of the schools that I taught at, a student (fortunately not one of mine) was so disruptive that he managed to prevent the entire class from progressing for a whole year. After much bureaucratic wrangling, the principal finally managed to get approval to remove the student from the class room and assign him his own individual teachers. The rest of the class improved in leaps and bounds after the student was removed. This is a common story throughout the state.

Mainstreaming sounds fine in theory but in practice, it is a disaster.

 

[psionl0]

Yeah no. You decided they were ordinal. You also decided that ordinal data can never be aggregated (even though this is exactly what is done with GPA).

I didn't make up this stuff about ordinal data. This is standard mathematical teaching. A GPA may be a popular method of measuring student achievement but it doesn't make it mathematically valid. The only valid averages with ordinal data are median and mode.

Under a GPA calculation, it doesn't matter if a student "just" fails or scores an absolute zero. an F is always a zero and that zero forms part of the student's overall GPA. So, no matter what merits you see in granting a student 50% in a failed test, any defence of the GPA nullifies it.

 

[fuelair]

You are the second person to accuse me of making things up.

The last incarnation of high school education that I was involved in was "Outcomes Based Education". Scoring had been abolished entirely in favour of "leveling" (from 1 to 8) students on a variety of "outcomes". The problem was that the outcomes and the methods of leveling were so poorly described and incomprehensible that no two teachers could agree on what level a student was at. It was a complete farce! A lot of teachers quit in disgust at this bureaucratically imposed nonsense.

Prior to that we had a "Unit Curriculum". Each student was graded according to a weighted mean of the scores they achieved in the assessment tasks they were given in the unit. However, the scoring was not done at state level. Each school did its own individual assessments. (Tertiary entrance exams continued to be administered at the state level).











Since students had to pass a stage before continuing to the next stage, it was much more sensible. Students who were not capable or willing to do the standard units were put in special "Maths for living", "Science for living" etc units instead.


I believe you.

If you assume I do not believe you, you are incorrect. I do assume you were using your own experience to draw from/respond with and, given mine and many others, I assumed it was not in public high schools since it does not match what I have read, heard in national and semi-local meetings and experienced personally. Given my experiences and the reports of others I asked if you were teaching college rather than public high school as your experiences as presented do not match those of my experience. Thus, the questioning.
I have heard of Outcome based education programs but we did not use anything like you have described during the short time it passed through here and fairly quickly disappeared. Since what we did of that passed quickly I assume we were late to that game or were already headed to the next perfect
(heh, heh, heh) way that would make all students great learners!!!!! But somehow never did.

A quick ask of my wife says it went through two cycles sometime in the last 20-30 years. Since she does not remember details (and she is great on these which is why our AP did not like her/us as we - especially she- remember the different recycling with new names and companies promoting them, and, more importantly, why and how they did not work as promised) the program did not last long enough here to make much of an impression.

 

[fuelair]

I didn't make up this stuff about ordinal data. This is standard mathematical teaching. A GPA may be a popular method of measuring student achievement but it doesn't make it mathematically valid. The only valid averages with ordinal data are median and mode.

Under a GPA calculation, it doesn't matter if a student "just" fails or scores an absolute zero. an F is always a zero and that zero forms part of the student's overall GPA. So, no matter what merits you see in granting a student 50% in a failed test, any defence of the GPA nullifies it.

And, again, most of us do not get to choose our own grading system - it and any later adjustments are presented to us and we are required to grade in that way, average by the computer and otherwise try to teach all the students under those rules and procedures and get them through the required material.

 

[Manopolus]

In my experience as a student in the Pacific Northwest, F has always been 60-67%.

Really? Everywhere I went to school (Kansas), that would be a "D." F was anything below 60. Basically, ten percentage points per letter grade, no variation. Of course, I can't speak for recent history, because it's been a while. I graduated HS in 1990, to be specific, and I have no kids to help keep me current. I've heard of systems that did differently, but I always thought they were rare.

 

[psionl0]

And, again, most of us do not get to choose our own grading system - it and any later adjustments are presented to us and we are required to grade in that way, average by the computer and otherwise try to teach all the students under those rules and procedures and get them through the required material.

You're not trying to tell me that water is wet are you? Education has always been subject to the whims of politicians and bureaucrats and they are constantly on the lookout for some new "innovation" that they can use to make a name for themselves.

In one mutation, it was decided that "right" and "wrong" were dirty words and scoring was outlawed. Instead, teachers were forced to use a complicated and time consuming rating system based on the letters "N", "S", "G" and "V". I won't go into the nuts and bolts of this system here but suffice to say, what ended up on a student's report card was a work of pure fiction.

 

[Minoosh]

In one of the schools that I taught at, a student (fortunately not one of mine) was so disruptive ...

Your anecdote leaves me with at least 4 questions, all of which are off-topic.

Mainstreaming sounds fine in theory but in practice, it is a disaster.

Those are our only choices? "Fine" and "disaster"?

Since you speak of mainstreaming I take it the kid you were writing about was a special-ed student. But I wasn't talking about disruptive students; I was talking about unmotivated students. Conflating the two doesn't really help. Do I want the quiet kid who shows up but doesn't turn anything in for the first half of the semester to have a fighting chance at a D? Yeah, I do. That's why I don't dismiss the 50 percent policy. Fifty percent might be too high, though. I don't want to make things too convenient.

This would be a good topic for a math or English lesson.

 

[psionl0]

Do I want the quiet kid who shows up but doesn't turn anything in for the first half of the semester to have a fighting chance at a D? Yeah, I do.

Who are you really rewarding? The kid who did nothing for half a semester or the teacher who allowed the kid to do nothing for half a semester?

 

[mijopaalmc]

Who are you really rewarding? The kid who did nothing for half a semester or the teacher who allowed the kid to do nothing for half a semester?

Why are you so focused on the idea that we are rewarding student who do no work?

Those students still receive a failing grade on the assignment, and will receive failing grades in the course if they do no work consistently.

 

[psionl0]

Why are you so focused on the idea that we are rewarding student who do no work?

You can't have an honest discussion if you have to suppress the truth.

 

[fuelair]

Who are you really rewarding? The kid who did nothing for half a semester or the teacher who allowed the kid to do nothing for half a semester?

You seem not to have met certain hard core ones of these and I and others have. Done everything up to and including having parental units, Many were annoyed at being called re: the problem, many tried to help. Most failed. And, then, I was one of those kids. If it wasn't interesting to me, I tended to not do it or do as little as possible of it . As I have noted priorly, one year I sneak read in class (5th grade iirc.) while boring stuff was going on, all of World Book encyclopedia plus assorted.

 

[mijopaalmc]

You can't have an honest discussion if you have to suppress the truth.

Is it your honest assessment of the situation that the implementation of a floor of 50% grated course materials benefits students who do little work over all other categories of possible students?

 

[Manopolus]

Never mind. I'm not sure I understood something right with the post formerly here.

 

[mijopaalmc]

First prove that it does harm to "other categories of students." I'm not talking about what you think anybody deserves. Demonstrate actual harm. It's generally said that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, but sometimes providing for the needs of the few doesn't even affect the satisfaction of the needs of the many.

Define harm.

Within the context of the discussion of grades, lowering a grade is doing harm to the student and raising a grade is doing a benefit to the student. There may be no other effects on the student then the effect that raising or lowering a grade, but I am giving you the scope of the discussion.

 

[Manopolus]

Define harm.

Within the context of the discussion of grades, lowering a grade is doing harm to the student and raising a grade is doing a benefit to the student. There may be no other effects on the student then the effect that raising or lowering a grade, but I am giving you the scope of the discussion.

Ah, okay... you're actually here.

I deleted because I wasn't sure my quote of you was meant the way I interpreted it. I have been skimming and lacked context. I think that's the key issue in this, anyway. If the system is fully adaptable to for students that it does not directly benefit, that's different than saying that it harms them.

 

[psionl0]

You seem not to have met certain hard core ones of these and I and others have. Done everything up to and including having parental units, Many were annoyed at being called re: the problem, many tried to help. Most failed. And, then, I was one of those kids. If it wasn't interesting to me, I tended to not do it or do as little as possible of it . As I have noted priorly, one year I sneak read in class (5th grade iirc.) while boring stuff was going on, all of World Book encyclopedia plus assorted.

If you re-read that exchange again you will find that I was responding to Minoosh's argument about the "quiet" kid - not the disruptive one.