The End of Grading (wired.com) 231
How the irrational mathematics of measuring, ranking, and rating distort the value of stuff, work, people -- everything. From a report: More irrational even than pi, assessing people amounts to quantifying a relationship between unknown, usually unknowable things. Every measurement, the mathematician Paul Lockhart reminds us in his book Measurement, is a comparison: "We are comparing the thing we are measuring to the thing we are measuring it with." What thing do we use to measure undergraduates? What aspects can be compared? Quality or quantity? Originality or effort? Participation or progress? Apples and oranges at best. Closer to bananas and elephants. Even quantitative tests mark, at most, a comparison between what the test-maker thought the student should know and the effectiveness of instruction. Grades become the permanent records of these passing encounters.
And how do we grade the grader? When a physicist friend found out that a first-year Harvard student he knew -- a math star in high school -- got an F in physics, he said: "Harvard should be ashamed of itself." A Harvard grad himself, he believed that schools fail students far more often than students fail schools. Some STEM profs, I'm told, tell the class at the outset that half of them will fail. I give that teacher an F. I'm not alone in my discomfort with the irrational business of ranking, rating, and grading. The deans of Yale's and Harvard's law schools recently removed themselves from the rankings of US News & World Report, followed by Harvard Medical School and scores of others. "Rankings cannot meaningfully reflect ... educational excellence," Harvard dean George O. Daley explained. Rankings lead schools to falsify data and make policies designed to raise rankings rather than "nobler objectives." The very thing that's been eating education is now devouring everything else. My doctor recently urged me to get an expensive diagnostic test because it "makes our numbers look good." Her nurse asked me to rank my pain on a totem pole of emojis. Then after the visit, to rate my experience. The numbers are all irrational. And rather like the never-ending digits of pi, there seems to be no end to them.
And how do we grade the grader? When a physicist friend found out that a first-year Harvard student he knew -- a math star in high school -- got an F in physics, he said: "Harvard should be ashamed of itself." A Harvard grad himself, he believed that schools fail students far more often than students fail schools. Some STEM profs, I'm told, tell the class at the outset that half of them will fail. I give that teacher an F. I'm not alone in my discomfort with the irrational business of ranking, rating, and grading. The deans of Yale's and Harvard's law schools recently removed themselves from the rankings of US News & World Report, followed by Harvard Medical School and scores of others. "Rankings cannot meaningfully reflect ... educational excellence," Harvard dean George O. Daley explained. Rankings lead schools to falsify data and make policies designed to raise rankings rather than "nobler objectives." The very thing that's been eating education is now devouring everything else. My doctor recently urged me to get an expensive diagnostic test because it "makes our numbers look good." Her nurse asked me to rank my pain on a totem pole of emojis. Then after the visit, to rate my experience. The numbers are all irrational. And rather like the never-ending digits of pi, there seems to be no end to them.
If it's all the same to you... (Score:4, Insightful)
...I'd rather the doctor that's working on me have gotten straight A's, or the engineer that designed the airplane I'm riding in was a 4.0 student.
Grades may be "irrational", but they remain the best way to quantify the quality of the student. And no; they should not be reflective of "effort".
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I have to wonder, do you think doctors in Europe are less qualified? I mean, since I don't have to sell a kidney to finance the operation on the other one...
Re:If it's all the same to you... (Score:4, Funny)
have to wonder, do you think doctors in Europe are less qualified? I mean, since I don't have to sell a kidney to finance the operation on the other one...
Actually we don't have doctors in Europe. Sick people are taken behind the hospital and shot. Well not shot because we don't have guns either.
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Please report to room 101 immediately. You are not supposed to impart that information with The Proles.
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Why do you wonder that, when it's obviously true...
Have any evidence for this obvious bullshit?
No? Just idle speculation based on your complete and total ignorance of the subject? That's what I thought.
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I don't know about Europe but in New Zealand the same doctors work in both private and public health.
What you get in private is:
1. You get usually get seen sooner.
2. You will get treated for optional surgeries.
3. You get to stay in a fancy private room with with better meals.
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Could I point to a country and whether the outcome of medical conditions is superior to the US? The reason is that if I only treat the people who can afford insurance, the outcome is usually a far better one than when treating people who can't afford to not work in hazardous conditions and/or live in such circumstances.
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It's easier to just point to all the rich Europeans who haul ass to the US for the highest quality treatment in the world when they get sick with something serious. You only ever hear of Americans going to other countries like Mexico to get the cheapest care possible regardless of quality.
That could easily be just marketing. Rich people aren't smarter and buy a lot of useless expensive junk. For example https://www.thecableco.com/cab... [thecableco.com] $2000 for a 3M HDMI cable, its digital so there is no loss of quality. But that is what marketing can do.
Re:If it's all the same to you... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well just because a doctor got 4.0 in school doesn't mean he is actually better at being a doctor than the doctor that got 3.5, it just means he was better at playing the game of medical school.
In fact a common scenario amongst intelligent people is that they end up with less than perfect grades because they are more willing to challenge themselves with more difficult coursework whereas those obsessed with playing the game will pad their coursework with easier classes.
And no one is suggesting a world where people are held to no standards at all, rather that the current grading model is flawed and results in poor evaluations of actual skill/knowledge.
Re:If it's all the same to you... (Score:4, Informative)
That's why doctors (at least in the US) must undergo several years of practical residency to demonstrate the skills they learned from the book before they're given a license to practice.
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But to me those years and how well they did there are more important than the grades the attained from exams.
Re:If it's all the same to you... (Score:5, Interesting)
No need to mod down. You've expressed your opinion. Allow me to express mine, with a little background.
I was not always the greatest student. I did not get straight A's. I did not consider myself the brightest student in my undergraduate class. The guy that was smartest went to Princeton for grad school, while I flunked out of my first grad school program. The guy that was right behind him was a double-major in our STEM field and music, went to Berkeley. Both those guys are out of the field and did not finish grad school.
I went to a second grad school and started all over again. I had to take one particular grad school class a total of 3 times (scoring less than 10% on a crucial midterm will do that). I was a solid B, B+ student overall in undergrad and grad school, and no one was coming to me for help on our assignments. I was, however, an excellent teacher.
After school, I went to work at a national lab, and after close to a decade left to work at a research non-profit. I have a solid international reputation in my own field, with numerous publications, leadership roles, even a patent that turned into a commercial product. I have won prestigious awards throughout my career. I do a good job, and people rely on my knowledge and expertise to further our mutual goals.
At no point does anyone ever ask me about my grades. No one cares. It has no relevance to my performance today as an actual professional working in my field. Don't overweight grades.
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Right, but what made you struggle so hard to achieve your goals?
Grades. You didn't have the grades necessary to pass. Without grades, or some comparison mechanism to measure competency, can you honestly say you'd be as accomplished today as you are?
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Are grades really the only thing motivating people to be good at stuff? Going back to the doctor, I'd rather they be motivated to help people, rather than to get a perfect score. Your stats look better if you say that cancer is untreatable, than if you try and fail to help the patient recover. Or maybe it's the other way around, your numbers are better if you get them to spend all their money on things with an extremely low probability of working.
Numbers are rarely good motivators.
Didn't ask or didn't look? (Score:2, Insightful)
After school, I went to work at a national lab...At no point does anyone ever ask me about my grades.
There is no way that a lab would hire you out of school without at least considering your grades.
Even if your grades were middling they fact you didn't fail out of a tough degree means something. And the fact you didn't fail relies on... grades.
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So, again, you know absolutely nothing about the subject. Yet, here you are, pretending to be an expert.
but I will re-iterate
Repeating your bullshit doesn't make it any more true. Now let me repeat something: You are not an expert on anything. Your "opinions" are worthless.
Either the oriignal poster is lying OR he did send a transcript
There is a third, far more likely, option: You don't know anything about the subject and you're taking out of your ass.
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Just because you're the exception doesn't make it the statistical average.
All you're doing is make it so people who aren't good at their job can stand side by stand to those who excel at it easier. Are you going to buy the car that randomly bursts into flames 90% of the time, because sometimes it doesn't, one of them is the exception and doesn't burst into flames?
No, no you're not.
You're right, some people are exceptions, not everyone, Hell, most people believe they're the exception when they're not, but ma
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...I'd rather the doctor that's working on me have gotten straight A's, or the engineer that designed the airplane I'm riding in was a 4.0 student.
What do you call a Doctor who graduated at the bottom of their class?
Doctor.
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I've known a few straight A's, the problem is that some of them couldn't translate those A's into something practical or a usable job-skill.
Most of the grades doled out today is entirely based on remembering stuff, not the ability to use that knowledge in the real world. I guess the exception is vocational schools.
As you say, "effort" alone isn't a good metric for grading. To be blunt here, someone could be dumber than a stone and still put up a herculean effort in school.
Effort does Matter for Grades (Score:5, Insightful)
And no; they should not be reflective of "effort".
Grades are inevitably a partial reflection of effort. However, all that effort does is ensure that you get the best grade that your ability allows. The article above completely seems to ignore that fact. The reason that a "maths star in high school" got an F in physics is most likely to be a complete lack of effort on the student's part - probably because school standards today are so low that they could breeze through school with little to no effort and are then suddenly brought up short by a university course that is much harder and does require them to work that they are not used to doing.
Learning is a collaborative enterprise it requires effort from both the instructor and the student. To say that "Even quantitative tests mark, at most, a comparison between what the test-maker thought the student should know and the effectiveness of instruction." is only half the story: they are also a measure of the effort the student put into learning the material and the ability of the student to understand it...and that's why exams, as flawed as they may be, are still the best and most useful way we have to assess learning.
Re: Effort does Matter for Grades (Score:3)
Each stage of education results in new responsibility, more heavy lifting to the student. In college it is self directed behavior. You no longer have teachers who are going to be fired if you do not want to learn.
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likely to be a complete lack of effort on the student's part - probably because school standards today are so low that they could breeze through school with little to no effort and are then suddenly brought up short by a university course that is much harder and does require them to work that they are not used to doing.
Aren't you a lecturer of some sort?
I arrived like that and ran into similar problems. I had no idea entering uni how to study hard for things that didn't click easily for me or that I didn't
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You remind me of a friend of a friend of mine. Back when he was at CalTech, he was famous at the school for getting an A in any course related to his major (Math) and a D in any course that wasn't. Why? Because if he didn't put in at least enough effort for a D, he'd fail it and have to take it again, but if he got better than a D he'd have put more work into it than it needed. He ended up with his PhD, and is now a r
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At the minimum, it meant the student knew how to play the game and jump through the hoops without missing a beat, so hopefully there is some correlation between that and competency at the job.
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Exactly. As sad as it sounds, not everyone is intended to be good at everything. It's time we stopped this PC madness. Quality matters.
Re:If it's all the same to you... (Score:5, Insightful)
A 4.0 gpa means that the person focused on the numbers to the exclusion of all else.
I would select the surgeon that got a 3.7-3.9 GPA. That's the person who has the ABILITY to make it to a 4.0, but accurately judged that the diminishing returns to get from 3.8 to 4.0 would literally double their time investment, so they sat happy with a 3.8 and used the rest of the time to be a person, de-stress, develop a good network of colleagues, and just generally improve across the board. If anyone is gonna dig around inside my organs, that's the person I would choose.
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The problem is, grades are a proxy measure. You can't measure what you really intend to measure - competence.
From "Surelly You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" where he recounts teaching Physics in Brazil - https://edisciplinas [edisciplinas.usp.br]
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...I'd rather the doctor that's working on me have gotten straight A's,.
You can pretty much take that for granted, and yet there are still bad doctors. Really, really terrible ones. I don't doubt that grading weeds out some people who would be bad doctors, but clearly it doesn't weed out all of them. Given how bad some doctors are, it's pretty certain that some B+ students would have made better doctors had their GPA not quite made the medical school cutoff.
Grades may be "irrational", but they remain the best way to quantify the quality of the student.
Sure. And messengers on horseback used to be the best way of sending a message. Just because grades are the best thing
Re:If it's all the same to you... (Score:4, Insightful)
You're not wrong. Not by a long shot.
My dad went to MIT in the 1950's, one of only a small number (3?) from his state who were accepted. His first mith class covered his entire knowledge of mathematics in the first 20 minutes and he ended up failing that class. He did retake and pass that class, and all of the others that were required to graduate.
Malcolm Gladwell has made similar observations, where someone who's in the top 1 percent of their high-school class might be at the bottom of their class at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, etc. This doesn't mean that they are stupid or dumb, but only that they're outclassed by their classmates.
This person isn't saying anything new, he's just complaining because he thinks he's a failure, without considering the circumstances.
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I'd rather the doctor that's working on me have gotten straight A's, or the engineer that designed the airplane I'm riding in was a 4.0 student.
meh. Given the average quality of exams, I'll pass on that. I know brilliant people who don't examine well. I'd rather have a plane designed by one of those who got a 2:2 in engineering than one who is great with the mathematical puzzles in engineering exams but lacks the intuition to see when someone messed up the simulation and the results are bogus.
I say this as
Evaluating education itself? (Score:2)
Rather a feeble first post. But insightful? Agreement with opinion mods. But the story is still fresh enough to justify a bit of writing for a completely different perspective:
The purpose of education should be to help each student learn as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. What happens after that is not really the school's business.
Even though LOTS of giant companies want to convert schools into training machines so they can just pluck the cheapest employees from the latest harvest. The path to maximu
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Have you ever checked a report card before getting on a plane? Or before going to a doctor?
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What if your doctor ignored your symptoms? Had a terrible bedside manner? What if they didn't care about whether or not you were living a good life, but merely whether or not you were alive?
I've seen doctors like this throughout my life. It turns out practicing medicine needs to be at least as much about the patient as the doctor. My partner had to go to several different doctors to get her hypothyroidism diagnosed. The endocrinologist she saw basically accused her of lying (despite not doing the appropriat
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Grades may be "irrational", but they remain the best way to quantify the quality of the student
Depends on your quantification methods. Yes, "effort" isn't an effective means, but neither is the infamous "multiple guess"*, i.e. survey, method which the US tends to use exclusively. Due to it's minimal cost required to generate those grades. Cheap and fast is the motto of the US, and when it comes to their education system, that motto doesn't change. They are more concerned with the amount of time and money spent than they are with the results of spending it. No amount of "A"s or extra "+" marks can ma
Re:If it's all the same to you... (Score:5, Insightful)
When it comes to my surgery, yes, it is all about me. When I travel, it is all about me.
But, since you get what you measure, I would rather my surgeon have excellent results in residency, and be able to gain fellowship in the relevant societies and groups that both judge and enable continuing development in their field. And I would expect the engineers that designed the airplanes I've traveled in were well trained, gained good and useful experience, and exercise the necessary skills to do so.
Why would I support anything to my detriment? That would be irrational. And yes, are are not rational beings,
Re: If it's all the same to you... (Score:2)
So, if I can't afford it, I don't deserve that best I can get? BTW, it's the 737MAX. The engineers weren't consulted, the well-trained number-crunchers and managers did what they were trained to do. No? Look into ethics training in MBA programs. Then recognize how what ethics training they get is so quickly discarded. And not measured as much as profit. You get what you measure.
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Effort is an indirect cause of success. Knowing what one is doing is a much more direct cause. It's more helpful to measure and judge based on more direct causes than in indirect causes.
I wouldn't. I want a plane that *actually* flies (Score:5, Insightful)
TFS says:
> Originality or effort? Participation or progress? Apples and oranges at best.
You said:
> I want effort factored in to my doctors and engineers
I don't. I want RESULTS, period.
My 8 year old daughter could try really, really, really hard to design an airplane. Lots of effort. I ain't trying to fly in it. I'll stick with engineers who design planes that actually fly safely. Engineers who get right results.
Donald Trump could put in lots and lots of effort trying to guess what surgery I need, and try really hard to do the surgery correctly. Not for me. I'll go to a doctor who actually gets the diagnosis correct, and performs the surgery correctly.
I'll *applaud* effort. I'll buy results.
Not just with critical things like airplanes and surgeries of course. I buy a phone that actually works. I don't *care* how hard someone *tried* to design a phone. I'm not spending $150 on a phone that doesn't boot. I want results. I'll buy the phone that works well, from the folks who actually got good results. I don't care if it was easy for them or hard for them. I care about the results they deliver- does the phone boot or not? I don't buy a phone that doesn't boot.
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Sure, but do you care that the first prototype sucked? Do you need the engineers to do it on the first try, or is it okay if they get it wrong and iterate?
Exams are basically about studying everything up front and getting it right on the first try. But that's not how anything works. I don't release my software until it's some approximation of done, but I never get it right on the first try and I never assume it'll be right on the first try.
And so much of doing good work isn't about exams, it's about TRAININ
I prefer to not die, not even the first time (Score:3)
> Exams are basically about studying everything up front and getting it right on the first try. But that's not how anything works.
I prefer my doctor get the surgery right the FIRST time they operate on me.
I don't know or care how many flash cards they went over or how many times they rehearsed in the MIST-VR. I do care that they get it right in the final exam (me).
> Exams are basically about studying everything up front and getting it right on the first try.
Dude you're gonna freak when you find out wh
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I'll *applaud* effort. I'll buy results.
The problem is in many cases you cannot buy results. You can only buy the potential for results. This is one reason hiring can be so difficult. Just looking at past results shows what they have done, but not what they are capable of doing. If often doesn't even show what they have done, just what they have been fortunate enough to be involved in.
Any rating system which is meant to show what someone's potential is (like grades) should factor in the effort they have shown on previously difficult tasks. It is
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https://news.clearancejobs.com... [clearancejobs.com]
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Also exam taking is also a skill that some people have that is not useful in real life. I have seen a lot of people do well in exams and forget everything after a few weeks. I would like a doctor that may not necessarily not the reason for my illness from memory but has the skill and work ethic that they investigate and find out.
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Effort should be graded if it can be translated into achievement, if you can't then too bad. There is another argument to how exactly you grade achievement.
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Show us on this doll where the minority hurt you...
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these are your rules.
No, that's your straw man. If you actually believe this, you're even more delusional that even I thought you were.
You won't like post-meritocracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Essentially, a society where merit is not measured (and consequently recognized) is also a society where progress, innovation, efficiency, and competency are not valued. However, that does not create egalitarian paradise, instead Machiavellian qualities of manipulation and deceit end up rewarded. So you still end up with a hierarchy of brutish sociopaths in charge of running your life.
Re:You won't like post-meritocracy (Score:5, Insightful)
As anyone that lived under communist regime could tell you all it will accomplish is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator level.
Precisely. Post-meritocracy means mediocracy at best.
The much-hyped ChatGPT thing works like that too, albeit with a slightly different emphasis. Regurgitating median content increases entropy and creates nothing, never mind how aptly it is done and how convenient it is.
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The meritocracy has never been about merit, instead it's a convenient lie to let the rich stay rich. I have seen many times when the lack of a college degree slows down the promotion of a better qualified person. I've been in graduate school and in my experience there are idiots getting masters degrees for sure, some even get their doctorate without really knowing their field very well. Anyone who's worked for an incompetent boss knows that the system isn't a meritocracy. It's not a meritocracy when you
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This right here. You do need grading. Is it imperfect? Of course. Yet, it also serves a selection criteria. Who gets to enter certain fields or get certain positions. You need something quantifiable so it isn't just who knows who or who has money.
Performance metrics are trickier because they often come with perverse incentives that have very tangible real world consequences.
This is an absolutely true story. I was working for a networking company way back and they outsourced part of the stack development. It
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Essentially, a society where merit is not measured (and consequently recognized) is also a society where [bad things happen]
A world without grades is not a world without recognizing merit. Grades are just an easy and simplistic (and therefore often flawed) way of measuring merit. But most of the professional world finds ways to measure merit without giving people grades. Or without those grades being very meaningful. The closest analog are performance reviews, but those are just as worthless and subjective as grades.
Grades may still be useful just to expedite processes like college admissions and new grad hiring, but they aren't
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However, that does not create egalitarian paradise, instead Machiavellian qualities of manipulation and deceit end up rewarded. So you still end up with a hierarchy of brutish sociopaths in charge of running your life.
And that would be different to now in ... what way exactly?
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We don't live in meritocracy
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"...because if we did surely I'd be a superstar."
No, I'm not delusional.
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Meritocracy is non-binary (Score:4, Insightful)
Meritocracy is non-binary, it's a spectrum. It's not something you either have or don't have, it's something you can be better or worse at. We measure imperfectly, but as long as it's directionaly correct and of sufficient magnitude, it makes things better.
The idea that we can just abandon any attempt at measuring and be better off is utterly laughable. You don't have to prove that meritocracy is imperfect, you have to prove that it's on average directionaly wrong.
And yet I bet you still believe scientists with degrees and go to doctors who are accredited and want lawyers who have passed the bar exam, so unless we see the people saying this proving it by action, we know that they don't actually believe what they're saying.
As a prof (Score:5, Interesting)
As a prof, I would love to stop grading. This would require 5wo things: (1) All students willing to learn the material without an extrinsic motivation, and (2) students willing to recognize when the cannot learn something, and go do something else.
Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. Many students only study, because otherwise they will fail. And students either cannot or will not realistically evaluate their own abilities. They want a tech degree, even if they are incapable of doing the work.
Articles like TFA don't work in the real world.
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Articles like TFA don't work in the real world.
They are not intended to, as the real goal is DIE smuggling.
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"the real goal is DIE smuggling."
I'm assuming "DIE" is an acronym for something, but I have no clue what. A webpage on acronyms was no help (I assume you didn't mean "Dictionary of Indian English"). So a little explanation here would be nice.
Re:As a prof (Score:4, Insightful)
It's supposed to be DEI: "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion"
As is often the case with these initiatives, the acronym stands for all the things it purports to champion while, in actuality, doing the complete opposite.
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What you have stated about students is correct, but it's also a chickens and eggs problem. Many students only study because otherwise they fail, but also since failure or success is measured by a grade, they will study just enough to get the grade and not to learn.
This article, and the book its presenting, is a step in the right direction. A discussion needs to be had about the educational system in general and what it's supposed to achieve. We all know that it's not perfect, but unless we seek a different
Re:As a prof (Score:4, Informative)
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Many students only study, because otherwise they will fail. And students either cannot or will not realistically evaluate their own abilities. They want a tech degree, even if they are incapable of doing the work.
I wonder how many people without that intrinsic motivation actually succeed in their profession. With studies suggesting about a third of college graduates being worse off than if they didn't have the degree, I think college is already failing most of these students even with grades.
The sad fact is it only takes minimal effort to get a C in almost any class, and most colleges will graduate a straight C student. And in my opinion any straight C student who is successful in their field would have been just as
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What you describe is the result of herding everyone with a pulse into a college-path without any thought given to whether that person can or will succeed in college. All to keep the big money flowing to university administrators from student loans. So when the inevitable happens and failure/drop-out rates skyrocket there's a huge push to lower standards until they can't be lowered any more and then just give up and say "It must be grading that's the problem here! Let's just stop giving grades!"
We are here
Re:As a prof (Score:4, Insightful)
Articles like TFA don't work in the real world.
Most of modern philosophies and theories don't - which is why you're even seeing a harsh reaction to the concept of reality itself.
Notice that so many younger people no longer believe in the concept of "the truth", but rather "my truth". To them reality doesn't exist - only one's perception of reality - and all perceptions are weighted equally. A paranoid schizophrenic isn't having delusions - "his truth" is just different than the rest of us.
This line of thinking cannot sustain itself for long, but its an interesting (albeit annoying) experiment in the meantime.
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This line of thinking cannot sustain itself for long, but its an interesting (albeit annoying) experiment in the meantime.
It is only an experiment until we realize we have ruined an entire generation worth of people who will be a problem in politics and other venues for the next 50 years or so. At this point, I really worry about hiring any westerner younger than about 40 or 45. I am looking forward to the day I can put a bottom bound on that age range but I am not optimistic.
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As another prof... (Score:2)
This would require 5wo things: (1) All students willing to learn the material without an extrinsic motivation, and (2) students willing to recognize when the cannot learn something, and go do something else.
As another prof I would disagree. Your conditions only work if all you want is a pass/fail system with a minimum standard students must achieve. However, that is not a useful system. We also need to have some measure of the ability of a student to master the material because some things you want to use a degree for require more than a minimum passing standard.
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get rid of the tenure system (Score:3, Insightful)
Poor Title (Score:2)
The article itself isn't really a call to end grades or measurement. It's really a call for greater reflection on life, and for an appreciation of things that are not quantifiable. It's more of a philosophical think piece than an actual policy recommendation.
If you can't count it, you can't manage it. (Score:2)
Missed it by that much (Score:4, Insightful)
The author is correct in giving the professor an F. But it's not the grading system. The teacher should be able to make the material understandable to everyone in the class not just the A student who always blows the bell curve. Those people probably don't need the class. Let me give you an example from my freshman year. General Chemistry class taught by the head of the chemistry department. In a class of 500 students, the mean score on the first midterm is a 60 out of 200 points, which is more likely, that the students are idiots or that the teacher isn't being effective? Let me give you another example. Physics class. The professor was great. Kind of a Richard Feynman hippie type who could really related to his students. But that's only half of the course. The other half was a lab handled by several teaching fellows. Some of my friends had one guy who spent about 15 minutes explaining experiment leaving 1 hour and 45 minutes for the students to do the work. The guy I had spent 1 hour and 45 minute lecturing to us and telling us that we needed to do a bunch of stuff beyond what was on the professor's lab assignment leaving us on 15 minutes to do the work. Guess which group got an A and which group didn't. The grade was really bullshit because the amount and scope of work was totally different.
So, how do you decide who gets it and who doesn't? Simple. When I became a teaching assistant for a microprocessors class, the students had to actually build the thing and demonstrate not just that it worked but how it worked. That's where you can see the quality of the work. If the student explains the code clearly and it's well-written, that's an A. If the student can't and the code is sloppy, that's a C.
Re:Missed it by that much (Score:5, Informative)
The author is correct in giving the professor an F. But it's not the grading system. The teacher should be able to make the material understandable to everyone in the class not just the A student who always blows the bell curve.
At the elementary school level? I'll buy that. In a STEM weedout course (which is where you hear that particular lecture), not so much. If you don't have aptitude, desire, some fundamental knowledge, and good study habits, there's no teacher that is going to help you learn, say, organic chemistry.
The kid failed physics (Score:3)
I can honestly say. 1. the teaching of first year physics was abysmal. 2. I wasn't highly motivated. 3. Physics is not Math, even though you use Math to describe Physics... the conceptual basis is not the same.
So you could be good at "math" but not at the concepts of physics. However, if you can't do algebra, you can't program. Programming is algebra.
The idea that you can teach/learn without any guidelines or signposts of accomplishment is pure hubris. Math is literally the easiest of all subject to grade. There are right and wrong answers. It's not subjective like any artform.
So... Yeah... DIE.
Re: (Score:2)
You obviously don't understand mathematics as a field. The stuff we do in undergrad is kid stuff. Solve some formulas, learn some proofs.
But high level math is super creative. Simple proofs that take a page can still have several solutions. Look up proofs of the square root of 2 being irrational. There's more than one way to get there. We KNOW the answer--root 2 IS irrational--but how you GET there is so much more important.
I can do those simple proofs, given enough time and guidance, but I'll never be a ma
Re: (Score:2)
wikipedia says:
Physics is the natural science that studies matter,[a] its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force.[2]
As you can see it's not math, its something else. However, as you probably know, math is the the primary way to describe those motions, behaviours, energies, and forces.
So, yes. You can understand and be good at some branch of math
Profs tell the class that half of them will fail. (Score:2)
And that's bad? Should they instead lie to their students and pretend that the whole "everyone is a winner" bullshit will fly here too only for them to notice the hard way that it doesn't?
Over here, studying is cheap. Really cheap. Think a couple 100 a year. So everyone and their dog wants a degree. The entry level courses are packed. If you're lucky, you can get a seat on the stairs of the auditorium. In turn, the profs don't give a fuck about you. You're a nuisance. At best. The failure rates are around 9
Re:Profs tell the class that half of them will fai (Score:4, Interesting)
Profs should not tell the class that half of them will fail. Profs should tell the class that historically, half of them have failed, and then challenge this class to be better -- which they won't, but at least they don't feel like they're being set up to fail.
The common denominator... (Score:5, Insightful)
Article is click bait (Score:2)
There's literally no discussion of any of the alternatives to letter grades in an educational setting. This is not it. The article's just there to get you riled up and clicking through for page impressions and ad views. It's trolling us.
It's Wired, so should've known
Been there, done that (Score:4, Interesting)
It takes a working system with a few flaws, and replaces it with an opinion.
Even at that, the situations cited expose other problems than the need to eliminate grading. If someone is teaching a course where half of the students fail, there is something really wrong with either the instructor, or the prerequisites for the class. The failure rate should be hovering around 20 percent for science/tech subjects, and maybe 5 percent for opinion courses.
If the people that think we should eliminate grades think that is a bad system, they have no idea how awful the replacement they want is. Opinions shouldn't be the basis of passing or failing. And if you apply any metric at all, you are back to grading.
Gamification of Learning (Score:2)
That's what grading is.
People do enjoy learning for the sake of learning, but they'll enjoy and work at it more if there's immediate tangible feedback and rewards. ie. grades.
And how do we grade the grader? When a physicist friend found out that a first-year Harvard student he knew -- a math star in high school -- got an F in physics, he said: "Harvard should be ashamed of itself." A Harvard grad himself, he believed that schools fail students far more often than students fail schools. Some STEM profs, I'm
Objectivity (Score:2)
Everyone tells us we need to make rational, objective and replicable decisions. That's why we want to measure and compare each and everything.
2023 or 1960? (Score:2)
Some STEM profs, I'm told, tell the class at the outset that half of them will fail.
Citation, please. That may have been common practice in the '50s (my dad tells me that's what he experienced). When I was a TA involved in grading in the '80s, more common was "most students will get A's or B's." I suspect more common today is "50% of students will get A's." I suspect the classic STEM weeder classes today filter out students by assigning a lot of work, not by handing out low grades.
Yeah, grading stinks. So does employee evaluations and Amazon review stars. They're subjective and omit a lot of valuable information. They're still valuable in a lot of cases.
Re: (Score:2)
They're still valuable in a lot of cases.
So are closing tags.
horsepoo (Score:2)
"More irrational even than pi." That's as far as I had to read to know this was complete horsepoo.
students do better with grading, testing (Score:2)
https://www.theatlantic.com/ed... [theatlantic.com]
Grades (Score:2)
As a former college prof... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Any sufficiently large group of people is going to have attributes that when assigned a value and plotted will result in a Bell curve.
Having said that... if statistically significant numbers of students are failing a class, then I believe the institution is at fault for not filtering them out in the first place. In an ideal world, your Bell curve should be such that pretty much everyone is able to pass.
Re: (Score:2)
And how to you filter out the people that don't belong there, that are likely to fail? You look at their past grades.
Avoiding grades is impossible. If you don't have grades in the university, you'll get graded by your first boss.
Nonsense (Score:3)
Rather than see grading end, I'd prefer to see this nonsense end. It's just an obvious attack on the concept of merit based achievement. They arrived at this conclusion by working backwards from their equality of outcomes axiom. Sorry, that axiom is false. It's from the same people who want kids to stop keeping score in sports. Everyone should be paid millions to be a professional baller, right. If we are all equal, then I should be tied with LeBron for all time scoring, along with everyone else.
The purpose of grades is to make most students work harder. Measurement is actually the secondary purpose to motivation. You learn more by setting and then meeting a self-imposed standard for your understanding that you reasonably expect to align with the grading scale. When I ran out of classes to take in graduate school, I had developed this skill of setting self-expectations during learning to the level that grades were no longer necessary. That was really hard to achieve and it's the most valuable thing I got out of graduate school, actually (learning how to learn on my own) but it could NOT have been achieved without a couple reality checks that happened when I went into tests thinking I had mastered the material, when I hadn't and the grading scale is what revealed this.
Being able to learning without grades what a masters degree represents. It's fiction to pretend that's what a bachelors represents and to say it's what a high school diploma represents is beyond stupid, more on the willful deceit level. The higher education system in the US has traditionally been a source of competitive advantage for the US, but it's failing harder and harder in both directions: it's offering less and costing more and both are trending in very bad directions. We need disruptive change in education now or we will lose this national advantage.
Quite the opposite... (Score:2)
Your note about grading, communism and space race are rather self-contradictory...
If you look at maths/physics education at communist countries - usually it was better than in capitalist countries...
Just look at math and physics international high school olympics winner - China, Russia/USSR, Vietnam, Poland were overrepresented there...
If you looked only at graded material - communism would win...
It is economy, freedom of ideas and minds what won the space race.... not grades...
Re: (Score:2)
This goes to show that most of what preschool, school and academic prep & undergrad is about isn't education, but academic selection. Both can come together, but often they don't and are completely orthogonal to each other. Point in case: I have no formal education in software engineering what-so-ever, yet I code, plan and design circles around my academically accredited colleagues.
I fix scaling issues in my current job. There are 100s of programmers whose code I fix regularly. I suspect you are just like them. When they submitted their PRs, they though their code was "correct"/perfect. They were wrong a fair bit of the time. And the things they were wrong about at least in part are always based upon academic theory. So thanks to egotistical people like you who make my job possible. I bet you think you understand programming. LOL. What you don't know, can hurt you.