20 May
60% of You Won’t Get This
Via John Gruber, some educators are espousing a minimum grade of ‘50’ for test scores, so that students who get a low ‘F’ are not faced with an ‘insurmountable’ challenge to get their grade above passing level. Here’s the most disturbing quote:
It’s a classic mathematical dilemma: that the students have a six times greater chance of getting an F,” says Douglas Reeves, founder of The Leadership and Learning Center, a Colorado-based educational think tank who has written on the topic. “The statistical tweak of saying the F is now 50 instead of zero is a tiny part of how we can have better grading practices to encourage student performance.
I cannot believe this person runs a think tank on education. Here is the most specious part of his argument—that a student has a six times greater chance to get an ‘F’ instead of another letter grade. This could only be true IFF every grade had an equal, random chance of selection—i.e., you drew grades out of a hat. Given that this is not the case, and that it is extremely unlikely in any school that 60% of all assigned grades are actually failing grades, this whole part of the argument falls from “classical dilemma” to patently absurd.
Actually, though, as a high school student, I would have loved this system. I would have busted my butt on the early, introductory material at the start of the quarter, gotten a 100 on the first test, and then spent the rest of the semester coasting along on a string of 50s until final grades. In this fashion, I could have passed math and english without those pesky times tables or prepositions, and spent more time applying my genius for evil, instead of for good.
