In “How Grading Reform Changed Our School,” author Jeffery Erickson, the assistant principal of Minnetonka High School in Minnesota, discusses why and how he and his colleagues changed the way students received their grades. Erickson’s main argument in his essay is, “What should go into a grade?” His answer to this is that a student’s grade is solely reflected based on what a student knows and his or her ability to perform. Erickson opens up his essay by giving a scenario from a personal experience of when his daughter took swimming lessons. It was a challenge for his daughter to master the class, but in the end she finally passed on the last day. He goes on by saying how unethical it would be if his daughter did not pass the class based …show more content…
In the practice of inflating, many teachers would reward their students with extra credit when there was no work being put forward for them to even receive extra credit; such as, bringing in permission slips, canned food for food drives, tissue boxes, and so on. He explains that this process demeans the purpose of grades and is not truly reflecting the student’s performance. As for deflating, these were factors that misrepresented a student’s grades based on behavioral infractions, unexcused absences, missing work, or averaging. He then goes on by providing two examples in the use of deflating grades. For instance, how a student had her final grade averaged together at the end of the semester, but it did not reflect her true performance in the class at all due to averaging. Also how some teachers deducted grades from students because of the use of cell phones during …show more content…
This is done now through the process of having a two assessment category- formative and summative. Both of these categories are used to determine the student’s quarter and semester grade. The summative category would be based on four common assessments, and one of these must be a performance task. As for formative assessments, this would show students the progress that they have made in mastering the material that would appear during the summative exam. He continues by saying that the school has realized that they can no longer control student’s grades based on behavioral infractions. This can be done instead with classroom management and student engagement strategies. For example, if a student is skipping class, then the student receives a phone call the same day. Then a staff member will get in contact with the student, and determine why the student was absent and then issue a detention for his or her unexcused class absence. He also mentions how the school has changed the way teachers grade homework. The teachers no longer grade homework based on completion but now on accuracy, and the following day the teachers give quizzes based on the assigned homework from the previous night to guarantee that the students fully understand the concept before taking the summative
Students have started expecting good grades for mediocre work, knowing that the professors are under an obligation to give in to the way the rest of college professors grade. Harvey Mansfield, says that according to the american education system, grading strictly is ‘cruel and dehumanizing’ and affects the student's self esteem. The author says how he thinks that a reason professors have opted into a lenient grading scale is to spare their students self esteems and feelings. I wonder, if students don’t learn how to cope with a critique from a professor on an assignment how are these students going to cope in the real world with criticism from coworkers or authority figures. Not only do these students suffer from self esteem issues they are not being challenged enough and suffer from laziness and lack an incentive to achieve
The Failure of Grading in Public High Schools Most people in life that go on to be publicly known or have a successful business after escaping the jail that is high school, are actually the students that didn’t make such good grades. The school grading system trains you students to reach for an unattainable goal, has untruthful promises, has many flaws, causes mental issues in students, leads to cheating, and makes students not even comprehend what they are learning. The grades we get are supposedly the only thing that tracks how a student is doing in school. With that, a student has the mind set that if they do, everything right and good like they’re supposed to they’ll get rewarded with an A grade. Sadly however, the real world hits hard
You can't expect a kid to change if all you do is just tell him. " Here, Jeff is angry at the way his teacher takes the banking approach when it comes to teaching the students because it fails to teach the students anything when they are not driven. When repetition starts to take place students become disinterested and because they are not driven they will not question their education or their teacher. This is the way the manifestation of our education has been for decades and in result the
In Carl Singleton’s article, “What Our Education System Needs is More F’s,” he argues that students aren’t receiving the failing grades they deserve. School systems are to blame for the lack of quality in America’s education. No other recommendation for improvement will succeed. The only way to fix the American education system is to fail more students. According to Singleton, the real root of the issue is with the parents.
While the teacher was walking around the room to check for completion of the homework, Eve started scribbling words across her paper. According to her paper, the cause of the Civil War was a single displacement reaction. Eve did not care that her answer was completely incorrect because the teacher gave her full credit for having any answer on the page. Numerous students like Eve are in the school system.
Elona Kalaja Professor Eleni Saltourides ENG 101 Critical Analysis Paper February 21, 2018 Flunking vs Students In the article, “In Praise of the F Word” Mary Sherry argues that flunking students is a method that has been effective in the past and is still effective todays day, and anyone needs to see is as a positive teaching tool. Sherry indicates that flunking students is a method that motivates students to study more and to be more responsible for what is their responsibility. Students challenge is not to get an A or B, but to succeed or to fail.
Schools use traditional grades such as homework, tests, and quizzes for many reasons and here is three of them, number one is they use traditional grading systems because that is just what they are use to, the second one is teachers can grade many items to determine what you have learned instead of just one simple grade, and the last one is the grades that a student may get are more accurate with more grades. If you have a bad grade you can use several other items to make that grade up unlike just one single grade where if you fail it you fail the class. A math professor by the name of harold osborne did some research on the subject and proved that 70% of students learned the items faster and more efficient with more grades and items to complete. Using several grades to determine if a students fails or not is way more efficient than just the one grade deciding their future. The traditional grading system is what most schools use and what they have always used and they should not change that to a new system that they would have to learn all over again.
Cassie Davis, a former student at Highland High School in Nunn, Colarado, worked herself strenuously in order to achieve academic excellence. She took every AP and Honors class she could, and in her senior year, while the others students began to relax as the result of their college applications being finished, she hit the books and continued to take classes at the University of Northern Colorado. However, she was punished for her diligence, as her school’s grading system discounted her college credits, and she lost her valedictorian status to a kid who had not taken difficult college courses. She found that she had been cheated, punished for choosing to challenge herself and learn more.
Every year over 1.2 million kids drop out of high school in the United States. One fourth of kids will fail high school in their life. Nobody seems to question why these students are failing, other than that they are not trying hard enough. America 's grading system is flawed compared to the rest of the world, and there is many ways this problem could be fixed. Getting a zero and an assignment drops the final grade on a subject massively, and getting an F means the same score.
Under a traditional grading system, teachers must narrow down the students work over the course of the semester to a single grade. A standard based system grades using different categories and rates students on their progress, product, and process, rather than one consolidated grade. According to Shannon O. Sampson “The separate reporting of achievement, effort, and progress lends itself well to reflection. If achievement grades are low but effort grades are high, for example, the problem may be rooted in curriculum issues” (Shannon O. Sampson, 2009). If there is one grade for a student and it is low, there could be several issues that cannot be determined through a traditional grading system.
Cheating is unethical in and of itself, so a system that promotes this practice must be unethical as well. Yet another unethical aspect of grading is the emphasis on grade point average to gain acceptance into colleges. If grading was eliminated altogether, it would not only force schools to come up with other alternatives, but it would also force colleges to change their admittance methods and potentially reduce the dropout rate (Barnes). Ultimately, the judgment method of our grading system proves to be ineffective and
Statistics indicate that the number of attaining a grade A in learning institutions such as colleges has risen considerably from 15% to about 43%. Moreover, the reports show that the As’ and Bs’ represents approximately 73% of all the grades in the public universities and about 86% of the private colleges (Lindsay). The significant changes in grade inflation seem harmless but have detrimental effects on the quality of education offered in the public universities and the private colleges. Therefore, grade inflation has not only affected students, but also society as well. Grade inflation impacts negatively on the students in that they do not know where they stand thereby putting in the necessary effort to get where they are presumed to
Grading papers felt like a huge responsibility. I was faced with the question of “who am I to give these kids these grades?” Then I realized that I was the teacher and these kids were depending on these grades to tell them what kind of progress they had made and what they needed to work on. I graded the first four and then asked my self what it was that I was doing to determine the grades I was administering. I decided to take the “Six Trait Writing Scale” and give a score on each, then add them up, divide by six, and that was their score.
In academics, cheating can take different forms that mostly involve using or representing somebody else’s work as your own without acknowledging him/her. This is plagiarism, and is often referred to as academic dishonesty by colleges and other institutions of higher learning. In the modern day world of academics, other forms of cheating include sharing another person’s work, paying another person to do an exam or an assignment, and purchasing a test or a term paper in advance are considered to be the most common forms of cheating. Bryce Buchmann, the author of the article Cheating In College: Where It Happens, Why Students Do It and How to Stop It, argues that approximately 75 percent of college students and prospective graduate students in
Having you ever had to take a class in high school but never really learned anything from it? Most students have been introduced to this problem, but the few who have not been in this situation due to the difference in their schooling system. In my opinion, I think that the alternative grading system where testing is not the center of attention is much more effective. On the other hand, many people may argue that the traditional system that focuses on test, homework and quizzes is more beneficial, rather than a long term assignment. But, my reasoning states otherwise.