Zero Intolerance
I don't know about you, but when I was in school, everyone – students, teachers, principals, school board members – understood that your grade was proportional to your accomplishment. If you got everything on an assignment or test right, you got 100. If you got half of it right, you got a 50. And if you didn't get anything right – or simply didn't do it (which was the same thing; obviously, if you didn't do the work at all, you didn't get anything right) – you got a zero.
Apparently it doesn't work that way any more, at least not around south Hampton Roads, if we can believe this article in the local paper. Seems that some teachers no longer give zeroes: the lowest they will give is a 50 or 60 – even if an assignment is never turned in – because of the "devastating effects that one zero can have on a student's grade."
Shoot, I thought that was the whole point of giving zeroes – as a disincentive to blowing off the assignment. But local school officials "want to ensure that teachers understand how heavily a zero can weigh on a student’s final grade" because "Zeros can mean fewer students are eligible for the honor roll..."
Well, duh. And here I always thought that the honor roll was for recognition of outstanding work (which to my mind doesn't encompass failure to turn in your homework). Silly me.
A school board member explained everything with this example:
Consider trying to find the average temperature over five days and recording 85, 82, 83 and 86, then forgetting a day and recording 0. The average temperature would be 67 , a figure that does not accurately show the weather from that week.Talk about comparing apples and Volkswagens. If those temperatures were grades, then the equivalent would be a teacher "forgetting" to record a legitimate grade and giving a 0 instead. The weather didn't fail to register a temperature that day; the temperature was what it was, whether it was recorded or not.
If those temperatures were grades, a student would fail after consistently earning B’s and C’s.
Of course, there's more than one way to skin a zero. Some principals use a "dilution" policy: they "review gradebooks to ensure that teachers are offering students enough grades during a quarter" so that "one or two zeros will not submarine a semester’s effort." [Emphasis added.] How considerate to let you pick and choose from a wide "offering" of grade opportunities rather than simply expecting you to demonstrate that you've learned the material.
Heaven forbid you might not make the honor roll.
4 comments:
Is the school more concerned with their league table performance than accurate marking? Same thing happens back home. The culture is such that students failing to learn is a reflection on the teachers aswell. Teachers should be axamined but I strongly disagree that student grades is the way to do it.
Also, the person quoted is confusing the mean average with the median average. That's a bad example because AFAIK schools use the mean.
The Honor Roll argument is a red herring. They just want to be able to graduate as many students as possible. Grading on a curve is mostly acceptable because at least it agrees with basic statistics, but never issuing sub-failing grades completely removes the entire point of assignments and tests.
This among other things is why we're going to try to home school are kids. We're not holy rollers who want to shelter our kids from the world, but we're reasonable intelligent human beings who realize that public education in this country is largely a joke unless one lives somewhere with insanely high property taxes.
Marcus, to my knowledge the mean is always used for grades. If the median were used, a zero could have little to no impact on the overall grade. We could go round and round about which measurement is better in eduction, but again, a zero's impact upon a grade average is not analogous to a zero's impact upon a temperature average.
I'm a "median man" myself as a rule. It's more statistically honest.
Very simple... the greater chance the student will fail - means less money from the federal government because of the No Child Left Behind Act. Thanks to the poorly written piece of crap legislation (which btw is a under-funded mandate) there is an incentive for schools to cheat on their student grade reports... and this is just one way of doing it.
No wonder that there have already been scandals by multiple states in "improving" student grades. In fact, just six states this year reported student grades that fell within the national average -- which means that 44 states effectively found a way to lie. Maybe the lawmakers should receive a zero.
"In fact, just six states this year reported student grades that fell within the national average -- which means that 44 states effectively found a way to lie."
Fascinating. Sounds like a bad case of Lake Wobegon syndrome.
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