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United States24630 Posts
You are teaching a class (high school, college, whatever). You give five graded homework assignments and assign each one a score. What grading system will you use? What do you do if a student doesn't complete the assignment on time? What about if he/she never turns it in? How will that count.
Depending on what level you are teaching the course at and where you are located geographically, you might be influenced to answer in a very different way. Most high schools in the USA (where I attended/worked) grade students out of 100% within each individual course. For example, I might have had a 93% average in physics. I think most schools ultimately convert your average over to a gpa out of 4.0 or something similar which goes on college applications.
This is a perfectly valid system. However, what range of grades corresponds to an A? At my high school, 95-100 was an A+, 90-94.4 was an A, 85-89.4 was a B+, etc. Each of those bins is equivalent to approximately 5 percentage points. But after D (65-69.4) what happens? F covers all grades from 0-64.4 (varies slightly depending on school). So if you don't hand in an assignment and are assigned a 0% which is 65 points below passing, then you will need to get a 70% (passing by 5 points) on the next 13 assignments in order to compensate, or 75% on the next 6-7 assignments... or you could say that you'd have to get 100% on the next two assignments in order to compensate and get a passing average. If we also consider the ability of a 0% to have an emotional effect on students (due to its severe weighting), then this could become a recipe for disaster (failure in the course, etc).
Is this unfair? The system has worked well for hundreds of years... or has it? In colleges, the 4.0 scale is much more forgiving about failing grades. Suppose your student got an 95 on one assignment, an 80 on two of them, a 65 on one of them, and a 0 (didn't hand it in) on the last assignment. Using my high school's old grading system, that would work out to (95+80+80+65+0)/5 or 64%. This students has failed. However, using a college-style grading system, the student scored approximately a 2.2 which is a low-mid C.
Educational researchers are beginning to evaluate this system and are arriving at one unanimous conclusion: punishing students for incomplete or unsubmitted work with a disproportionately low grade is demonstrated to have detrimental effects on student motivation, performance, and learning overall. Not only is there a mathematical unfairness in 0% being 65 points away from passing (more than half of the total 100 point scale), but it causes students to shut down, do less work, and learn less effectively.
Returning to the original question, what would you do? How exactly would you grade the assignments? My school is currently discussing this issue and thinking of new ways to grade.
Relevant reading material for those who are interested:
"Alternatives" by Thomas R Guskey, Curriculum & Instruction, October 2004.
and
"The Case Against Zero" by Douglas B. Reeves, Phi Delta Kappan, Dec 2004 v86 i4 p324
P.S. One alternative is to maintain the same traditional system but use 55% (for example) as the lowest grade you can get on an assignment.
 
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YES, I hate forgetting stuff and getting an automatic 0.
It's such a blow to morale.
Regarding this matter, I'd reduce the maximum grade possible rather than not accepting any late homework.
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At the university I attended (St. Andrews, in Scotland), if you were late you would just get -2 off your final score (off a non-linear grading scale of 0-20 where 5 is fail and 11 is an honours-eligible grade), and if you were late a week after the due date you'd get a 0. Which was fair, IMO, as it even gave people the added option of being able to work at it for another week if they felt they could offset the -2 penalty.
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One of my stats professors had an interesting system which was pretty nice. First, we had about 10 hmwk assignments, and the lowest 2 were dropped (maybe too much?). There were 2 tests, and 1 final. Of course, if you messed up a test badly, then of course your grade gets screwed. However, since the goal of the class is that you understand the material in the end, he just wrote a really good final and made it so if your final was higher than a test grade, it would replace that test grade (could replace both test grades if they were both lower).
Basically you always had a chance to get an A, up until the last day.
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I always thought it was about preparing kids for the real world. In the real world, if you don't meet a deadline, you're fucked. School is more about learning life skills and learning how to learn rather than actually learning specific knowledge. When you get a job, you're going to have to (re)learn everything over again.
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micronesia, hate to burst your bubble but it seems like your post has a gigantic flaw. You never say what the "college grading system" is. How are they different? How is the HS equivalent a 64% and the college equivalent a 2.2? Because in fact college classes oftentimes use the same A-F scale as high school - they just calculate points different because in college you'll have different weighted assignments / papers rather than a flat scale. Although in high school (most AP classes) grade really similarly to college...
So I think your question has some inherrent flaws in it.
Furthermore, giving someone a 55% for not even doing an assignment is rewarding the student not doing work. That 55% is is undeserved because it's 55% more than the actual work he put in, why should he get the same grade that someone who actually did the assignment but sucked get?
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United States24630 Posts
On November 04 2009 03:58 Anihc wrote:
I always thought it was about preparing kids for the real world. In the real world, if you don't meet a deadline, you're fucked. School is more about learning life skills and learning how to learn rather than actually learning specific knowledge. When you get a job, you're going to have to (re)learn everything over again.
This begs the question: does giving 0's (on a 100 point scale) to students who don't complete an assignment on time effectively help to prepare them for the real world? Is there evidence of this?
On November 04 2009 04:00 Xeris wrote:
micronesia, hate to burst your bubble but it seems like your post has a gigantic flaw. You never say what the "college grading system" is. How are they different? How is the HS equivalent a 64% and the college equivalent a 2.2? Because in fact college classes oftentimes use the same A-F scale as high school - they just calculate points different because in college you'll have different weighted assignments / papers rather than a flat scale. Although in high school (most AP classes) grade really similarly to college...
So I think your question has some inherrent flaws in it.
Furthermore, giving someone a 55% for not even doing an assignment is rewarding the student not doing work. That 55% is is undeserved because it's 55% more than the actual work he put in, why should he get the same grade that someone who actually did the assignment but sucked get?
I think you should reread the OP and your post and then we can discuss after we've both had more time to think about it.
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On November 04 2009 04:00 Xeris wrote:
micronesia, hate to burst your bubble but it seems like your post has a gigantic flaw. You never say what the "college grading system" is. How are they different? How is the HS equivalent a 64% and the college equivalent a 2.2? Because in fact college classes oftentimes use the same A-F scale as high school - they just calculate points different because in college you'll have different weighted assignments / papers rather than a flat scale. Although in high school (most AP classes) grade really similarly to college...
Yeah, my uni uses the same grading scale as was used in the higher level courses at my high school; 90/80/70/60. A 64% is a 1 here.
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And ya there's the work ethic component. Sure you could have a smart kid who doesn't need to do the homework to get an A in the class, so your system would reward him for being lazy basically. That's not how life works though. If he's in a work situation and misses his deadline there's nothing he can do, he'll get fired, etc. Your proposed system basically rewards coasting, which is a bad lesson to teach to high schoolers.
Also, college classes aren't really run like high school classes. For example, in humanities classes, you'll have maybe 1-2 midterms and 1 final. The final will be like 60% of the grade, and the midterms each 20%. So if you get a 0 on one of them, literally the highest grade you can get is an 80% if you ACE everything else... that's actually much harsher than anything in high school.
In typical high school classes - you have homework, tests, a midterm, and a final, and usually some extra credit. Students aren't punished nearly as much for totally missing stuff (unless it's a lot).
The only thing (as I mentioned before) is AP classes. For example my typical AP class would have some HW (aprox 10% of the grade) attendance + participation (aprox 10% of the grade), 2-3 unit tests (40% of the grade) and a final (40% of the grade)... In this situation missing a particular assignment isn't too bad, but that 10% is essentially a freebie as long as you do all the work - however if you miss a unit test/midterm or whatever, your chances of getting an A are drastically lowered (same as college).
So again, I'm not sure where you teach, but at least in California, AP classes and such are fairly similar to college in that respect, and college is fucking brutal if you get 0's on stuff.
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On November 04 2009 04:00 micronesia wrote:Show nested quote +On November 04 2009 03:58 Anihc wrote:
I always thought it was about preparing kids for the real world. In the real world, if you don't meet a deadline, you're fucked. School is more about learning life skills and learning how to learn rather than actually learning specific knowledge. When you get a job, you're going to have to (re)learn everything over again. This begs the question: does giving 0's (on a 100 point scale) to students who don't complete an assignment on time effectively help to prepare them for the real world? Is there evidence of this? Show nested quote +On November 04 2009 04:00 Xeris wrote:
micronesia, hate to burst your bubble but it seems like your post has a gigantic flaw. You never say what the "college grading system" is. How are they different? How is the HS equivalent a 64% and the college equivalent a 2.2? Because in fact college classes oftentimes use the same A-F scale as high school - they just calculate points different because in college you'll have different weighted assignments / papers rather than a flat scale. Although in high school (most AP classes) grade really similarly to college...
So I think your question has some inherrent flaws in it.
Furthermore, giving someone a 55% for not even doing an assignment is rewarding the student not doing work. That 55% is is undeserved because it's 55% more than the actual work he put in, why should he get the same grade that someone who actually did the assignment but sucked get? I think you should reread the OP and your post and then we can discuss after we've both had more time to think about it.
I'll think about it some more... got a staff meeting but I'll be back. Read my second post.
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A lot of teachers let you drop whatever your lowest grade on homework or a test was. That helps a lot with this "0" problem- if you just forgot about one HW or test, then it's ok. But as long as you don't completely forget about an assignment or test, it's usually easy to get at least SOME points on it. I mean, if it's a multiple choice test with ABCD answers, you could completely guess and get 25% no effort at all.
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Well in the UK we don't have a GPA. In Scotland we require a certain number of A/B passes at Higher to get into most good university's (the highest requirement is Medicine with 4A's and a B I think, and the average is 4B's. Universities don't vary a huge amount in their required grades.)
Although I can't remember the exact ways the GPA works, I remember an American friend of mine explaining that it's quite easy to be screwed by it, like if a class all does really well you can do well, but not as well as the other 80% of the class you can end up with a C.
I don't really know, but here theres very little punishment for late submission of work as almost none of it contributes anything to your final grade. In 5th year of Secondary you make a pholio for most subjects which is compiled at the end of the year, and in 6th year you generally have 1-2 big pieces of course work due in at the end of the year, so forgetting them doesn't ever really happen. At uni again, very few graded pieces of work except for a few essays each term, which are pretty hard to forget about, which contribute a moderate amount to your final grade.
The system we do use for people that hand in work late seems to work though, you just lose a mark from your overall score for it every day until you hand it in.
UK does, imo, have one of the worst education systems in Europe though, so maybe the lack of a competitive atmosphere is causing problems.
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I get grading an exam with a 0 if you didn't present it. I mean, exams are very important, yet if I didn't know anything I wouldn't waste my time (or anybody else's) and just deliver a blank exam.
And well, your assignment example doesn't make much sense to me.
I have no idea on how classes are in the USA, but here, most of the teachers have a grading system for every exam (every 1.5-2 months, 2-3 exams on each semester)
And they would count assistance (or sometimes participation in class), assignments and then the actual exam, with a 20-20-60 respective percentage distribution or similar.
Doing that really makes grading assignments a little pointless. The difference between a 100 and an 80 in a scale of 20 is nil. So you just "sign" whichever are good enough and the student just racks up signatures. When the assignments go over ten, then missing a signature (or having a 0 if you wanna see it that way) is no big deal.
Now I guess I'm just talking random here. But I think that classes need to be 33-33-33 (or 30-30-40) in my opinion. Which allows for grading assignments better and then participation in class also counts, and the grade isn't seen as something that you can achieve at the very last moment (with the exam) even if you were a complete slacker for the rest of the course. And neither does it seem like it might be completely lost in a couple hours regardless of your work in the rest of the semester because you get irrevocably nervous at exams. And your 0's and stuff still don't seem like too much of a big deal because of the scale.
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In this university I used to attend, you would have 6 homeworks(I think) to turn in per semester, and the worst of those 6 would get ignored, and the average would get calculated for 5 of the best.
I liked that system.
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On November 04 2009 04:49 Piy wrote:
Although I can't remember the exact ways the GPA works, I remember an American friend of mine explaining that it's quite easy to be screwed by it, like if a class all does really well you can do well, but not as well as the other 80% of the class you can end up with a C.
That's curved grading which is separate from the GPA system, and I have never heard of someone getting screwed by curved grading. :|
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I definitely see the issue here, however doesn't having some sort of standard late-work policy solve all of this? By this I mean a typical '-20% per day late' or similar system?
If a student 'forgets' to do something, despite the fact that everyone does this from time to time, I still think he/she should be penalized for a lack of organization, and I believe that this system does that just fine without being unfair.
I would think that if a student doesn't turn in the assignment after FIVE days, he/she fully deserves that 0% and the demoralization/gpa that comes along with it, and chances are is a student that doesn't really care about their grade anyway.
I also once had an instructor that gave each student a 61% (Barely passing by our scale) simply for turning in any completed assignment with effort apparent. His grading was harsher than most, but it seemed to work out well, and the only students who failed were the ones who deserved it. Students who turned these in late lost 20% each day and didn't get the automatic 61%.
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I think grades give the false motivation for kids to learn.
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ah definately its how much u retain of what you learn not the grade itself that is important and how well u can apply the knowledge.
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I agree with this. Pretty much every class I didn't do well in was because I had a teacher who really pissed me off and discouraged me from applying myself.
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On November 04 2009 05:36 Athos wrote:
I agree with this. Pretty much every class I didn't do well in was because I had a teacher who really pissed me off and discouraged me from applying myself.
Hmm I wonder if that's why in the Chem class I graded, I spent most of my time giving failing grades (there was a curve though so they un-failed so to speak). Although, that seems rather improbable given the professor. Sometimes I wonder if people just don't really care until they see the failing grade (because the grades did go up somewhat over time).
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EPT
