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Failure in Schools - Page 3

Blogs > micronesia
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Kau *
Profile Joined March 2007
Canada3500 Posts
November 03 2009 22:24 GMT
#41
On November 04 2009 07:14 mahnini wrote:
the fundamental problem isn't with the grading system but the teaching curriculum and philosophy. small assignments distributed over a long period of time that add up to a final grade are incredibly demoralizing for me and i really see it as a way of encouraging mediocre consistency.

one of the classes i am currently taking uses an approach i really like. no assignments aside from 3 projects. lectures outline important parts of the book giving you foundation to build on with reading. you receive no help with projects whatsoever so you actually have to work and think to get the project done, you can't just get stuck and go crawling to professor. this method enables the course to provide the necessary information in lectures and encourages critical thinking without the tediousness of menial assignments.

many courses are far to reliant on the idea of assigning a grade and not focused enough on actual learning.


I had a class like that! Did about class average on the projects and got like 35% on the midterm and whatever on the final and came out with a B!
Moderator
mahnini
Profile Blog Joined October 2005
United States6862 Posts
November 03 2009 22:24 GMT
#42
On November 04 2009 06:23 Xeris wrote:
Show nested quote +
On November 04 2009 06:13 citi.zen wrote:
On November 04 2009 06:08 Xeris wrote:
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.


That's a huge cop-out. "Ya I could be a straight A student but it's my teacher's fault I got a bad grade". Bullshit.


You're both mixing two separate issues: how a class is taught vs. how its graded. If a teacher does a poor job at getting you interested and teaching, your performance will fall. However, this has nothing to do with how the course is graded: could be 1-10, A-F, with 2 exams or 5, with or without hw, etc. etc. As long as you have a fantastic teacher that is just administrative stuff.


No, what he's doing is basically projecting blame on his teachers for poor performances. Maybe it's true from time to time, but at some point you need to take responsibility for your own actions and you can't continually blame other people for your shortcomings.

you can't take the blame off the teachers. this is a flaw i find that many people just seem to accept. the teachers are the dictators of the course curriculum, everything you will be learning and that you will consider relevant to the subject / course will be controlled by the teacher. i've had classes that included the worst most impractical information and i just completely tune out because it is not relevant for me. on the other hand i've had courses that were essential to understanding my desired field and i have an easy time listening.

you cant put all the blame on teachers - true - but you can't put all the blame on students either.
the world's a playground. you know that when you're a kid, but somewhere along the way everyone forgets it.
mahnini
Profile Blog Joined October 2005
United States6862 Posts
November 03 2009 22:33 GMT
#43
i guess what i'm trying to say is you shouldn't be tested on whether or not you can complete the assignments, rather, whether you understand the concepts presented in the assignments. i guess that doesn't really make sense when you take into account the current system but a class is for learning and mistakes should be allowed to be made. where you should be tested for understanding are the tests. grading a students learning process seems counter productive when at the end of the class one C student is far more capable than another. though, i supposed that can never be really solved, it can at least be minimalized.
the world's a playground. you know that when you're a kid, but somewhere along the way everyone forgets it.
StorrZerg
Profile Blog Joined February 2008
United States13919 Posts
November 03 2009 22:36 GMT
#44
i hear some teachers like failing kids for shits and giggles

damn you mrs james damn you
Hwaseung Oz fan for life. Swing out, always swing out.
QuanticHawk
Profile Blog Joined May 2007
United States32049 Posts
November 03 2009 22:41 GMT
#45
On November 04 2009 07:24 timmeh wrote:
Show nested quote +
On November 04 2009 07:06 Hawk wrote:
On November 04 2009 06:57 timmeh wrote:
On November 04 2009 06:24 Hawk wrote:
On November 04 2009 05:57 ShadowDrgn wrote:
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.


In the real world, everyone misses deadlines constantly. A few industries are exceptions, but not the rule.


Have fun explaining that to your boss when he firmly plants his foot up your ass and fires you.

If a student straight up doesn't do an assignment, how can you possibly expect them to receive anything other than a zero? It's demoralizing? How about the kid who busted his ass, got a 95% and sees that kid pull a 65 because the teacher felt bad that he didn't do a single thing? It will just continue to breed laziness.

With a few exceptions, there should always be a late policy that allows a student to make up work but heavily penalizes them. Shit happens, it's college, not a real job etc... but it's still not fair to prop up the lazy kids and let the smart, hard working ones bust their ass. Each day late cuts a quarter off the grade is more than adequate. The lazy students are reprimanded but have an opportunity to rectify the situation, and the other ones are rewarded with good grades for a job done well.

I can't even fathom how educated people thing rewarding laziness is going to make it go away.


No-one is asking anyone to just give someone 65% because the teacher in question felt bad.


He's saying students should get something other than a zero for putting in zero effort. That's rewarding doing nothing.

The person with 95% who busted his ass to get it won't care whether some lazy-ass got 65% or not.


Are you kidding me??

If you slave away on an important paper for several hours to get an A and some douchebag doesn't even hand it in and gets what amounts to 2/3 of your grade for zero effort, that is pure bullshit.

What the hell happened to self responsibility? As much as I may have hated meaningless assignments, if there's four of them in the semester and they count for 25% each, you do them. If you can't be bothered to at least attempt to do them all, you don't deserve to be in school. It's not as if the teacher lets your guess how much each assignment is worth.

College educations are going to become worthless if every lazy idiot is allowed to get one because of super PC concepts like this.
PROFESSIONAL GAMER - SEND ME OFFERS TO JOIN YOUR TEAM - USA USA USA
timmeh
Profile Joined September 2009
Austria177 Posts
November 03 2009 22:52 GMT
#46
On November 04 2009 07:41 Hawk wrote:
Show nested quote +
On November 04 2009 07:24 timmeh wrote:
On November 04 2009 07:06 Hawk wrote:
On November 04 2009 06:57 timmeh wrote:
On November 04 2009 06:24 Hawk wrote:
On November 04 2009 05:57 ShadowDrgn wrote:
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.


In the real world, everyone misses deadlines constantly. A few industries are exceptions, but not the rule.


Have fun explaining that to your boss when he firmly plants his foot up your ass and fires you.

If a student straight up doesn't do an assignment, how can you possibly expect them to receive anything other than a zero? It's demoralizing? How about the kid who busted his ass, got a 95% and sees that kid pull a 65 because the teacher felt bad that he didn't do a single thing? It will just continue to breed laziness.

With a few exceptions, there should always be a late policy that allows a student to make up work but heavily penalizes them. Shit happens, it's college, not a real job etc... but it's still not fair to prop up the lazy kids and let the smart, hard working ones bust their ass. Each day late cuts a quarter off the grade is more than adequate. The lazy students are reprimanded but have an opportunity to rectify the situation, and the other ones are rewarded with good grades for a job done well.

I can't even fathom how educated people thing rewarding laziness is going to make it go away.


No-one is asking anyone to just give someone 65% because the teacher in question felt bad.


He's saying students should get something other than a zero for putting in zero effort. That's rewarding doing nothing.

The person with 95% who busted his ass to get it won't care whether some lazy-ass got 65% or not.


Are you kidding me??

If you slave away on an important paper for several hours to get an A and some douchebag doesn't even hand it in and gets what amounts to 2/3 of your grade for zero effort, that is pure bullshit.

What the hell happened to self responsibility? As much as I may have hated meaningless assignments, if there's four of them in the semester and they count for 25% each, you do them. If you can't be bothered to at least attempt to do them all, you don't deserve to be in school. It's not as if the teacher lets your guess how much each assignment is worth.

College educations are going to become worthless if every lazy idiot is allowed to get one because of super PC concepts like this.


It seems I've expressed myself inaccurately.

I was rather talking about the entire score you will get for your term/semester, not a singular assignment. I do support the idea that you get punished with a 0% for for failing to produce a hand-in. However, I do not support the idea that having not handed in an (1, maybe 2 depending on the total number) assignment whatsoever (for whatever reason) has to mean that it drops your mark across the whole term by X percentage.

And yes, I never really cared about other people's scores when I myself did really well.
;o
EtherealDeath
Profile Blog Joined July 2007
United States8366 Posts
November 03 2009 22:58 GMT
#47
On November 04 2009 07:52 timmeh wrote:
Show nested quote +
On November 04 2009 07:41 Hawk wrote:
On November 04 2009 07:24 timmeh wrote:
On November 04 2009 07:06 Hawk wrote:
On November 04 2009 06:57 timmeh wrote:
On November 04 2009 06:24 Hawk wrote:
On November 04 2009 05:57 ShadowDrgn wrote:
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.


In the real world, everyone misses deadlines constantly. A few industries are exceptions, but not the rule.


Have fun explaining that to your boss when he firmly plants his foot up your ass and fires you.

If a student straight up doesn't do an assignment, how can you possibly expect them to receive anything other than a zero? It's demoralizing? How about the kid who busted his ass, got a 95% and sees that kid pull a 65 because the teacher felt bad that he didn't do a single thing? It will just continue to breed laziness.

With a few exceptions, there should always be a late policy that allows a student to make up work but heavily penalizes them. Shit happens, it's college, not a real job etc... but it's still not fair to prop up the lazy kids and let the smart, hard working ones bust their ass. Each day late cuts a quarter off the grade is more than adequate. The lazy students are reprimanded but have an opportunity to rectify the situation, and the other ones are rewarded with good grades for a job done well.

I can't even fathom how educated people thing rewarding laziness is going to make it go away.


No-one is asking anyone to just give someone 65% because the teacher in question felt bad.


He's saying students should get something other than a zero for putting in zero effort. That's rewarding doing nothing.

The person with 95% who busted his ass to get it won't care whether some lazy-ass got 65% or not.


Are you kidding me??

If you slave away on an important paper for several hours to get an A and some douchebag doesn't even hand it in and gets what amounts to 2/3 of your grade for zero effort, that is pure bullshit.

What the hell happened to self responsibility? As much as I may have hated meaningless assignments, if there's four of them in the semester and they count for 25% each, you do them. If you can't be bothered to at least attempt to do them all, you don't deserve to be in school. It's not as if the teacher lets your guess how much each assignment is worth.

College educations are going to become worthless if every lazy idiot is allowed to get one because of super PC concepts like this.


It seems I've expressed myself inaccurately.

I was rather talking about the entire score you will get for your term/semester, not a singular assignment. I do support the idea that you get punished with a 0% for for failing to produce a hand-in. However, I do not support the idea that having not handed in an (1, maybe 2 depending on the total number) assignment whatsoever (for whatever reason) has to mean that it drops your mark across the whole term by X percentage.

And yes, I never really cared about other people's scores when I myself did really well.


Same, as long as the class doesn't turn out in the end to be a secret free A class, who cares.
Mortality
Profile Blog Joined December 2005
United States4790 Posts
November 03 2009 23:29 GMT
#48
At my high school, 94-100 was an A and 90-94 was a B+. Yes, a 93.9 was a B+. Glad that's been over for a long time now.
Even though this Proleague bullshit has been completely bogus, I really, really, really do not see how Khan can lose this. I swear I will kill myself if they do. - nesix before KHAN lost to eNature
QuanticHawk
Profile Blog Joined May 2007
United States32049 Posts
Last Edited: 2009-11-04 00:34:46
November 04 2009 00:20 GMT
#49
On November 04 2009 07:52 timmeh wrote:
Show nested quote +
On November 04 2009 07:41 Hawk wrote:
On November 04 2009 07:24 timmeh wrote:
On November 04 2009 07:06 Hawk wrote:
On November 04 2009 06:57 timmeh wrote:
On November 04 2009 06:24 Hawk wrote:
On November 04 2009 05:57 ShadowDrgn wrote:
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.


In the real world, everyone misses deadlines constantly. A few industries are exceptions, but not the rule.


Have fun explaining that to your boss when he firmly plants his foot up your ass and fires you.

If a student straight up doesn't do an assignment, how can you possibly expect them to receive anything other than a zero? It's demoralizing? How about the kid who busted his ass, got a 95% and sees that kid pull a 65 because the teacher felt bad that he didn't do a single thing? It will just continue to breed laziness.

With a few exceptions, there should always be a late policy that allows a student to make up work but heavily penalizes them. Shit happens, it's college, not a real job etc... but it's still not fair to prop up the lazy kids and let the smart, hard working ones bust their ass. Each day late cuts a quarter off the grade is more than adequate. The lazy students are reprimanded but have an opportunity to rectify the situation, and the other ones are rewarded with good grades for a job done well.

I can't even fathom how educated people thing rewarding laziness is going to make it go away.


No-one is asking anyone to just give someone 65% because the teacher in question felt bad.


He's saying students should get something other than a zero for putting in zero effort. That's rewarding doing nothing.

The person with 95% who busted his ass to get it won't care whether some lazy-ass got 65% or not.


Are you kidding me??

If you slave away on an important paper for several hours to get an A and some douchebag doesn't even hand it in and gets what amounts to 2/3 of your grade for zero effort, that is pure bullshit.

What the hell happened to self responsibility? As much as I may have hated meaningless assignments, if there's four of them in the semester and they count for 25% each, you do them. If you can't be bothered to at least attempt to do them all, you don't deserve to be in school. It's not as if the teacher lets your guess how much each assignment is worth.

College educations are going to become worthless if every lazy idiot is allowed to get one because of super PC concepts like this.


It seems I've expressed myself inaccurately.

I was rather talking about the entire score you will get for your term/semester, not a singular assignment. I do support the idea that you get punished with a 0% for for failing to produce a hand-in. However, I do not support the idea that having not handed in an (1, maybe 2 depending on the total number) assignment whatsoever (for whatever reason) has to mean that it drops your mark across the whole term by X percentage.

And yes, I never really cared about other people's scores when I myself did really well.


If you have four 10 page papers for your semester as your only graded assignments and you only turn in three, how exactly do you propose to grade that student? Just pretend it never happened?

http://www.every1graduates.org/PDFs/BeyondTheIndicators.pdf

micro, is that the second one you source? what page is the no zero thing on because it's a pretty lengthy article.
PROFESSIONAL GAMER - SEND ME OFFERS TO JOIN YOUR TEAM - USA USA USA
micronesia
Profile Blog Joined July 2006
United States24670 Posts
November 04 2009 00:49 GMT
#50
On November 04 2009 09:20 Hawk wrote:
Show nested quote +
On November 04 2009 07:52 timmeh wrote:
On November 04 2009 07:41 Hawk wrote:
On November 04 2009 07:24 timmeh wrote:
On November 04 2009 07:06 Hawk wrote:
On November 04 2009 06:57 timmeh wrote:
On November 04 2009 06:24 Hawk wrote:
On November 04 2009 05:57 ShadowDrgn wrote:
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.


In the real world, everyone misses deadlines constantly. A few industries are exceptions, but not the rule.


Have fun explaining that to your boss when he firmly plants his foot up your ass and fires you.

If a student straight up doesn't do an assignment, how can you possibly expect them to receive anything other than a zero? It's demoralizing? How about the kid who busted his ass, got a 95% and sees that kid pull a 65 because the teacher felt bad that he didn't do a single thing? It will just continue to breed laziness.

With a few exceptions, there should always be a late policy that allows a student to make up work but heavily penalizes them. Shit happens, it's college, not a real job etc... but it's still not fair to prop up the lazy kids and let the smart, hard working ones bust their ass. Each day late cuts a quarter off the grade is more than adequate. The lazy students are reprimanded but have an opportunity to rectify the situation, and the other ones are rewarded with good grades for a job done well.

I can't even fathom how educated people thing rewarding laziness is going to make it go away.


No-one is asking anyone to just give someone 65% because the teacher in question felt bad.


He's saying students should get something other than a zero for putting in zero effort. That's rewarding doing nothing.

The person with 95% who busted his ass to get it won't care whether some lazy-ass got 65% or not.


Are you kidding me??

If you slave away on an important paper for several hours to get an A and some douchebag doesn't even hand it in and gets what amounts to 2/3 of your grade for zero effort, that is pure bullshit.

What the hell happened to self responsibility? As much as I may have hated meaningless assignments, if there's four of them in the semester and they count for 25% each, you do them. If you can't be bothered to at least attempt to do them all, you don't deserve to be in school. It's not as if the teacher lets your guess how much each assignment is worth.

College educations are going to become worthless if every lazy idiot is allowed to get one because of super PC concepts like this.


It seems I've expressed myself inaccurately.

I was rather talking about the entire score you will get for your term/semester, not a singular assignment. I do support the idea that you get punished with a 0% for for failing to produce a hand-in. However, I do not support the idea that having not handed in an (1, maybe 2 depending on the total number) assignment whatsoever (for whatever reason) has to mean that it drops your mark across the whole term by X percentage.

And yes, I never really cared about other people's scores when I myself did really well.

http://www.every1graduates.org/PDFs/BeyondTheIndicators.pdf

micro, is that the second one you source? what page is the no zero thing on because it's a pretty lengthy article.
That isn't it. I don't recognize that pdf.
ModeratorThere are animal crackers for people and there are people crackers for animals.
Sadistx
Profile Blog Joined February 2009
Zimbabwe5568 Posts
November 04 2009 01:15 GMT
#51
This is a self-solving problem - if the assignment is minor and unimportant, like a single homework, then the worst thing that can happen is it drops your total grade by 1-2%, as homework is usually no more than 20% of the grade by weight.
If the assignment is a major one (like one of 3 or 4) - you better make sure you hand it in, or else you deserve to get whatever the drop is.

You can implement a policy of dropping 1-2 lowest grades from homework assignments (including 0s) if you so wish, but in my experience it makes little difference in the end, not enough to affect the letter grade most of the time, again due to little weight of the homework.
Mora
Profile Blog Joined October 2002
Canada5235 Posts
November 04 2009 01:49 GMT
#52
intresting topic.

i'm enjoying the discussion.

just thought i'd share.
Happiness only real when shared.
[ZiNC]Ling
Profile Blog Joined April 2009
United States69 Posts
November 04 2009 04:15 GMT
#53
On November 04 2009 03:49 micronesia wrote:
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.

Personally, I would allocate 20% to each assignment, to be divided up differently on each assignment depending on whether it's divided into problems, stages, etc. If a student doesn't complete the assignment on time, he loses some points (perhaps 20% per day as someone else in this thread suggested), and if he never turns the assignment in at all, he gets a zero. Disclaimer: I'm not a teacher, just a student and occasionally a tutor/grader.

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.

This is pretty similar to my high school and college, although this system seems a little kinder since it doesn't have A-, B-, etc. I always hate getting something with a minus sign on it.

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 <calculations>.

It's true that F is a big category, and it isn't a very kind letter either since it stands for Failure. I think it's highly dependent on the content of the assignment whether someone who has earned 50% of the points has failed, but generally it's accurate to say that someone who does no work whatsoever or never turns in his assignment has failed.

At my high school we had report cards every half semester, and at my college we get them every semester, which I presume is fairly standard. In the middle of the grading period and again a week or two before grades are finalized, most teachers give any student who has not turned in an assignment a notice to that effect. In most cases this leaves students plenty of time to do something to handle the missed assignment, whether it's completing the assignment late, doing extra work on a different assignment, consulting the teacher for help, or dropping the class.

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).

The way I see it, a zero for someone who deserves a zero is simply accurate feedback. A teacher who refuses to give a zero to a student who deserves one is not doing him any favors. A kind teacher might offer the student extra help with the course, a chance to redo the assignment, or an additional assignment to make up for his zero. A strict teacher will say, "Look junior, I gave you a deadline for this assignment, and you could have turned it in on any day up until the deadline but you did not. You missed ALL your chances, and you've done nothing to deserve yet more chances. Try harder next time."

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.

As some have already mentioned before me, the college style grading systems that I know of perform exactly the same calculation. The student's average is 64%, which is a D, and on a GPA scale this translates into a 1.0. At some schools this may be considered a failing grade, but at the schools I have attended 64% would be barely passing.

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.

<related reading>

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.

I don't think there is a problem with "punishing" students with a 0% for doing 0% of their work. I think the enormous impact of zeroes is just a symptom of grade inflation. This problem lies with grading systems who declare a 50% a failure equivalent to a 0% (i.e. both represented as F) and do not often give out grades in the 0%-50% range to students who deserve them. As a result, students' sense of what grade is acceptable is heavily skewed toward the top end of the grading scale. A grade of 50% is pretty much universally considered a horrible, even "rock bottom" grade to get, instead of being thought of as halfway between perfect (100%) and nothing (0%). And overall, grades are taken as the outcome of school, where the truly useful outcome is the information gained.

It took me until college to figure this out, but grades are not a true measure of a student's skill or effort. The idea of a grade is simply to communicate how well the student performed in the class, which is invariably based on the professor's personal expectations, comparison with other students in the class, and random circumstances that disrupt the student's performance unexpectedly. I don't think this is any different than real life. Based on what I hear from my parents and my friends who have graduated, salaries and promotions have a luck and/or circumstance aspect just as grades do.

I do think that there are important things that teachers and students can both do to minimize the number of zeros they give and receive respectively:

As a student, my favorite way for professors to avoid giving me zeros is to have a policy such as, "There will be an assignment every week, and at the end of the semester your worst assignment will not count for your final grade." In this case I don't feel like I should be nervous about forgetting an assignment in the printer, or getting sick one day, since I have one free fuckup.

Obviously I have never been a professor, but I feel like my responsibility as a college student is to be organized, stay on top of my work, and handle unexpected circumstances maturely. I find that if I go to my professor's office and say something like, "I don't think I'll be able to complete the assignment for Friday on time, since I have a big presentation on Friday. Would you be willing to give me a 24 hour extension, so I can work on the assignment after my presentation?" the answer is usually yes.
Sadist
Profile Blog Joined October 2002
United States7219 Posts
November 04 2009 04:40 GMT
#54
On November 04 2009 06:07 Xeris wrote:
Show nested quote +
On November 04 2009 05:53 Mastermind wrote:
On November 04 2009 04:05 Xeris wrote:
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.

I disagree with this. When I was in HS I didnt do many assignments because I saw no educational value in them. I gained nothing by completing them except for a grade that I didnt care about. In the real world you only need to do what is necessary to complete the job. Not a bunch of extra filler material that is designed for the soul purpose of eating up your time.
If I am going to gain something from an assignment, I will do it. Which is exactly what happened when I was university. In HS I probably did 30% of my assignments and in University it was more like 98%.
I did what work I needed to do in order to understand the material and ace the exams. And that is exactly how it works in the real world. If you need to know how to use a certain computer program to do your job your boss isnt going to make you take the training course for that program if you already know how to use it, but in high school they would force you to do it anyways. The HS system is totally broken in my opinion. It is a fucking joke. It is designed so any idiot can pass which makes it extremely boring and unrewarding for those people that are intelligent.


The point of the assignments isn't actually learning something. In very few college majors (aside maybe from engineering and hard sciences) you don't learn actual job skills. As a Poli Sci major - I've learned absolutely nothing in my classes that is making my job (researching at a Think Tank) easier. The point of school assignments is to teach you work ethic, responsibility, etc.



You dont learn job skills in engineering (at least mechanical here at msu)

im fucked..... =((
How do you go from where you are to where you want to be? I think you have to have an enthusiasm for life. You have to have a dream, a goal and you have to be willing to work for it. Jim Valvano
d3_crescentia
Profile Blog Joined May 2009
United States4054 Posts
November 04 2009 07:16 GMT
#55
some kids just have trouble dealing with deadlines, yes, and a lot of them get demotivated once they hit a roadblock and aren't able to finish on time, because then they realize they have a choice in whether or not to do the work - which is true, but to teach work ethic, they need to be tricked into thinking that there ISN'T a choice

no nambly pambly "make our students feel better" compromises - usually in the past, teachers could beat their students for acting out of line - so what really needs to be done here is some form of discipline from either parents or students with a punishment so severe kids would never even think about doing it again

and that involves pain and shame, and we all like our kids to feel special, but pain and shame works better in a lot of cases

so beat your kids

and establish a school system where if you don't complete your work, you get an incomplete and won't be allowed to pass the class, AND you only get ONE chance where you can simply hand in your incomplete work for the credit you would have received, and make sure the parents make a BIG deal out of this whole process (and beat their kids if they don't)

and then save up the money for therapy years down the line in case they need it
once, not long ago, there was a moon here
KurtistheTurtle
Profile Blog Joined December 2008
United States1966 Posts
November 04 2009 07:30 GMT
#56
I'll agree that shame works. It sucks and it isn't fun at all to learn that way, but there were some things I had to learn over the course of last year where if I didn't it was shameful. I can still recite them without a pause right now. And it isn't for everyone, which is the problem with every other teaching method.
“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears."
biomedical
Profile Blog Joined October 2009
235 Posts
November 04 2009 11:40 GMT
#57
i think you should be able to hand in work "late", just get -X per day that it is handed in late rather than an instant 0
geometryb
Profile Blog Joined November 2005
United States1249 Posts
November 04 2009 13:18 GMT
#58
might've been mentioned already but,
weight assignments: i.e. homework 20%, projects 20%, tests 60%
drop the lowest homework grade
KlaCkoN
Profile Blog Joined May 2007
Sweden1661 Posts
November 04 2009 14:30 GMT
#59
I am so happy that I don't have to deal with the bull"# that seem to be graded homework.
One test at the end of the second year for 25% of the final degree mark, one at the end of the third year for 50% and one thesis by the end of the fourth for 25%. Nothing else counts, labs are pass/fail with fail = cannot sit exams = failed exams = kicked out.

How does graded hoework work in curved classes anyway (seem to be common in the US)? Do people like trick each other into giving the wrong answers? Or do they still help each other out and stuff?
"Voice or no voice the people can always be brought to the bidding of their leaders ... All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."
blue_arrow
Profile Blog Joined July 2008
1971 Posts
November 05 2009 08:02 GMT
#60
i prefer courses with 0 hw and a couple tests + finals
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