Check your valedictorian privilege. It hurts my FEELZ

[Endus]

In my field, architecture, nobody looks at your grade. If you work in Spain, your portfolio is what matters. If you work outside of Spain, you're a Spanish architect, which essentially grants you access anywhere because the degree here agglutinates several other professional fields (such as the entirety of your second degree).
Doing better is your portfolio. Not the grades. Grades are entirely irrelevant. And not just in my field: they weight less and less as you age and attain more work experience.

That's more or less the point I was making. You can always improve upon your work, and making your portfolio as good as it can be is the goal. Not "okay, I got a B, that's good enough".

[Masark]

Being in the top 10% of a university means a lot more than being in the top 10% of Random Public High School X. To argue otherwise is not only stupid, its disingenuous.

So? All you're arguing is to make it "top 0.5%" rather than an objective measure.

[May90]

Way to interpret the article... The real story is that valedictorians and salutorians used to be assigned according solely to GPA, while now they will no longer exist, and another system of ranks, accounting for both GPA and extracurricular achievements, will be used.

[Brubear]

My real issue with stuff like school valedictorianships is that it makes education into a contest, where you're competing with other students in your school, which is an asinine perspective. It shouldn't be about "beating" anyone, and nobody should ever get to feel that they're "the best", because there is always more to learn. It's why I disagree with giving any student a 100% on anything (and avoiding evaluation methods like multiple-choice tests which allow for them). No matter how good their essay may be, it didn't win a Pulitzer and become a touchstone for future generations, so it probably could have been better, and it's more important for their development to give them higher plateaus to shoot for than to pat them on the back and say "that's adequate".

That doesn't mean all feedback should be negative, but there's always room for improvement.

While normally I'm in agreement with you, this is an opinion where we greatly diverge.

Yes, in education there is always more to learn, and we would be better served in testing whether you are able to apply what you learned rather than what you remember.

With that said, the idea that you should not get full credit (100%) because you could always have done better is just silly perfectionism. You should get 100% if you adequately met all criteria put forth for the assignment/class. If we were to use the grade system, that would gain you an A. If you were pretty close but were off an a few things, that would get you a B. If you're only half way there, a C. If you got a few parts right but were mostly off the mark, a D. Finally, if you didn't meet any of the criteria or displayed no understanding of the topic, an F.

Now, if they write a Pulitzer-worthy essay for an English class then they have clearly gone above and beyond the requirements of the assignment and would deserve something higher than an A, so an A+ or extra credit.

That's the whole idea behind having a grading scale. Teaching people that, it doesn't matter how good you did on your assignment because you can ALWAYS do better doesn't help encourage learning, it discourages people from trying. Why keep giving their best if you're telling them that their best will never be good enough?

Yes, they're not writing an essay that will change the future. Because that is not what they're supposed to be learning in a high-school English class. They should be solidifying their mastery of basic grammar and the structure of the English language. They should be introduced to more advanced topics and how to dissect works of literature. Prepare them for the higher thinking needed to perform well in more advanced topics. If they show that they have a firm grasp on that, why on earth should they not receive 100%? They met the criteria put forth.

Unless your criteria so so ridiculously high that they can never meet it. In which case, you need to reassess your criteria and approach, because you've likely set your standards too high. You've lost sight of what the purpose of the class/assignment is for.

[nextormento]

That's more or less the point I was making. You can always improve upon your work, and making your portfolio as good as it can be is the goal. Not "okay, I got a B, that's good enough".

Yes, which is why I argue that grading has no meaning beyond fail/pass. Because excellence is somewhere else.
If it wasn't sufficiently clear: I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your point of view. After all I'm not a teacher, nor do I have strong opinions on the subject. And I'm not all too interested in debating what a subject is or the scope of evaluation.

I merely explained how I see our rewards for excellence, which is: to make grades (not the achievement of learning more stuff) minimally meaningful.
The rewards were really a 1 in a hundred or thousand people thing. I only knew 1 other student working on them. I got 5 of them through school, but only because I'm much more interested in certain subjects than what is expected from an architect (descriptive geometry, for instance, is something computers do; the only point of the subject is to develop complex spatial thinking; but I liked it to unusual points).
And, for what is worth, I too find them ridiculous. But I didn't really explore why. The problem I have with them is that they encouraged me to focus a lot less on other subjects, so that I could work on the reward. My grades were very asymmetric because of that. Alas, that's what we had, so I made the best I could with it.

[Sesshou]

It's why I disagree with giving any student a 100% on anything (and avoiding evaluation methods like multiple-choice tests which allow for them).

So if they got every question 100% correct, you wouldn't agree with giving them 100%? If the assignment is subjective like an essay, then sure I can see your point. What about math though? Your later post talks about 1000 level college math courses, but even senior level and graduate level college math courses like Real Analysis or Stochastic Calculus the answers are either right or wrong (though usually you can get partial credit). If my proofs are 100% correct, should I not get a 100%? It isn't just multiple choice tests, but any test without subjective questions. Please explain what format you are suggesting be used for a math test where answers are right or wrong since you don't like formats that give 100%s.

[May90]

So if they got every question 100% correct, you wouldn't agree with giving them 100%? If the assignment is subjective like an essay, then sure I can see your point. What about math though? Your later post talks about 1000 level college math courses, but even senior level and graduate level college math courses like Real Analysis or Stochastic Calculus the answers are either right or wrong (though usually you can get partial credit). If my proofs are 100% correct, should I not get a 100%? It isn't just multiple choice tests, but any test without subjective questions. Please explain what format you are suggesting be used for a math test where answers are right or wrong since you don't like formats that give 100%s.

I'd say every assignment should contain both objective and subjective elements. Objective ones can get you a part of grade up to 100% included, while in subjective ones, there is always a room for improvement. Even in Real Analysis, you could give students, say, an assignment in which they need to make a mini-research, without the "right" or "wrong" answer, right there in class.

[stormgust]

No, but you can stop encouraging it, at the administrative level.

If they're doing it regardless, you should turn it into a healthy competition at the administrative level, not let it devolve into something you cannot control at all.

A kid's grades shouldn't be relevant to anyone but the kid, their parents, and the teacher. Hell, it's better if they don't get "grades", but instead get graded according to a rubric. They require grades to be standardized up here, still, but teachers have all moved over to using such rubrics; they get converted into grades down the line, rather than just telling the student "you get an 82" which tells them nothing of use.

I had to look up what rubrics are, but isn't a rubric just telling how they got their grade is made up. If in the US you really just got a grade on essays or similar subjective assignements, then I can see why grading has to be changed, but here in germany, teachers usually gave a grade on essays, alongside some notes (though with varying quality depending on the teacher) on where your shortcomings were.

If there's more to learn on the subject, then you DON'T understand it completely.

That's sort of the point.

Test don't see what you don't know of, and if subsequent topics build on what you just learned, you have to make sure that students got a solid foundation on that, otherwise you're just asking for them to fall behind.

To take you up on you're earlier "I disagree with giving 100%", that's just not something you should do under the current system, because all what students see is: "I can't meet the teachers expectations, so why should I aim higher", i.e. you're just discouraging them. Instead you should set expectations they can actually meet, and then show them where the higher goals to aim for are (you seem to be under the impressions, that they won't pursue further goals it seems?).

Outside of purely mathematical questions which have a straight right/wrong aspect, even STEM subjects get away from this stuff.

Care to elaborate on this, how did STEM subjects/teaching change, which would take away the right/wrong aspects. At a school levels, it's mostly laying foundations, and those usually are objective.

You'll see that in the first year, but once you get into theoretical mathematics or the like, you're back into much more subjective territory.

AC vs. non AC. I can't really think about more which would be "subjective" in theoretical math.

[Endus]

I had to look up what rubrics are, but isn't a rubric just telling how they got their grade is made up.

Here's one I snagged of the Internet which seems okay;

http://www.duxbury.k12.ma.us/cms/lib...d%20Rubric.jpg

The basic gist is that the categories are rated from 1-4, anything 2 or higher is a "pass", the number of categories really doesn't matter. If you want to convert it to a letter grade, you've got A, B, C/D, and F built in (C/D share a category, they're usually narrower anyway). There's specific targetable goals you identify for the students, so they can understand what their strengths and weak points were. It isn't really DESIGNED for conversion into a number/letter grade, because it's meant to be used as-is; letter/number grades are essentially an archaic holdover at this point, that people aren't willing to give up because they're so culturally ingrained.

Care to elaborate on this, how did STEM subjects/teaching change, which would take away the right/wrong aspects. At a school levels, it's mostly laying foundations, and those usually are objective.

If you're writing up lab reports for physics/chemistry/biology or the like, your writing and language skills matter, as do how well you designed the experiment to test for your desired factor and so forth (assuming you're past introductory levels, where that's done for you).

Just by way of example.

[Garnier Fructis]

AC vs. non AC. I can't really think about more which would be "subjective" in theoretical math.

There's subjectivity in grading an incorrect proof. The degree of wrongness can range anywhere from trivial (accidentally dropping a factor of two), to slightly bad (not proving that a set with a certain property exists), to very bad (assuming a result that's actually false).

Now, if everyone took the same approach then there might be hope of some objective grading criteria, but when you have people making all sorts of mistakes with many different approaches, and that's where the subjectivity in evaluation comes from.

AC vs. non AC is not something that's going to matter to the vast majority of mathematicians, much less students. Mathematicians that feel strongly one way or another are basically assholes anyway, since it effectively amounts to a condemnation of the mathematics that others are doing.

[Simulacrum]

... because there is always more to learn. It's why I disagree with giving any student a 100% on anything (and avoiding evaluation methods like multiple-choice tests which allow for them). No matter how good their essay may be, it didn't win a Pulitzer and become a touchstone for future generations, so it probably could have been better, and it's more important for their development to give them higher plateaus to shoot for than to pat them on the back and say "that's adequate".

That doesn't mean all feedback should be negative, but there's always room for improvement.

But if there's always room for improvement then the space between 0% and 100% is infinite, making every single answer every person could possibly give to anything that wasn't something like a pure logical abstraction a 0%. After all, saying that the earth is round is just as astronomically far from a complete answer to the perfect shape of the earth as saying that it is flat is. So is writing a "good" essay relative to a "perfect" essay, whatever that would actually objectively be. May as well throw the entire grading system out the window if that's what all things are going to be measured up against. Which luckily it isn't, since everybody understands that what people are measured up against isn't objective reality but other people. Well, outside the fields that deal with objective reality, anyway. Grading engineers subjectively probably wouldn't be a good idea.

- - - Updated - - -

There's subjectivity in grading an incorrect proof. The degree of wrongness can range anywhere from trivial (accidentally dropping a factor of two), to slightly bad (not proving that a set with a certain property exists), to very bad (assuming a result that's actually false).

Does it really matter? If you get the answer wrong, whether you got it wrong because you didn't understand the right way to do it or because your brain swapped numbers around, the answer is still wrong.

I was one of the latter kind in school. Did great at understanding all the concepts in maths, but whenever I took tests I'd get these generously awarded half-points for tons of questions because I'd mix up numbers in my head and get the wrong answer out of a correct solution. That I might understand how to properly solve these problems didn't change that I wasn't able to actually solve them, and I'd make a pretty shitty mathematician as a result. Heck, I couldn't even reliably operate a cash register...

[Rennadrel]

No, but you can stop encouraging it, at the administrative level.

A kid's grades shouldn't be relevant to anyone but the kid, their parents, and the teacher. Hell, it's better if they don't get "grades", but instead get graded according to a rubric. They require grades to be standardized up here, still, but teachers have all moved over to using such rubrics; they get converted into grades down the line, rather than just telling the student "you get an 82" which tells them nothing of use.



If there's more to learn on the subject, then you DON'T understand it completely.

That's sort of the point.



Outside of purely mathematical questions which have a straight right/wrong aspect, even STEM subjects get away from this stuff. You'll see that in the first year, but once you get into theoretical mathematics or the like, you're back into much more subjective territory.

You shouldn't discourage competition and excellence among students. If you care about your future, you should be willing to work hard to be the best. Competition is one of the healthiest things for kids.

[Garnier Fructis]

Does it really matter? If you get the answer wrong, whether you got it wrong because you didn't understand the right way to do it or because your brain swapped numbers around, the answer is still wrong.

I was one of the latter kind in school. Did great at understanding all the concepts in maths, but whenever I took tests I'd get these generously awarded half-points for tons of questions because I'd mix up numbers in my head and get the wrong answer out of a correct solution. That I might understand how to properly solve these problems didn't change that I wasn't able to actually solve them, and I'd make a pretty shitty mathematician as a result. Heck, I couldn't even reliably operate a cash register...

It matters a hell of a lot. Notice that I'm talking about proofs, not about basic calculations. Mathematics programs mostly stop giving a shit about calculations like 2 years in. An otherwise correct proof where you forgot to mention a trivial case (like if your proof method doesn't work for a = 0, but the a = 0 case is trivially true) is nowhere near as wrong as a 'proof' where the entire attempt is based on a false assumption.

Simple mistakes are also things that you'll catch if you have time to proofread your own work (like homework or projects). If you're doing research, then you likely have collaborators and the chance that a trivial error goes uncorrected decreases. Major mistakes like assuming something non-obvious (a.k.a. leaving out a lot of work) or assuming something actually false are not something that's simply corrected. It actually indicates that you don't understand the material very well at all.

Theoretical math exams are like 4-7 questions. There are going to be a whole lot of F's if simple mistakes are treated just like critical mistakes in the grading.

[Cthulhu 2020]

In educations systems where there can be only one winner, everyone knows who the best student is, and they don't try to beat that best person. Sorry, it's not like in soccer where they give the winners and the losers a trophy; you give the HIGH PERFORMING students rewards, but not rewards to those who do not meet the best performance standards, then you are still awarding achievement, not "giving everyone an award" and it's asinine to claim otherwise. If people meet a certain threshold of achievement, you are still awarding performance and not just telling everyone they're winners.

[Underverse]

Not seeing the problem here.

[purebalance]

Sounds like they're taking a more collegiate level approach and still rewarding students for academic excellence.

Extremely minor outrage-bait article (well, mainly the title of this thread) is minor and blown out of proportion because...I don't know, raisins.

Eh that isn't quite how colleges work. It's still the top X% and summa cum laude is the top 1 or 2% iirc so even if you have a 3.75 you aren't guaranteed anything. High schools have already somewhat been similar by having valedictorian, salutatorian, and honor grads.

[Endus]

You shouldn't discourage competition and excellence among students. If you care about your future, you should be willing to work hard to be the best. Competition is one of the healthiest things for kids.

If you make education about "winning", you end up disincentivizing the kids who don't feel they have a shot at "winning". They just give up, and try and just "get by", rather than seeing how well they can do for their own benefit.

It's one of the things that's arguably most screwed-up about the American educational system.

[Bollocks]

If you make education about "winning", you end up disincentivizing the kids who don't feel they have a shot at "winning". They just give up, and try and just "get by", rather than seeing how well they can do for their own benefit.

It's one of the things that's arguably most screwed-up about the American educational system.

^This. Also I disagree with the notion of not puting 100%. If you are going to be that perfectionist to the point in which nothing is going to be enough, kids are going to give up once they discover that fact. Not sure what system would be better though.

[Reinhard von Lohengramm]

I'll cash in my High School Valedictorian Privilege here and give my two cents.

No to awards based on Rank.You're not here to compete, but to learn.
Yes, YES to awards based on threshold (Honor Roll and Improvement awards). But that doesn't mean we shouldn't reward excellence and the ability to get the material better.

As for "Don't give 100% ever..." I've nothing more to add beyond what's been stated.

[Sixnalia]

When I graduated from my high school about 5 years back, our top 10 wasn't really the "best of the best" for grades. They simply had more grades. The top 10 students all took at least 2-4 additional classes online, with the top student taking 4. Some of those courses did little to test them, the Valedictorian of my class was a friend who mentioned at least three of them were a free A with little to no work. His parents forced him to do it, because they wanted him to be "the top".

Knowing that the difference between the students who earned straight 100's in their classes and the top 10 felt disappointing and left most of the student body unimpressed.

Hopefully these titles and the way they're given will deter parents from forcing their children to take extra courses that do little to challenge them. They should be taking dual-courses for college level education, or AP classes.