9 ms·

Somewhat related, there was another article this week that mentioned kids (and parents) now get notifications sent over the phone of their grades: https://www.v

• legionof7 8y ago
  Yeah, I'm in high school right now and they have this system. They also had the same in middle school. There's no way this instant feedback system is mentally healthy. Also, a lot of times, teachers push a 0 as a placeholder grade and parents aren't in the classroom, so they see that and flip out. Also, with the notification system, both parents and students see each assignment grade in a bubble, so it affects them a lot more than if they saw the whole semester grade (i.e getting an F on a homework assignment isn't a big deal)
  • skandl 8y ago
    this sounds terrible :(
  • Hello71 8y ago
    wouldn't it make more sense to use 1 as a placeholder
    • yogeshlor 8y ago
      how about hyphen -
      • tatami 8y ago
        Which is not an Integer and the whole view crashes after the ConversionError. You know it
        • saagarjha 8y ago
          My high school system used to convert those to zeroes, just FYI. Anything that was nonnumeric and not a fixed set of "aliases" (for example, "pass" might mean 100% if the teacher set it up that way) became a zero.
      • nailer 8y ago
        How about using an integer where an integer is needed and false where no grade has been produced, with the teacher and student UI showing 'Not yet graded [x]' rather than using magic numbers?
    • gpvos 8y ago
      Where I live, 1 looks more like an actual grade (the lowest one) than a 0, so that would be a very bad idea.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • gre 8y ago
    Opt out
  • freeflight 8y ago
    > Also, with the notification system, both parents and students see each assignment grade in a bubble, so it affects them a lot more than if they saw the whole semester grade (i.e getting an F on a homework assignment isn't a big deal) Could also show the average grade of the class for each assignment, to give students, parents, and teachers a reference for how well they are actually doing?
    • chrismeller 8y ago
      That's a possible partial fix, but I recall plenty of classes in high school and college that had a weighted grading scale. Done every homework assignment and aced every test all semester but then bomb the midterm or final? You're still in trouble. Also vice versa - if you didn't do any homework all year, but the midterm is going to be worth 90% of your grade anyway. And of course we all know there are teachers that are just notoriously harder than anyone else where no one is going to get an A in the class, so there's also an aspect of how well other people have done on the assignment/in the class as a whole. None of that is new at all, though. The problem is that technology has now calculated out a number and displayed it and we as humans add more importance to that hard number. To me it's similar to the whole "fake news" thing - we're too inclined to glance at what the app on our phone says and not think any further.
    • JeanMarcS 8y ago
      The average grade could be an idea, but being the worse in a upper high good class doesn’t mean you’re bad. And I personally think that grades should show how you progress. If you get better with time it’s good. And also we all agree that one grade out of any context should’nt mean anything
  • ceautery 8y ago
    The system should prevent 0 from being pushed as a notification. Each teacher or school should be forced to deal with 0 in some other way, preferably erring on the side of helping students, rather than punishing them.
    • antsar 8y ago
      Teachers already seem overworked. Wouldn’t they just invent a new magic number, maybe “1”?
      • kijin 8y ago
        101 would be a relatively safe number to use as a placeholder. Since these people aren't programmers, trying to use NULL or NaN or -1 will probably backfire.
        • sethammons 8y ago
          Sentry values are a nope. Have the assignment have a is_published check box / flag. An option to select all as published and the ability to toggle/select individual's assignments as published.
        • hnuser355 8y ago
          No, there could be extra credit
      • FakeComments 8y ago
        It wouldn’t stop a 0 from being entered as a grade — just not push that notification. This would actually makes teaching easier, as they can use a 0 as a placeholder without having to decide about accidentally pushing a notification. I don’t think the teacher’s goal is to cause a panic with a transient 0 that’s later replaced — so I don’t see why they’d stop using something that better accomplished their goals.
    • Tempest1981 8y ago
      How about a system where grades are published online. If the parent and student don't acknowledge the grade within 7 days, a reminder text is sent. Then later the actual grade. A related issue is that many parents struggle with school website logins/passwords. I bet a significant percentage never log in, all year. But they can't ignore their phones.
  • sroya 8y ago
    Which SIS are you using?
  • paganel 8y ago
    But why send the grades (real or invented, it doesn’t matter) to students’ and parents’ phones? Who does that help? Does it help the students? Apparently not, because it looks like it makes them more anxious. Does it help the parents? It probably only helps those “tiger” moms and dads who are toxic anyway, I honestely think a parent shouldn’t care about the intrinsic details of his kids grades and day-to-day activity at school, it only causes more anxiety for said kids as it makes them even more nervous and risk-averse. And on a more general note, how did we manage to screw this up? (I’m talking about people in my generation, late-20s, 30s, early 40s). Why are our kids anxious? Why do they kill themselves? Why do I hear of a close friend’s niece cutting herself when she’s only 12? We weren’t like that, at least not at this magnitude/level, so the screw-up is on us.
    • legionof7 8y ago
      I think schools just wanted to hop on the latest technology and the easiest way for companies to push that was "instant feedback" or something. They didn't foresee the unintended mental health consequences.
    • idrios 8y ago
      >how did we manage to screw this up? I was a teacher last year and while I can't answer this question fully, I do know that it's a result of perverse incentives and group pressure. Where I taught at school (a private English school in China) we also had an app that shows parents how their student is doing. They'd see test scores as soon as I uploaded the grades, and I'd get complaints from some of the parents if I was more than a day late in uploading those scores. In the case of my school, we were competing with other private English schools. If we stopped or had never started using this app, we would get a few parents complaining "why can't I see my son's grade? [school z] does it, so I'm going to switch to their school!" We would lose some parents -- and for our student-retention team, losing too many parents means a pay for cut the following year. They would do anything to keep those parents so promises get made, and ultimately the school would certainly go back to using the app. Meanwhile the group who built the app gets fabulously wealthy because they've built a (albeit harmful) service that their clients can't possibly get rid of. Depressingly, the only way I see it turning back would be a force of equally-upset parents who removed their students from the school while asking "why do you use this at all? It's fostering anxiety and depression for my kid". People vote with their wallets.
• userbinator 8y ago
  From someone who went through the "old-school" (literally) system, that's something I would've loved to have --- not notifications per se, but the ability to get feedback much faster, to satiate the "how did I do?" feeling I got immediately after submitting anything.
  • PakG1 8y ago
    I think it really depends on the psychology of the student and their perception of their performance for which they are awaiting results.
• saagarjha 8y ago
  From another viewpoint, I spent a significant amount of time in high school reverse engineering and retrofitting grade update notifications onto our school's (well, School Loop's) existing gradebook, which I shipped as part of my app for accessing this system. For privacy reasons, I would not display any grades or scores in the notification itself, opting for something like "your grade in $course has changed". This gave students the chance to wait to see their new score, since they would have to actively tap on the notification.
  • tempestn 8y ago
    I don't know if that's all that much better. As soon as you get the notification you're not going to be able to think of much else until you check.
    • saagarjha 8y ago
      Sure, but I see it as similar to the teacher giving you your test back: you get time to talk to your friends, prepare yourself, whatever before you actually see your grade (rather than it just popping up on your screen). In both, you do eventually have to see your grade, and you're not going to be thinking of much else while the teacher is going around passing out the test. Of course, I hadn't considered viewpoint when designing the feature, so it's not perfect, but I think it does a somewhat decent job (also, notifications are off by default, again, not because I had this issue in mind, but because I didn't want the iOS notification permission alert being the first thing that showed up when users launched the app).
      • hyperpape 8y ago
        One is during a specific time at school, one is not. That's a huge difference.
    • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      But that's no different to the status quo, you know that a grade is coming right from when you sit the test; and IME a teacher will say roughly when the marking will be done, so there's always anticipation. It sounds to me like this is the sort of thing that needs to be fixed by each person (for themselves) at some level. Sure, the provider can give multiple options (message with|without grade, message once a week, no message, etc.) but it's still up to the person to choose. If you're fretting over a grade coming you're going to fret, you need to fix your own notification system. You could get messages sent to a parent/carer instead, block the number and check them once a week, wait for the teacher to tell you, etc.. Just because food is put on your plate doesn't mean you have to eat it.
• MichaelMoser123 8y ago
  we also have a web portal where they notify us of pending homework (well, in reality its the teachers who are not always filling out the reports). When I saw that my reaction was: thanks goodness they didn't have these in my time...
• nmca 8y ago
  It really is horrible to do it that way - at University, our final grades were often released on a particular day but at an unknown time, ruining the day until around 5pm on one occasion.
• aquadrop 8y ago
  But you can disable notifications for the app on the OS level, right?
• nathanlied 8y ago
  Huh, given all the answers here - I guess I might be different from the average, I never considered a different experience. At my Alma Mater, we were always "mass-mailed" when grades were released. The email didn't have our grade specifically, but we could go on the University's portal, navigate to that class, and see whatever grade just got released - tests, exams, projects, anything we could be graded on, really. I loved this system, because the alternative was the grades being released and me not knowing about it, which would result in either having to check every X period of time, or, most likely, coding my own script to do it for me. I've been told by family that my old High School also works similarly nowadays, as well as other high schools and middle schools in the same district. I can't imagine it working any other way, given the increasing integration of technology. I'd like to know, though, isn't it just as anxiety-inducing to go in every morning after an assignment, knowing this could be the day it's delivered? Mine were delivered that way back in HS, sometimes at the beginning of class, others in the middle, sometimes we thought we weren't getting it that day, and the teacher would remember at the very end of class, or be reminded by someone. Is it because it's an "it could come at literally any time" thing, instead of being restricted to the class schedule?
  • nixpulvis 8y ago
    > I can't imagine it working any other way, given the increasing integration of technology. Just wait to release grades until a set time (maybe at the end of class), so students can all check their grades together? It could still be all online and tech savvy.
    • nathanlied 8y ago
      Yeah - I did not mean that line in the sense of "it cannot work any other way", but more that I hadn't imagined people could feel differently than me about that topic, so I didn't conceive of it evolving any other way. This topic opened my eyes a bit - and that feature is definitely something I'd push for, if ever given the opportunity to work in that kind of system.
  • alistairSH 8y ago
    Is it because it's an "it could come at literally any time" thing, instead of being restricted to the class schedule? I think that's exactly the difference. With in-class grade reporting, you know it's coming inside a 6-7 hour block of time. Even more precise if the assignment was for a given class. With real-time grading, you could receive the grades at the breakfast table on a Saturday morning. And the real-time grading is likely tied into how unhealthy other online forums can be. The student could get in the habit of just waiting for the grade (refresh, refresh, refresh if it's a web page). I finished high school before there was any automatic grade reporting (for assignments). And report cards were sent on a known schedule (and received a day or two later in the post). It wasn't stress free, but at least you could mentally prepare for the bad news.
• raarts 8y ago
  Tangential but reading this thread I feel many words have apparently changed meaning. Parent mentions that receiving the notifications are 'agonizing'. Another post in this thread calls it 'horrible' According to the Cambridge dictionary agonizing means: 'causing extreme physical or mental pain' or 'causing extreme worry'. Horrible means 'very bad unpleasant or disgusting'. These are very strong words, when I hear agonizing I think of a crushed leg, or seeing your daughter tortured, I would use horrible for similar circumstances, not a kid getting a bad grade in a notification.. And I personally think learning your kids to grow a thick skin to cope with the adult world is a good thing, so in conclusion I don't really see a problem here and people are way overreacting.
  • Retric 8y ago
    Most people have never had a crushed leg so their scale is limited to what they have experienced. Think back on all the insignificant trauma that seemed so important in high school. Within the range if the average American student, these things are a big deal.
  • profquail 8y ago
    Cambridge English dicctionary has “causing extreme worry” as the 2nd definition of “agonizing”: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/agonizing https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/agonizin... An example they give for this definition of the word is: “She went through an agonizing few weeks waiting for the test results.” — which is how the GP used it.
    • raarts 8y ago
      You are not wrong, but I think the 'test results' in the example refer to medical testing for a serious disease, and not a school test.
  • XMPPwocky 8y ago
    > And I personally think learning your kids to grow a thick skin to cope with the adult world is a good thing, What does this actually mean? My reading of it is- "as adults kids will be stressed, so don't try to keep them from being stressed when they're kids or else they won't be able to deal with stress later." Fair? If so, I have a modest proposal for you. Instead of providing the grades immediately, delay them by a random amount- weeks or months. Then, immediately notify both parent and child, at a random time of day. Perhaps weight it more heavily during mealtimes. Additionally, grade a small fraction of assignments- say, 5%- as zeroes regardless of actual performance- this will ensure that academically gifted children, even those whose parents don't pressure them- are also stressed. Since children are likely to outlive their parents, we should also randomly select some children, tell them their parents have died suddenly, and let them start to come to terms with that loss before it happens. Finally, all shoes and socks must surely be banned, to ensure the proper development of calluses on children's feet. Surely this will help make kids more resilient. Suffering is part of life, so children must suffer early and often or they'll be too weak.
• rubidium 8y ago
  I went to a high school without public course grades. We’d get qualitative feedback often, and quantitative feedback on tests (eg 78/100) but it was never translated into a letter grade. It was great. Letter grades were given at the end of the semester to the parents in a session with the teacher. Up to the parents if they shared that with their kids. Many didn’t.
• filmgirlcw 8y ago
  As someone who was a perfectionist to an unhealthy degree as a kid (and had high anxiety tied to that), this would have been a nightmare. Our grades and weekly averages were posted on a schedule for certain classes, and I would obsessively search the sheet for my student number to make sure I hadn’t fallen below my personal threshold of acceptability (which was often far too high), but at least I knew the date/time grades would be posted. If I was especially freaking out, I could sometime cajole a teacher to grade an exam or something early — but having that “you could find out at any time your world is still spinning or perilously out of balance” would have been awful. And my parents weren’t even part of this —- if anything they actively tried to make me care less —- but plenty of parents when I was in middle/high school were obsessed with kids grades and just the thought that my mom would get a text the same time as me as to my grades is flat-out horrifying.
• Tempest1981 8y ago
  The reason is probably because teachers are frustrated by parents who are too busy to take interest in their child's education, so they overcompensate and over-communicate, thinking it may help. And if done properly, it might.