there's more downside than upside. One failure cancels out 3 or 4 successes Some should be so hard that the hardest exam problems go for years without being an

there's more downside than upside. One failure cancels out 3 or 4 successes Some should be so hard that the hardest exam problems go for years without being answered. Make it so hard that 20% is passing and 60% is exceptional-- instead of 70% being passing and 95% being exceptional I think what you're getting at here is the question of scale. The students in the linked story quit upon reaching 100%. But obviously they had not learned 100% of the words in English, they had only learned 100% of the words on a very short vocabulary list. One way to keep their motivation might be to scale their accomplishments relative to the total number of words. There are somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 words in English (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Number_of_words_in_English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Number_of_word...). The teacher might keep track of the total number of words the students have learned. Basic English is about 850 words, and newspaper literacy is somewhere between 4000–10,000 words. Regardless of how many they learn in class, they will always know how many more there are to learn. You ideas about higher downsides to grading and scaling the 'exceptional' point to a shift from averaging grades based on mastering course content to cumulative grades based on mastering field content. Does that sound about right?