6 ms·

Grading for Equity

12 points by loughnane 5y ago

Bostonian 5y ago
The author wants to reduce demographic disparities in grades by making grading easier. That will not reduce disparities in actual learning and may increase them. Teachers should strive to be impartial and accurate in grading. Producing "equity" as in equal results is not their job.
- simiones 5y ago
  At least some of the proposals go directly against what you are saying. For example, the author (interviewee) points out the practice of adding extra credit for conscientiousness, which makes it exactly that students are graded incorrectly compared to their actual knowledge on the subject. In another example, he points out how students who start out doing poorly in a new class but by the end have improved and have absorbed the knowledge will nevertheless get a mediocre final grade because their final grade is an average. In a third example, he points out how homework is often copied or done by others, and so again, grades for homework tend to misrepresent a student's actual knowledge in the class.
- __ryan__ 5y ago
  > The author wants to reduce demographic disparities in grades by making grading easier. Can you point out where this is expressed in the transcript? I am missing it.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > The author wants to reduce demographic disparities in grades by making grading easier. No, the author wants final grading to reflect ultimate subject mastery, not (e.g.) be distorted by details of the process by which that mastery was approached. Part of this is reducing demographic disparities, but only those demographic disparities in grading that are artifacts of the system grading for things other than ultimate mastery (including, as the article notes, giving what amounts to bonus on the final grade for coming in more advanced even when there is no difference in final mastery.) > Producing "equity" as in equal results is not their job. “Equity”, as used here, is not equal results independent of mastery. It is equal results for equal mastery.
literallyaduck 5y ago
Grading for quality, and correct answers and providing remedial instructions without stigma would elevate everyone. It is academic fraud to mislabel student grades. It cheats future employers who will stop accepting degrees as a measure of quality. It cheats students who rightfully paid and honestly earned their grades. Most of all it treats the students who didn't earn their grades as less than everyone else. If they were not adequately nutured into a quality student, they should be tutored and assisted in getting up to standard. Consider Always Sunny in Philadelphia, does it help Charlie when he is told he is a genius? We have this problem right now with anyone who has a sports scholarship. It can be assumed they didn't earn their degrees the same way a non-sport student did.
- simiones 5y ago
  > Grading for quality, and correct answers and providing remedial instructions without stigma would elevate everyone. Fortunately, the author is proposing exactly this. Their critique of current grading practices is precisely that they do not correctly reflect student performance.
DiggyJohnson 5y ago
I am extremely skeptical of this approach. Weary, too. It is prioritizing all the wrong things. If grading is inefficient then it ought to be improved, but replacing qualified achievement with instant gratification is very sad to see and will only harm the education of all students subject to the practice.
- boplicity 5y ago
  I don't think you understood the article at all. For example, they talk about how standard grading practices often misrepresent mastery, by including grades from the beginning of a class, before the learning has happened. This benefits people who start out with advantages, and clearly disadvantages people who end up with the same level of mastery, but start at a place where they need to learn more. This relates back to software design: Averaging the homework scores from the entire class is a "default" in how most grading software works. It doesn't have to be.
  - bojangleslover 5y ago
    Well then why not just give one big test at the end of the year, something tells me that would end up being even less equitable than the current system
  - DiggyJohnson 5y ago
    I read the entire transcript and understood that point. I prefer the default grading method to the proposed solution, though I admit I much prefer this discussion to those of the form of “getting rid of grades altogether.” I don’t think we actually see the outcome you are referring to, where students who struggle at first end up with the same level of mastery. I don’t think we should use the grading process itself to compensate for inequities if they do exist.
    - professoretc 5y ago
      It's less a matter of someone failing all the early tests but pulling a Hail Mary in the final, and more a matter of someone failing an early test because it took them an extra week to grasp the material; i.e., if the test had been offered a week later, they would have passed. So they still learned everything, just not on the artificial schedule imposed by one-off tests.
ihsw 5y ago
Post-secondary academic institutions are at a cross-roads now -- they must decide whether they pursue truth or whether they pursue justice. It cannot be both. Harvard made their choice.
queuebert 5y ago
The delicious irony of this coming from an institution notorious for grade inflation.
- echopurity 5y ago
  The delicious indoctrination of believing there are objective grades to inflate.
synergy20 5y ago
The goal is really just that: let's not grade at all, so everyone got the same score and that's the only way to be fair to _everyone_ due to the current practice is imperfect. please tell me something that is perfect in the world, just one of it. education equity(read: score equally) is popular from k-12 now onto college, seems nothing can stop that. path to hell is paved with equity "good-will" thoughts.
- simiones 5y ago
  > The goal is really just that: let's not grade at all, so everyone got the same score and that's the only way to be fair to _everyone_ due to the current practice is imperfect. The article is arguing precisely the opposite: focusing grades more precisely on student performance, instead of extraneous things like time dedicated to school, discipline, conscientiousness etc, that are all a significant part of grading today.
temp8964 5y ago
This is an article asking for political flamewar. What the guy specifically said has nothing to do with the political "equity" or "inequity". The points he raised are issues common in educational measurement to get more valid scores. It is pathetic that he tries to spread his voice by appealing to a political side.
- tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
  I didn't read the whole thing but I had the same impression. I have no idea how it ties into equity, apart from "more accurate scores might help anyone who would otherwise be disadvantaged by the scoring system", which is several leaps removed from "equity".
echopurity 5y ago
Never gonna square that circle.
tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
I admit I didn't read the entire conversation so I can't give an absolute opinion on it, but the following passage stuck out to me: The problem with that, is that for the student who does well from the very beginning and gets A's on everything, their performance is fine, their average is an A, but for the student who struggles at the beginning and gets very low grades, D's and C's and even F's as they are in the process of learning, and even on early quizzes when they demonstrate mastery on the test and let's say they get an A on the test, because they have those earlier grades that ostensibly were for assignments and assessments that were on the path to learning, that they were supposed to learn from, and that they weren't even supposed to have learned everything yet, when we include those early scores, it pulls down the final grades, so it actually misrepresents the level of mastery that a student has ultimately demonstrated. I tend to be skeptical of the term "equity" since I strongly disagree with a lot of the thinking that goes along with it, but I can empathize with the above statement. Anyone who works with data knows that using an average can product highly misleading numbers, so he's correct on that point. But also the idea that a student is supposed to be learning and improving, and that expecting A's across the board defeats that purpose, seems totally reasonable.
- boplicity 5y ago
  It seems to me that the term "equity" triggers a lot of people. As someone who only sees it as a positive term, can you explain the skepticism around this? I understand that there are quite a lot of controversial things related to racial justice -- many of which do seem to be clearly controversial -- but I don't understand how this relates to the idea of equity. I would appreciate an explanation. (I'm not looking for a heated conversation here, just trying to understand different perspectives!)
  - tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
    Sure thing, I don't like heated conversations either. To explain it succinctly, I've become wary of a certain group of people attempting to use subtle language choices to slip in their controversial ideas without being noticed. Equity sounds very much like equality, and therefore people are more likely to sign up for it without understanding the difference. It's a weasel word.
boplicity 5y ago
One of the more interesting parts of this piece relates directly to software: The "default" for most grading software is to average the score of all homework throughout the entire class. The result of this averaging is that people who actually learn the most might end up with a worse grade than people who learn the least. Why? Because people who struggle in the beginning, get their poor results put into their grade, even if they have complete mastery of the subject by the end of the class. This is clearly not ideal. A grade should be based on the level of mastery of the subject at the end of the course, and not at the beginning, when you haven't yet had the chance to learn the subject. This, of course, could be changed by simply changing the default behavior of grading software. Most people use the defaults, so the software developer really does have quite a lot of influence.
- professoretc 5y ago
  Some systems don't provide any other option, or make it very difficult to replace the default. I use a grading scheme closer to what the authors propose (although I was using my own system years before Grading for Equity was written) and it's a constant struggle to make Canvas do what I want. I basically have to do all my grading in a spreadsheet offline, and then just upload it into the Canvas gradebook. (Even then it will average things that should not be averaged, and show students a "percentage grade" that has nothing to do with their actual performance, or final grade.)
simiones 5y ago
The title here, while representative of some of the points being made, is really atrocious and invites everyone to imagine what the interview may be pushing. Despite the title, the interview is arguing for grading practices that represent mastery in the class as precisely as possible. They are arguing for meritocracy. Some specific proposals include: - not grading homework as it is universally copied - not using grading to maintain class discipline - not giving extra credit for conscientiousness as it gives students a skewed view of their actual mastery of the subject matter - not using grade averages as the final grade for a class, as it doesn't reflect correctly the final knowledge that a student has accumulated by the end of a class (if they are a slow learner) The author does believe that all of these practices are particularly disadvantageous to certain students with "bad backgrounds", hence the equity angle. But these practices are in fact not helpful for any student who actually wants to learn - they are just as disadvantageous to privileged students as well, as they inflate their grades above their mastery, and set them up for disappointment later on.
- loughnane 5y ago
  The title is the name of the book written by the interviewee. I’ve been inspecting the book this week and agree with many of the proposals (don’t grade homework, for example). The one I take most exception to after a first pass is the changing of the grading scale. But still reading it. Shared the link here to get some other perspectives.
  - simiones 5y ago
    Yes, apologies, didn't mean to imply that you editorialized it! I was just commenting based on what I had already seen in the early comments: many people saw the title and assumed that the author is proposing something like boosting the grades of minority students, and started arguing from there. Unfortunately, "equity" is a really loaded term in today's American discourse, and I believe the author made a huge mistake in using this word for their proposal.
- DiggyJohnson 5y ago
  I had my comment misinterpreted along similar lines as you are proposing in the first sentence. That's frustrating because the title is not editorialized at all, and I think is an accurate description of the content of the piece. It is true that this is not a proposal to "get rid of grading" or "pass everyone," but the simple fact that this is trying to maintain meritocracy and improve learning outcomes is the bare minimum and does not mean that it is beyond reproach. I recognize that this is an attempt to merge equity and meritocracy, but I disagree with the approach and rigor of the method. I don't think it's the obvious improvement that you might hold it to be.

12 points by loughnane 5y ago

The author wants to reduce demographic disparities in grades by making grading easier. That will not reduce disparities in actual learning and may increase them. Teachers should strive to be impartial and accurate in grading. Producing "equity" as in equal results is not their job.

simiones 5y ago
At least some of the proposals go directly against what you are saying. For example, the author (interviewee) points out the practice of adding extra credit for conscientiousness, which makes it exactly that students are graded incorrectly compared to their actual knowledge on the subject. In another example, he points out how students who start out doing poorly in a new class but by the end have improved and have absorbed the knowledge will nevertheless get a mediocre final grade because their final grade is an average. In a third example, he points out how homework is often copied or done by others, and so again, grades for homework tend to misrepresent a student's actual knowledge in the class.
__ryan__ 5y ago
> The author wants to reduce demographic disparities in grades by making grading easier. Can you point out where this is expressed in the transcript? I am missing it.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> The author wants to reduce demographic disparities in grades by making grading easier. No, the author wants final grading to reflect ultimate subject mastery, not (e.g.) be distorted by details of the process by which that mastery was approached. Part of this is reducing demographic disparities, but only those demographic disparities in grading that are artifacts of the system grading for things other than ultimate mastery (including, as the article notes, giving what amounts to bonus on the final grade for coming in more advanced even when there is no difference in final mastery.) > Producing "equity" as in equal results is not their job. “Equity”, as used here, is not equal results independent of mastery. It is equal results for equal mastery.

literallyaduck 5y ago

Grading for quality, and correct answers and providing remedial instructions without stigma would elevate everyone. It is academic fraud to mislabel student grades. It cheats future employers who will stop accepting degrees as a measure of quality. It cheats students who rightfully paid and honestly earned their grades. Most of all it treats the students who didn't earn their grades as less than everyone else. If they were not adequately nutured into a quality student, they should be tutored and assisted in getting up to standard. Consider Always Sunny in Philadelphia, does it help Charlie when he is told he is a genius? We have this problem right now with anyone who has a sports scholarship. It can be assumed they didn't earn their degrees the same way a non-sport student did.

simiones 5y ago
> Grading for quality, and correct answers and providing remedial instructions without stigma would elevate everyone. Fortunately, the author is proposing exactly this. Their critique of current grading practices is precisely that they do not correctly reflect student performance.

DiggyJohnson 5y ago

I am extremely skeptical of this approach. Weary, too. It is prioritizing all the wrong things. If grading is inefficient then it ought to be improved, but replacing qualified achievement with instant gratification is very sad to see and will only harm the education of all students subject to the practice.

boplicity 5y ago
I don't think you understood the article at all. For example, they talk about how standard grading practices often misrepresent mastery, by including grades from the beginning of a class, before the learning has happened. This benefits people who start out with advantages, and clearly disadvantages people who end up with the same level of mastery, but start at a place where they need to learn more. This relates back to software design: Averaging the homework scores from the entire class is a "default" in how most grading software works. It doesn't have to be.
- bojangleslover 5y ago
  Well then why not just give one big test at the end of the year, something tells me that would end up being even less equitable than the current system
- DiggyJohnson 5y ago
  I read the entire transcript and understood that point. I prefer the default grading method to the proposed solution, though I admit I much prefer this discussion to those of the form of “getting rid of grades altogether.” I don’t think we actually see the outcome you are referring to, where students who struggle at first end up with the same level of mastery. I don’t think we should use the grading process itself to compensate for inequities if they do exist.
  - professoretc 5y ago
    It's less a matter of someone failing all the early tests but pulling a Hail Mary in the final, and more a matter of someone failing an early test because it took them an extra week to grasp the material; i.e., if the test had been offered a week later, they would have passed. So they still learned everything, just not on the artificial schedule imposed by one-off tests.

ihsw 5y ago

Post-secondary academic institutions are at a cross-roads now -- they must decide whether they pursue truth or whether they pursue justice. It cannot be both. Harvard made their choice.

queuebert 5y ago

The delicious irony of this coming from an institution notorious for grade inflation.

echopurity 5y ago
The delicious indoctrination of believing there are objective grades to inflate.

synergy20 5y ago

The goal is really just that: let's not grade at all, so everyone got the same score and that's the only way to be fair to _everyone_ due to the current practice is imperfect. please tell me something that is perfect in the world, just one of it. education equity(read: score equally) is popular from k-12 now onto college, seems nothing can stop that. path to hell is paved with equity "good-will" thoughts.

simiones 5y ago
> The goal is really just that: let's not grade at all, so everyone got the same score and that's the only way to be fair to _everyone_ due to the current practice is imperfect. The article is arguing precisely the opposite: focusing grades more precisely on student performance, instead of extraneous things like time dedicated to school, discipline, conscientiousness etc, that are all a significant part of grading today.

temp8964 5y ago

This is an article asking for political flamewar. What the guy specifically said has nothing to do with the political "equity" or "inequity". The points he raised are issues common in educational measurement to get more valid scores. It is pathetic that he tries to spread his voice by appealing to a political side.

tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
I didn't read the whole thing but I had the same impression. I have no idea how it ties into equity, apart from "more accurate scores might help anyone who would otherwise be disadvantaged by the scoring system", which is several leaps removed from "equity".

echopurity 5y ago

Never gonna square that circle.

tenaciousDaniel 5y ago

I admit I didn't read the entire conversation so I can't give an absolute opinion on it, but the following passage stuck out to me: The problem with that, is that for the student who does well from the very beginning and gets A's on everything, their performance is fine, their average is an A, but for the student who struggles at the beginning and gets very low grades, D's and C's and even F's as they are in the process of learning, and even on early quizzes when they demonstrate mastery on the test and let's say they get an A on the test, because they have those earlier grades that ostensibly were for assignments and assessments that were on the path to learning, that they were supposed to learn from, and that they weren't even supposed to have learned everything yet, when we include those early scores, it pulls down the final grades, so it actually misrepresents the level of mastery that a student has ultimately demonstrated. I tend to be skeptical of the term "equity" since I strongly disagree with a lot of the thinking that goes along with it, but I can empathize with the above statement. Anyone who works with data knows that using an average can product highly misleading numbers, so he's correct on that point. But also the idea that a student is supposed to be learning and improving, and that expecting A's across the board defeats that purpose, seems totally reasonable.

boplicity 5y ago
It seems to me that the term "equity" triggers a lot of people. As someone who only sees it as a positive term, can you explain the skepticism around this? I understand that there are quite a lot of controversial things related to racial justice -- many of which do seem to be clearly controversial -- but I don't understand how this relates to the idea of equity. I would appreciate an explanation. (I'm not looking for a heated conversation here, just trying to understand different perspectives!)
- tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
  Sure thing, I don't like heated conversations either. To explain it succinctly, I've become wary of a certain group of people attempting to use subtle language choices to slip in their controversial ideas without being noticed. Equity sounds very much like equality, and therefore people are more likely to sign up for it without understanding the difference. It's a weasel word.

boplicity 5y ago

One of the more interesting parts of this piece relates directly to software: The "default" for most grading software is to average the score of all homework throughout the entire class. The result of this averaging is that people who actually learn the most might end up with a worse grade than people who learn the least. Why? Because people who struggle in the beginning, get their poor results put into their grade, even if they have complete mastery of the subject by the end of the class. This is clearly not ideal. A grade should be based on the level of mastery of the subject at the end of the course, and not at the beginning, when you haven't yet had the chance to learn the subject. This, of course, could be changed by simply changing the default behavior of grading software. Most people use the defaults, so the software developer really does have quite a lot of influence.

professoretc 5y ago
Some systems don't provide any other option, or make it very difficult to replace the default. I use a grading scheme closer to what the authors propose (although I was using my own system years before Grading for Equity was written) and it's a constant struggle to make Canvas do what I want. I basically have to do all my grading in a spreadsheet offline, and then just upload it into the Canvas gradebook. (Even then it will average things that should not be averaged, and show students a "percentage grade" that has nothing to do with their actual performance, or final grade.)

simiones 5y ago

The title here, while representative of some of the points being made, is really atrocious and invites everyone to imagine what the interview may be pushing. Despite the title, the interview is arguing for grading practices that represent mastery in the class as precisely as possible. They are arguing for meritocracy. Some specific proposals include: - not grading homework as it is universally copied - not using grading to maintain class discipline - not giving extra credit for conscientiousness as it gives students a skewed view of their actual mastery of the subject matter - not using grade averages as the final grade for a class, as it doesn't reflect correctly the final knowledge that a student has accumulated by the end of a class (if they are a slow learner) The author does believe that all of these practices are particularly disadvantageous to certain students with "bad backgrounds", hence the equity angle. But these practices are in fact not helpful for any student who actually wants to learn - they are just as disadvantageous to privileged students as well, as they inflate their grades above their mastery, and set them up for disappointment later on.

loughnane 5y ago
The title is the name of the book written by the interviewee. I’ve been inspecting the book this week and agree with many of the proposals (don’t grade homework, for example). The one I take most exception to after a first pass is the changing of the grading scale. But still reading it. Shared the link here to get some other perspectives.
- simiones 5y ago
  Yes, apologies, didn't mean to imply that you editorialized it! I was just commenting based on what I had already seen in the early comments: many people saw the title and assumed that the author is proposing something like boosting the grades of minority students, and started arguing from there. Unfortunately, "equity" is a really loaded term in today's American discourse, and I believe the author made a huge mistake in using this word for their proposal.
DiggyJohnson 5y ago
I had my comment misinterpreted along similar lines as you are proposing in the first sentence. That's frustrating because the title is not editorialized at all, and I think is an accurate description of the content of the piece. It is true that this is not a proposal to "get rid of grading" or "pass everyone," but the simple fact that this is trying to maintain meritocracy and improve learning outcomes is the bare minimum and does not mean that it is beyond reproach. I recognize that this is an attempt to merge equity and meritocracy, but I disagree with the approach and rigor of the method. I don't think it's the obvious improvement that you might hold it to be.