5 ms·

How far should we strech this? there are students who come into courses with superior memory or iq and get a head start from that.

jrgoff 5y ago
Not sure what your getting at here? The person you are commenting on wasn't talking about punishing people for having a head start they were saying that people's final grade should be based on what they are capable of at the end of the class, not at the start of it.
- blodkorv 5y ago
  Why not, there will be for sure students who have the ability to grasp a course fast and effectily to compete with those with prior knowledge, why not grade and reward that ability.
  - mech987 5y ago
    If you grade improvement rather than mastery, you incentivize feigning incompetence at the start of the course to game the system. The closest thing I ever saw to this was my high school weightlifting class. Your bench press single rep max was a high percentage of your overall grade, and was tested several times over the course of the semester. You were graded on improvement. The teacher made sure not to mention this before the first test, to keep people from cheating, but a few kids were in the know and faked a low max. From a philosophical/values point of view- what is more important for education- incentivize all students to try to achieve the mastery level expected, or incentivize all students that as long as it looks like they're making progress, that is enough? I'd go with mastery. The appearance of progress is too easy to game, too subjective, and not easily applicable to varying courseloads.
  - lostcolony 5y ago
    It is rewarded, simply by the fact that they then have to put less effort into the class. Why should it be graded? The point of the class is not to learn quickly and effortlessly, but to learn the material completely. If by the time the class is over the student has learned it well, they should get a grade that reflects that learning. I mean, by your logic, should we give extra credit to the students who never show up to office hours in college, since clearly they're learning it 'faster and (more) effectily(sic)'?
a_shovel 5y ago
I don't understand your point. If a genius takes the class, then they'll get a good grade in any grading system. I'm talking about a student who starts off poorly and does badly on some early assignments, then improves dramatically during the course. Even if they get to the same level of knowledge as the genius, under the traditional grading system, the early poor grades will stand. That will influence their final average/GPA even though those early grades are no longer relevant.
- paulcole 5y ago
  They don't even need to be at the same level of mastery as the "genius." Everyone in the class needs to get to a pre-defined level of mastery of the subject. The genius isn't rewarded (in terms of grade for this class) for being 10x beyond that -- everyone who gets over the bar of mastery gets the same grade.
asoneth 5y ago
The argument is not that we need to neutralize a student's head start. The argument is that students should be evaluated based on their mastery of the content at the end of the course. Giving too much weight to early grades and tests results in disproportionately penalizing those students who enter the course with the least prior knowledge. Those students are already going to have to work harder than their classmates to catch up. Averaging in their initial low grades just serves to penalize them further.
- blodkorv 5y ago
  Even if every studen have zero prior knowledge in a course, there will be those who will perform better early on being able to understand the course faster than others, of course you should grade that ability.
  - trevorboaconstr 5y ago
    Why? Isn’t the point mastery? Are we grading students ability to learn, now, too? I really don’t understand what you’re getting at.
    - ryan93 5y ago
      Mastery obviously isn’t the only point. Engineering firms probably to want people who Learn the material in 4-5 years not 10
      - olsonjeffery 5y ago
        Grades don’t capture the difference in learning ability you use as an absurd example. Furthermore, this “observation” is sufficiently vague so as to be a truism. “Businesses don’t want to hire stupid people” is not novel or meaningful as a supporting argument to whatever your point is.
        ryan93 5y ago
        yes it is. part of the benefit of grades and semesters is to compare students. good students want that!
beepbooptheory 5y ago
Measuring IQ has an extremely narrow utility in general, and is rife with problems of measurement, to the point that people struggle to see correlations when we are talking about primary education. But even disregarding that, it is philosophically problematic to think along these lines. People learn and know things in an absolute plurality of ways, and in ways that can only be measured with very limited means; there is more than one way for someone to skin the cat of learning. In general, an absolute Platonic ideal of intelligence, which IQ enthusiasts implicitly rely on, is the thing that got us in this mess pedagogically.
joeframbach 5y ago
I see this sub-thread is getting heated, so maybe it's a good chance to clear our differences in understanding. First - Are you coming from a system where a student's rank in class is ordered? In that situation, grades are a zero-sum game, where you may be fighting for Valedictorian status. In the US at least, such things have been a farce for at least 20 years, when I graduated we had 13 Salutatorians in a class of 200, what a joke. The weighted GPA is what matters, even if half the student body has a GPA over 3.5. Nobody here cares what your rank was. Second - As others have stated - the topic is about bringing the lower-graded students up, not bringing the higher-graded students down. Could you explain why you are reframing the topic?
dehrmann 5y ago
Sounds like an intro CS class. Let's group people who played with this stuff for years with people who are here to get rich and people who have a theoretical aptitude, but never touched it.
- Spivak 5y ago
  I hated this. I literally had every advantage growing up, I'd been seriously programming since I was like 8, I took the CS AP tests on a whim without even taking the class because "eh why not." Then my freshman year I watched some of my classmates get wrecked for no reason other than they made the mistake of not having a decade of real world programming experience under their belt day 1 and all they were taught in class was basically math and pseudocode. I partnered with our CS club on campus and held workshops/hackathons aimed at actual beginners just because it made me so mad.

jrgoff 5y ago

Not sure what your getting at here? The person you are commenting on wasn't talking about punishing people for having a head start they were saying that people's final grade should be based on what they are capable of at the end of the class, not at the start of it.

blodkorv 5y ago
Why not, there will be for sure students who have the ability to grasp a course fast and effectily to compete with those with prior knowledge, why not grade and reward that ability.
- mech987 5y ago
  If you grade improvement rather than mastery, you incentivize feigning incompetence at the start of the course to game the system. The closest thing I ever saw to this was my high school weightlifting class. Your bench press single rep max was a high percentage of your overall grade, and was tested several times over the course of the semester. You were graded on improvement. The teacher made sure not to mention this before the first test, to keep people from cheating, but a few kids were in the know and faked a low max. From a philosophical/values point of view- what is more important for education- incentivize all students to try to achieve the mastery level expected, or incentivize all students that as long as it looks like they're making progress, that is enough? I'd go with mastery. The appearance of progress is too easy to game, too subjective, and not easily applicable to varying courseloads.
- lostcolony 5y ago
  It is rewarded, simply by the fact that they then have to put less effort into the class. Why should it be graded? The point of the class is not to learn quickly and effortlessly, but to learn the material completely. If by the time the class is over the student has learned it well, they should get a grade that reflects that learning. I mean, by your logic, should we give extra credit to the students who never show up to office hours in college, since clearly they're learning it 'faster and (more) effectily(sic)'?

a_shovel 5y ago

I don't understand your point. If a genius takes the class, then they'll get a good grade in any grading system. I'm talking about a student who starts off poorly and does badly on some early assignments, then improves dramatically during the course. Even if they get to the same level of knowledge as the genius, under the traditional grading system, the early poor grades will stand. That will influence their final average/GPA even though those early grades are no longer relevant.

paulcole 5y ago
They don't even need to be at the same level of mastery as the "genius." Everyone in the class needs to get to a pre-defined level of mastery of the subject. The genius isn't rewarded (in terms of grade for this class) for being 10x beyond that -- everyone who gets over the bar of mastery gets the same grade.

asoneth 5y ago

The argument is not that we need to neutralize a student's head start. The argument is that students should be evaluated based on their mastery of the content at the end of the course. Giving too much weight to early grades and tests results in disproportionately penalizing those students who enter the course with the least prior knowledge. Those students are already going to have to work harder than their classmates to catch up. Averaging in their initial low grades just serves to penalize them further.

blodkorv 5y ago
Even if every studen have zero prior knowledge in a course, there will be those who will perform better early on being able to understand the course faster than others, of course you should grade that ability.
- trevorboaconstr 5y ago
  Why? Isn’t the point mastery? Are we grading students ability to learn, now, too? I really don’t understand what you’re getting at.
  - ryan93 5y ago
    Mastery obviously isn’t the only point. Engineering firms probably to want people who Learn the material in 4-5 years not 10
    - olsonjeffery 5y ago
      Grades don’t capture the difference in learning ability you use as an absurd example. Furthermore, this “observation” is sufficiently vague so as to be a truism. “Businesses don’t want to hire stupid people” is not novel or meaningful as a supporting argument to whatever your point is.
      - ryan93 5y ago
        yes it is. part of the benefit of grades and semesters is to compare students. good students want that!

beepbooptheory 5y ago

Measuring IQ has an extremely narrow utility in general, and is rife with problems of measurement, to the point that people struggle to see correlations when we are talking about primary education. But even disregarding that, it is philosophically problematic to think along these lines. People learn and know things in an absolute plurality of ways, and in ways that can only be measured with very limited means; there is more than one way for someone to skin the cat of learning. In general, an absolute Platonic ideal of intelligence, which IQ enthusiasts implicitly rely on, is the thing that got us in this mess pedagogically.

joeframbach 5y ago

I see this sub-thread is getting heated, so maybe it's a good chance to clear our differences in understanding. First - Are you coming from a system where a student's rank in class is ordered? In that situation, grades are a zero-sum game, where you may be fighting for Valedictorian status. In the US at least, such things have been a farce for at least 20 years, when I graduated we had 13 Salutatorians in a class of 200, what a joke. The weighted GPA is what matters, even if half the student body has a GPA over 3.5. Nobody here cares what your rank was. Second - As others have stated - the topic is about bringing the lower-graded students up, not bringing the higher-graded students down. Could you explain why you are reframing the topic?

dehrmann 5y ago

Sounds like an intro CS class. Let's group people who played with this stuff for years with people who are here to get rich and people who have a theoretical aptitude, but never touched it.

Spivak 5y ago
I hated this. I literally had every advantage growing up, I'd been seriously programming since I was like 8, I took the CS AP tests on a whim without even taking the class because "eh why not." Then my freshman year I watched some of my classmates get wrecked for no reason other than they made the mistake of not having a decade of real world programming experience under their belt day 1 and all they were taught in class was basically math and pseudocode. I partnered with our CS club on campus and held workshops/hackathons aimed at actual beginners just because it made me so mad.