4 ms·
If the performance of the professor in a class cannot be reduced to a scalar value, then it seems probable that the performance of a student in a class also can
by agarden 13y ago
If the performance of the professor in a class cannot be reduced to a scalar value, then it seems probable that the performance of a student in a class also cannot be reduced to a scalar value, and professors should be required to write paragraph evaluations of students instead of just assigning them something from an A to an F.
In other words, if reduction of complex performance to a scalar value is invalid, then the entire grading system that defines academic success is bogus.
Incidentally, I think that likely.
- chris_wot 13y agoThank you. This is very insightful!!!
- tsm 13y agoThis is indeed exactly what happend at my lower/middle/high school--we received a full paragraph from each teacher evaluating our performance every trimester. Doing so at a college scale would be too costly. But you do have all the grades that go into your average, comments on each essay, office hour time, etcetera. The nuances of your performance don't matter in your GPA, that is, your Grade Point Average, but you do have a bit more information available to you, yourself.
- tsm 13y agoThis is indeed exactly what happend at my lower/middle/high school--we received a full paragraph from each teacher evaluating our performance every trimester. Doing so at a college scale would be too costly. But you do have all the grades that go into your average, comments on each essay, office hour time, etcetera. The nuances of your performance don't matter in your GPA, that is, your Grade Point Average, but you do have a bit more information available to you, yourself.
- tsm 13y agoThis is indeed exactly what happend at my lower/middle/high school--we received a full paragraph from each teacher evaluating our performance every trimester. Doing so at a college scale would be too costly. But you do have all the grades that go into your average, comments on each essay, office hour time, etcetera. The nuances of your performance don't matter in your GPA, that is, your Grade Point Average, but you do have a bit more information available to you, yourself.
- femto113 13y agoMy alma mater (UC Santa Cruz) does exactly this, all course were pass/fail and if you passed you got a narrative evaluation, which ranged from terse sentences that obviously encoded traditional grades as text ("He did very good on the midterm, and excellent on the final, and excellent overall.") to some that were several paragraphs in length and discussed specific merits of the work done in the course. Amusingly they also had a committee that would translate your narrative evaluations into numeric grades so you could apply to grad schools that required a GPA.