9 ms·

I teach high school, and a colleague of mine went to an education conference a couple weeks ago. She was sitting at a table with three elementary school teacher

by japhyr 12y ago

I teach high school, and a colleague of mine went to an education conference a couple weeks ago. She was sitting at a table with three elementary school teachers. They were talking about how to gauge student progress when the students had taken a 100-question test, and a 50-question test. None of the three teachers realized that you had to scale the test scores before making a comparison between the two tests. These teachers thought you could just look at the number of questions the students got correct, and see if the students "score" went up. My colleague pointed out that the questions on the 50-point test had twice as much weight as the questions on the 100-point test. One of the three other teachers realized their mistake - the other two just chuckled and said it didn't matter. This isn't just frighteningly ignorant, it ends up having a devastating impact on many young people. One anecdote: I knew a bright young student who loved learning, but hated school. Why? He took algebra and french in 8th grade; he passed algebra and failed french. When he got to 9th grade he was placed in algebra again, and french 2. The school would not budge from its original placement; I don't know the rationale. He failed algebra because he refused to do any homework, and failed french because he couldn't make any sense of the class. I want smart teachers to take control of education so this s* doesn't happen nearly as often as it does. Also, I've taught middle and high school math for 20 years now, mostly to students who struggle with math. I don't think I've had many groups of students who could come up with six different answers for a simple average problem.

kiba 12y ago
This isn't just frighteningly ignorant, it ends up having a devastating impact on many young people. One anecdote: I knew a bright young student who loved learning, but hated school. Why? He took algebra and french in 8th grade; he passed algebra and failed french. When he got to 9th grade he was placed in algebra again, and french 2. The school would not budge from its original placement; I don't know the rationale. He failed algebra because he refused to do any homework, and failed french because he couldn't make any sense of the class. I want smart teachers to take control of education so this s% doesn't happen nearly as often as it does. Sounds like passing a student with 80% grade, only with 60%. It's like passing a student who didn't master 40% of the content, and compounding it over and over again with each grade level, until eventual nothingness. That's what it means to pass a student with a B, C, or an F. This is not quite the same thing as mastery of the subject, but it's a good proxy. Even an A student will miss some stuff.
- japhyr 12y ago
  I had a conversation with a math teacher from another school not too long ago. Both of our schools require a minimum of two credits of math to graduate. My school allows students to spread this credit out developing a deeper understanding of basic math, and beginning algebra. His school requires everyone to receive a passing grade in the equivalent of Algebra 2. The lowest passing score at my school is a B-; at his school it's a D-. We have a reputation for being an "easy" school, so I asked him what the value of earning a D- in Algebra 2. His response: "At least they've been exposed to higher math." That's such an elitist answer, and it does such a disservice to students. The interesting part of the story is that he started to question the value of a D- when asked in this way. He stopped comparing basic algebra to Algebra 2, and started comparing a B- in Algebra 1 to a D- in Algebra 2. It's an interesting comparison.
  - sp332 12y ago
    Sounds like your school is suffering from grade inflation. The average grade used to be a C. (At my college, it still was.) If you tell the teachers that a C is a failing grade, they will not give a C grade to a student who's doing an OK job in their eyes.
    - japhyr 12y ago
      It's not grade inflation. We're a small alternative high school, and it's easier for us to do the right thing for students, even if it means going against existing bureaucracy. The smallest unit of credit in our traditional high school is 0.5 credits; at our school it's 0.25 credits. We grant passing grades for the parts of a class students demonstrate an understanding of, and grant partial credit for a class. This mitigates some of the issues involved with averaging over the course of an entire semester. Usually, when someone earns a B-, they do have a basic understanding of the material they were learning. A student who earns a D- with 0.5 credit at the traditional high school will usually earn a B- and 0.25 credits from us. At the traditional school, they're "done" with that class. At our school, they've got to do something to demonstrate further understanding. It's not a perfect system, but it's not as simple as grade inflation.
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
> I knew a bright young student who loved learning, but hated school. Of course. Any bright student realizes that school has nothing to do with learning, and furthermore often interferes with it. If schools existed to provide food instead of education, they'd start by lining up all the kids at the beginning of the week and doling out a single crumb to each. And if those crumbs happened to be rat turds instead of crumbs of bread, they'd never notice. Every once in awhile, the school stumbles across the rare child that is starving, absolutely ravenous. How long do you think it'd be before that child started to hate school? > want smart teachers to take control of education so this s* doesn't happen nearly as often as it does. Teachers aren't in control. They're prisoners of the classroom every bit as much as any child is. Maybe more so, they can't hope to be expelled or to flunk out or to graduate. Teachers will never be in control again, if ever they were.
- mehrzad 12y ago
  >bright student realizes that school has nothing to do with learning Depends on the high school and teacher. My high school (and primary schools) had really great teachers and they motivated me to learn things I otherwise would not have. Young people often need a push to learn things that they don't immediately see as useful. Schooling does interfere with learning, but when the stakes are high (getting into a top college) we might as well make the most of it if the privileges are afforded to us.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
    > Depends on the high school and teacher. In the US, each student will have between 20 and 40 teachers by the time they graduate highschool. Thus, you can't just hope to play the public education lottery and get all good teachers for your kid. Even if things work out better than could possibly be imagined, that's what, 10 or 15 good teachers, quite a few more mediocre and 2 or 3 bad ones? Sorry. The damage that a bad teacher can do outweighs much or all of the good that the good teachers can do. If your kid would have 40 doctors throughout his life, only 2 or 3 of which were quacks, would that make you happy? Would you say "but the quacks will probably be the dermatologist anyway and not the surgeon, so it's ok"? I wouldn't say that. The only way for any of this to work out is for the impossible to happen, for nearly all of teachers everywhere across the nation to be good teachers. The distribution is pretty natural, the various colleges of education don't act as a filter, and schools are co-opted to do too many non-education tasks for that to ever be possible.
woud420 12y ago
That is pretty sad. Having gone through the Quebec education system and now reflecting over it, I can relate to that student. It seems to me (of course I'm biased but...) that french and history were always seen as more way more important than math classes and that is very unfortunate. I was very lucky to be able to skim through french and math for most of high school. I didn't have an interest in french grammar and thought I was just horrible at math so I just skimmed through it and assumed it was normal. It wasn't until my first year of CEGEP where I had a very good math teacher and a great group of friends help me catch up and discover the beauty and usefulness of math. I would've never thought in high school that I would end up becoming an electrical engineer. I'm sure I'm not the only one from Quebec with a similar story and from your experience, it doesn't seem like things are going in the right way.
- herge 12y ago
  I don't think you went to the right school. It was made very clear to my classes from sec 3 onwards that taking "higher level math" (436, 536) would open a lot more doors in CÉGEP and university. On the same topic, I firmly believe that CÉGEP offers the best general education in the world for 17 to 19 year olds.
  - jeremiep 12y ago
    How can you say best education in the world? Have you studied all over the world to have a point of comparison? I've been to three different cegeps and they all had their share of clueless teachers.
    - chm 12y ago
      I'm pretty sure he's referring to the model, not the particular implementation.
  - mazork 12y ago
    I agree with you. I have a lot of friends in bot pre-uni (as myself) and in techniques and I find it awesome how a CÉGEP strikes a good balance between general education and specific classes.
andrepd 12y ago
The very same thing happened in Portugal, where the Ministry of Education's guidelines for gauging teacher performance included taking the mean of a test graded in percentage points with another evaluation on a 1 to 5 scale.. by adding them and dividing by two! Made even more embarrassing by the fact that the Minister is a mathematician.
- pdpi 12y ago
  He did what? Can you link a citation for that one please (pt is fine)?
tootie 12y ago
If folks in Quebec can speak French, it should be pretty easy.
- seszett 12y ago
  Having French as your native language doesn't mean French class is easy, and a sizable part of Québec's population doesn't speak French natively.
  - megaman22 12y ago
    A sizable portion of Quebec's population east of Montreal doesn't speak English at all.
kriro 12y ago
Imo, these results are not surprising (but sad regardless). There's similar studies in all fields. Economics is a prime example (with a couple of well publicized studies). A little "closer to home"...I've listened to quite a few software developers who regularly A/B test and always implemented B if it had more whatever_unit than A. Significance be damned. Statistics is pretty scary/best ignored on all levels I guess.
jeremiep 12y ago
I was working in a nightclub during my college years and I've met many, many people who loved learning yet hated school and dropped. There is an immense pool of potential being wasted out there. I'm one of the lucky few who did drop out of school yet found a job as a software engineer on AAA games; the job I wanted since I was a kid with my first NES. I don't think having a degree would've made much of a difference other than wasting more years of my life and putting me even more in debt. What made me get the job as well as keep it and rise faster in the company than those with actual degrees is finding the discipline to learn on my own every day and trying to understand how things work and why. In school I always felt slowed down by the rest of the class or by bad teachers.
testguy34 12y ago
> I want smart teachers to take control of education so this s* doesn't happen nearly as often as it does. This is the job of parents, not teachers. What does take control even mean? Public school teachers have no control.
- Crito 12y ago
  > "What does take control even mean? Public school teachers have no control." If they already had control, then they wouldn't need to take it, would they?
  - crusso 12y ago
    Good example of out of context quoting of even a short post. He said it's not the teachers' job to have the type of control that the original poster was saying that teachers should seize.
    - Crito 12y ago
      He responded to a proposal that it should be with, depending on how you interpret it: 1) An assertion that it is not currently the case. (Probably true, but completely missing the point of a proposal) 2) An unsupported assertion that it should not be the case. (An unsupported opinion in response to a thought out opinion isn't adding much to the conversation. He may as well simply respond "No, your opinion is wrong." A better comment would explain why he has that opinion.)
plehoux 12y ago
Many comments here are anecdotal. Quebec outperforms other Canadian provinces in most math rankings (Programme for International Student Assessment). Globe and Mail on the subject: > But there’s also good news. Canada’s declining performance in math isn’t equally distributed across the country. When results are broken down by province, there are shocking differences. And at the top of the class is Quebec. > While the math scores in most provinces were sliding over the past decade, Quebec’s already strong results held steady. Students in Quebec outperform their rest-of-Canada peers in every mathematical category. Quebec students ranked sixth in the world, tied with Japan and Macao, and ahead of the Netherlands. > There is no single, silver-bullet solution to solving the problem of declining math scores in the rest of the country, but Quebec is clearly doing something right. Exactly what is more than a matter of opinion. The OECD’s assessment teases out what appears to be working in those countries that perform best in the PISA survey. Quebec’s education system has a lot in common with them. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/editorials/quebec-adds-canada-subtracts-on-its-math-scores/article15748296/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/editorials/quebe...
- iamshs 12y ago
  Oh well:- http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/may/06/oecd-pisa-tests-damaging-education-academics http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/may/06/oecd-pisa-t...
- ramblerman 12y ago
  > Quebec outperforms other Canadian provinces in most math rankings Given what we have learned here today, I'm wondering if Quebec just has more questions on their exam :P
VanillaCafe 12y ago
> They were talking about how to gauge student progress when the students had taken a 100-question test, and a 50-question test. None of the three teachers realized that you had to scale the test scores before making a comparison between the two tests. That's not necessarily true at all. It's a function of the difficultly of each question. Possibly it could be generalized to the difficulty of each test -- where perhaps the questions on the 50-question test were twice as difficult as the questions on the 100-question test. The best way to resolve your concern is to never assign a percentage per test -- just assigned points to each question based on difficulty. Then accumulate points and take an average only at the very end. But, short of that, taking a weighted average of the two tests is not necessarily any more correct than just taking the average of the percentages.
Alex3917 12y ago
> My colleague pointed out that the questions on the 50-point test had twice as much weight as the questions on the 100-point test. Actually there wouldn't necessarily be any correlation between the percentage of questions answered correctly and whether the students were making progress, and arguably that answer is even worse than just comparing the raw scores.
baddox 12y ago
I've got a slightly subtler but similar story. I had a math teacher in high school who would curve her test scores to the lowest top score from any one class. In other words, if she taught three identical 10th grade Trig classes in a semester, for each test she would take the three top scores (one from each class), and curve the test to the lowest of those three scores. It's a reasonable enough idea, I suppose, since different classes will have different questions and thus spend slightly different amounts of time on various parts of the material. The trouble was that she would not give over 100% to the people who earned a higher score on the test than the curve. Her tests were not weighted, meaning that Test-A curved to 85 points was actually worth less than Test-B curved to 90 points. (Supposedly, the then-new district-wide computer grading system couldn't handle such arithmetic complexities.) At one point, I received a score above the curve. Let's say I got 90 of 100 points, and the curve was 85. Later, when I saw my grades, I asked why I was only given an 85/85 on that test. She explained that she didn't give "extra credit," and she wouldn't budge. She would say things like "you got 100% of the points, so there's no reason to complain." I asked, then, if I could at least be given a 90/90, and she very confidently explained to me that 100% of the points on the test is the same regardless of the total number of points. She would not entertain the notion that a 90/90 is better than an 85/85, much less that a 10th grader might be able to correct an arithmetic mistake of hers. I even presented the example of changing a 100/100 assignment to 1,000,000/1,000,000 and noting the affect on the total grade, but she would have none of it. As you can probably tell, I'm still bitter about that test.
- japhyr 12y ago
  People often underestimate the bitterness that these experiences create in smart people. It's not a petty thing, either - it's life changing in many situations. We need smart people to take control of schools.
  - crucini 12y ago
    The road of life is bumpy. I would not seek to smooth out the few remaining bumps in school. We are already in danger of creating fragile people who shatter at the first bump. All this, even if the teacher's idea were quite wrong - but it's not. By "clipping" the score, the teacher created a hybrid between curved and uncurved grades. If curved and uncurved are acceptable, why not the hybrid?
pdkl95 12y ago
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-stink-at-math.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-... I believe you might find this article very interesting. It is a discussion of how math education has changed over the years, and has strong words about the very problem you mentioned of the teachers being ignorant of math and passing that ignorance on to those they teach.
bonestamp2 12y ago
It's the simple stuff that kills me. My friend's wife is an elementary school teacher and she's one of those really arrogant people who always has something more "intelligent" to say than everyone else. She recently took over a project I was working on with her husband (my friend) so I've been emailing a fair amount with her. Her grammar is unbelievable for a school teacher. I mean, she doesn't know the difference between your/you're, their/there, then/than!
conistonwater 12y ago
This is consistent with this review [0] I once read of a book [1] about mathematics teaching in elementary schools. [0] http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf [1] Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers’ Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States, by Liping Ma

by japhyr 12y ago

kiba 12y ago

This isn't just frighteningly ignorant, it ends up having a devastating impact on many young people. One anecdote: I knew a bright young student who loved learning, but hated school. Why? He took algebra and french in 8th grade; he passed algebra and failed french. When he got to 9th grade he was placed in algebra again, and french 2. The school would not budge from its original placement; I don't know the rationale. He failed algebra because he refused to do any homework, and failed french because he couldn't make any sense of the class. I want smart teachers to take control of education so this s% doesn't happen nearly as often as it does. Sounds like passing a student with 80% grade, only with 60%. It's like passing a student who didn't master 40% of the content, and compounding it over and over again with each grade level, until eventual nothingness. That's what it means to pass a student with a B, C, or an F. This is not quite the same thing as mastery of the subject, but it's a good proxy. Even an A student will miss some stuff.

japhyr 12y ago
I had a conversation with a math teacher from another school not too long ago. Both of our schools require a minimum of two credits of math to graduate. My school allows students to spread this credit out developing a deeper understanding of basic math, and beginning algebra. His school requires everyone to receive a passing grade in the equivalent of Algebra 2. The lowest passing score at my school is a B-; at his school it's a D-. We have a reputation for being an "easy" school, so I asked him what the value of earning a D- in Algebra 2. His response: "At least they've been exposed to higher math." That's such an elitist answer, and it does such a disservice to students. The interesting part of the story is that he started to question the value of a D- when asked in this way. He stopped comparing basic algebra to Algebra 2, and started comparing a B- in Algebra 1 to a D- in Algebra 2. It's an interesting comparison.
- sp332 12y ago
  Sounds like your school is suffering from grade inflation. The average grade used to be a C. (At my college, it still was.) If you tell the teachers that a C is a failing grade, they will not give a C grade to a student who's doing an OK job in their eyes.
  - japhyr 12y ago
    It's not grade inflation. We're a small alternative high school, and it's easier for us to do the right thing for students, even if it means going against existing bureaucracy. The smallest unit of credit in our traditional high school is 0.5 credits; at our school it's 0.25 credits. We grant passing grades for the parts of a class students demonstrate an understanding of, and grant partial credit for a class. This mitigates some of the issues involved with averaging over the course of an entire semester. Usually, when someone earns a B-, they do have a basic understanding of the material they were learning. A student who earns a D- with 0.5 credit at the traditional high school will usually earn a B- and 0.25 credits from us. At the traditional school, they're "done" with that class. At our school, they've got to do something to demonstrate further understanding. It's not a perfect system, but it's not as simple as grade inflation.

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago

> I knew a bright young student who loved learning, but hated school. Of course. Any bright student realizes that school has nothing to do with learning, and furthermore often interferes with it. If schools existed to provide food instead of education, they'd start by lining up all the kids at the beginning of the week and doling out a single crumb to each. And if those crumbs happened to be rat turds instead of crumbs of bread, they'd never notice. Every once in awhile, the school stumbles across the rare child that is starving, absolutely ravenous. How long do you think it'd be before that child started to hate school? > want smart teachers to take control of education so this s* doesn't happen nearly as often as it does. Teachers aren't in control. They're prisoners of the classroom every bit as much as any child is. Maybe more so, they can't hope to be expelled or to flunk out or to graduate. Teachers will never be in control again, if ever they were.

mehrzad 12y ago
>bright student realizes that school has nothing to do with learning Depends on the high school and teacher. My high school (and primary schools) had really great teachers and they motivated me to learn things I otherwise would not have. Young people often need a push to learn things that they don't immediately see as useful. Schooling does interfere with learning, but when the stakes are high (getting into a top college) we might as well make the most of it if the privileges are afforded to us.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  > Depends on the high school and teacher. In the US, each student will have between 20 and 40 teachers by the time they graduate highschool. Thus, you can't just hope to play the public education lottery and get all good teachers for your kid. Even if things work out better than could possibly be imagined, that's what, 10 or 15 good teachers, quite a few more mediocre and 2 or 3 bad ones? Sorry. The damage that a bad teacher can do outweighs much or all of the good that the good teachers can do. If your kid would have 40 doctors throughout his life, only 2 or 3 of which were quacks, would that make you happy? Would you say "but the quacks will probably be the dermatologist anyway and not the surgeon, so it's ok"? I wouldn't say that. The only way for any of this to work out is for the impossible to happen, for nearly all of teachers everywhere across the nation to be good teachers. The distribution is pretty natural, the various colleges of education don't act as a filter, and schools are co-opted to do too many non-education tasks for that to ever be possible.

woud420 12y ago

That is pretty sad. Having gone through the Quebec education system and now reflecting over it, I can relate to that student. It seems to me (of course I'm biased but...) that french and history were always seen as more way more important than math classes and that is very unfortunate. I was very lucky to be able to skim through french and math for most of high school. I didn't have an interest in french grammar and thought I was just horrible at math so I just skimmed through it and assumed it was normal. It wasn't until my first year of CEGEP where I had a very good math teacher and a great group of friends help me catch up and discover the beauty and usefulness of math. I would've never thought in high school that I would end up becoming an electrical engineer. I'm sure I'm not the only one from Quebec with a similar story and from your experience, it doesn't seem like things are going in the right way.

herge 12y ago
I don't think you went to the right school. It was made very clear to my classes from sec 3 onwards that taking "higher level math" (436, 536) would open a lot more doors in CÉGEP and university. On the same topic, I firmly believe that CÉGEP offers the best general education in the world for 17 to 19 year olds.
- jeremiep 12y ago
  How can you say best education in the world? Have you studied all over the world to have a point of comparison? I've been to three different cegeps and they all had their share of clueless teachers.
  - chm 12y ago
    I'm pretty sure he's referring to the model, not the particular implementation.
- mazork 12y ago
  I agree with you. I have a lot of friends in bot pre-uni (as myself) and in techniques and I find it awesome how a CÉGEP strikes a good balance between general education and specific classes.

andrepd 12y ago

The very same thing happened in Portugal, where the Ministry of Education's guidelines for gauging teacher performance included taking the mean of a test graded in percentage points with another evaluation on a 1 to 5 scale.. by adding them and dividing by two! Made even more embarrassing by the fact that the Minister is a mathematician.

pdpi 12y ago
He did what? Can you link a citation for that one please (pt is fine)?

tootie 12y ago

If folks in Quebec can speak French, it should be pretty easy.

seszett 12y ago
Having French as your native language doesn't mean French class is easy, and a sizable part of Québec's population doesn't speak French natively.
- megaman22 12y ago
  A sizable portion of Quebec's population east of Montreal doesn't speak English at all.

kriro 12y ago

Imo, these results are not surprising (but sad regardless). There's similar studies in all fields. Economics is a prime example (with a couple of well publicized studies). A little "closer to home"...I've listened to quite a few software developers who regularly A/B test and always implemented B if it had more whatever_unit than A. Significance be damned. Statistics is pretty scary/best ignored on all levels I guess.

jeremiep 12y ago

I was working in a nightclub during my college years and I've met many, many people who loved learning yet hated school and dropped. There is an immense pool of potential being wasted out there. I'm one of the lucky few who did drop out of school yet found a job as a software engineer on AAA games; the job I wanted since I was a kid with my first NES. I don't think having a degree would've made much of a difference other than wasting more years of my life and putting me even more in debt. What made me get the job as well as keep it and rise faster in the company than those with actual degrees is finding the discipline to learn on my own every day and trying to understand how things work and why. In school I always felt slowed down by the rest of the class or by bad teachers.

testguy34 12y ago

> I want smart teachers to take control of education so this s* doesn't happen nearly as often as it does. This is the job of parents, not teachers. What does take control even mean? Public school teachers have no control.

Crito 12y ago
> "What does take control even mean? Public school teachers have no control." If they already had control, then they wouldn't need to take it, would they?
- crusso 12y ago
  Good example of out of context quoting of even a short post. He said it's not the teachers' job to have the type of control that the original poster was saying that teachers should seize.
  - Crito 12y ago
    He responded to a proposal that it should be with, depending on how you interpret it: 1) An assertion that it is not currently the case. (Probably true, but completely missing the point of a proposal) 2) An unsupported assertion that it should not be the case. (An unsupported opinion in response to a thought out opinion isn't adding much to the conversation. He may as well simply respond "No, your opinion is wrong." A better comment would explain why he has that opinion.)

plehoux 12y ago

Many comments here are anecdotal. Quebec outperforms other Canadian provinces in most math rankings (Programme for International Student Assessment). Globe and Mail on the subject: > But there’s also good news. Canada’s declining performance in math isn’t equally distributed across the country. When results are broken down by province, there are shocking differences. And at the top of the class is Quebec. > While the math scores in most provinces were sliding over the past decade, Quebec’s already strong results held steady. Students in Quebec outperform their rest-of-Canada peers in every mathematical category. Quebec students ranked sixth in the world, tied with Japan and Macao, and ahead of the Netherlands. > There is no single, silver-bullet solution to solving the problem of declining math scores in the rest of the country, but Quebec is clearly doing something right. Exactly what is more than a matter of opinion. The OECD’s assessment teases out what appears to be working in those countries that perform best in the PISA survey. Quebec’s education system has a lot in common with them. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/editorials/quebec-adds-canada-subtracts-on-its-math-scores/article15748296/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/editorials/quebe...

iamshs 12y ago
Oh well:- http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/may/06/oecd-pisa-tests-damaging-education-academics http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/may/06/oecd-pisa-t...
ramblerman 12y ago
> Quebec outperforms other Canadian provinces in most math rankings Given what we have learned here today, I'm wondering if Quebec just has more questions on their exam :P

VanillaCafe 12y ago

> They were talking about how to gauge student progress when the students had taken a 100-question test, and a 50-question test. None of the three teachers realized that you had to scale the test scores before making a comparison between the two tests. That's not necessarily true at all. It's a function of the difficultly of each question. Possibly it could be generalized to the difficulty of each test -- where perhaps the questions on the 50-question test were twice as difficult as the questions on the 100-question test. The best way to resolve your concern is to never assign a percentage per test -- just assigned points to each question based on difficulty. Then accumulate points and take an average only at the very end. But, short of that, taking a weighted average of the two tests is not necessarily any more correct than just taking the average of the percentages.

Alex3917 12y ago

> My colleague pointed out that the questions on the 50-point test had twice as much weight as the questions on the 100-point test. Actually there wouldn't necessarily be any correlation between the percentage of questions answered correctly and whether the students were making progress, and arguably that answer is even worse than just comparing the raw scores.

baddox 12y ago

I've got a slightly subtler but similar story. I had a math teacher in high school who would curve her test scores to the lowest top score from any one class. In other words, if she taught three identical 10th grade Trig classes in a semester, for each test she would take the three top scores (one from each class), and curve the test to the lowest of those three scores. It's a reasonable enough idea, I suppose, since different classes will have different questions and thus spend slightly different amounts of time on various parts of the material. The trouble was that she would not give over 100% to the people who earned a higher score on the test than the curve. Her tests were not weighted, meaning that Test-A curved to 85 points was actually worth less than Test-B curved to 90 points. (Supposedly, the then-new district-wide computer grading system couldn't handle such arithmetic complexities.) At one point, I received a score above the curve. Let's say I got 90 of 100 points, and the curve was 85. Later, when I saw my grades, I asked why I was only given an 85/85 on that test. She explained that she didn't give "extra credit," and she wouldn't budge. She would say things like "you got 100% of the points, so there's no reason to complain." I asked, then, if I could at least be given a 90/90, and she very confidently explained to me that 100% of the points on the test is the same regardless of the total number of points. She would not entertain the notion that a 90/90 is better than an 85/85, much less that a 10th grader might be able to correct an arithmetic mistake of hers. I even presented the example of changing a 100/100 assignment to 1,000,000/1,000,000 and noting the affect on the total grade, but she would have none of it. As you can probably tell, I'm still bitter about that test.

japhyr 12y ago
People often underestimate the bitterness that these experiences create in smart people. It's not a petty thing, either - it's life changing in many situations. We need smart people to take control of schools.
- crucini 12y ago
  The road of life is bumpy. I would not seek to smooth out the few remaining bumps in school. We are already in danger of creating fragile people who shatter at the first bump. All this, even if the teacher's idea were quite wrong - but it's not. By "clipping" the score, the teacher created a hybrid between curved and uncurved grades. If curved and uncurved are acceptable, why not the hybrid?

pdkl95 12y ago

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-stink-at-math.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-... I believe you might find this article very interesting. It is a discussion of how math education has changed over the years, and has strong words about the very problem you mentioned of the teachers being ignorant of math and passing that ignorance on to those they teach.

bonestamp2 12y ago

It's the simple stuff that kills me. My friend's wife is an elementary school teacher and she's one of those really arrogant people who always has something more "intelligent" to say than everyone else. She recently took over a project I was working on with her husband (my friend) so I've been emailing a fair amount with her. Her grammar is unbelievable for a school teacher. I mean, she doesn't know the difference between your/you're, their/there, then/than!

conistonwater 12y ago

This is consistent with this review [0] I once read of a book [1] about mathematics teaching in elementary schools. [0] http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf [1] Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers’ Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States, by Liping Ma