From Inside Higher Ed:
Some issues:
This “reformed” system would require teachers to know their students at a far deeper level in order to provide that level of feedback. While it’s fine for private day/boarding schools with small class/school sizes, this isn’t realistic for larger private schools or moreso…public schools in which teachers may be assigned to teach hundreds of students.
There’s much more increased level of subjectivity involved due to the nature of needing to know students well…or at least giving the appearance of such which could unfairly advantage students from “desirable”* backgrounds, people pleasers, rule followers, and otherwise those who don’t rock the boat and disadvantage those who aren’t from “desirable” backgrounds or worse, those who march to the beat of their own drum or worse…rock the boat by disagreeing with a teacher on a debatable point.
Funny part is if such a system was implemented as part of the admissions process for my public magnet HS, many of the most brilliant HS classmates I’ve known/befriended wouldn’t have been admitted precisely because they’re don’t fit one or more points on the advantaged criteria.
Not to mention this system would likely provide further advantages to the private day/boarding schools by virtue of their elite/respectable reputations vis a vis public schools.
- The article itself makes one criteria clear when they said "ability to pay".
I don’t see it in the foreseeable future. Every college admission officer I hear speak says that the foundation of the college application is the HS transcript (including course rigor and GPA) .
The gap between good public high schools and private high schools in terms of college admissions is closing fast if not already closed for some, so this is an attempt to put public schools a decade behind? The advantage of private schools, high schools or colleges, seems to diminish with many resources become increasingly and widely available online.
This is a bad Ideal as others have said. It also seems like a system were a teacher that didn’t like a student could ruin a kids ablity to get into school regardless of how well the kid actually did.
Sure, nice for schools with 20-40k worth of tuition per child coming in, but not possible AT ALL at public schools.
So if anything, it’ll just help the rich have yet another leg up.
There’s no way this would work at my D18’s public HS. It’s too subjective. There are 700+ kids in each grade and teachers wouldn’t be able to do such a detailed evaluation of each one (at least honestly, many would probably just check the highest level of “mastery” on their favorites and lower on others).
If I were to remake the current HS system I’d switch to a uniform 0-100 scale for grades nationwide accompanied by a difficulty level for the class. It would be followed up by standardized tests that draw from thousands of problems of varying difficulty (to prevent “teaching to the test” and other gaming issues) and where each student’s test is different (to prevent cheating at test time).
The one big problem is the issue of “mastery” vs. relative performance. Are colleges interested in what students “know” or how they did relative to their peers (i.e. vs. other students in their school)?
Note that I’m not a big fan of the multiple-choice tests as currently given. With a small number of choices you can game the system (it’s a test of elimination).
I think this article gets close to what this initiative is really all about: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448336/top-private-high-schools-declare-war-academic-merit.
On the face of it, this seems to be a way to limit competition at private schools and to gain a larger share of elite college admissions at the expense of public schools. It is the ultimate extension of the “everyone gets a trophy” mentality.
It would appear that the children of extremely wealthy donors to prep schools are not receiving sufficiently exemplary college offers to keep the parents donating at a level that makes the prep school boards happy. Probably too many of the “charity” scholarship students and “diversity” admits to the prep schools are snagging too many of the elite college spots. The proposal lets the prep schools game the system to make sure the “right” kids get in to the “right” schools. Overall, one of the most self serving, elitist proposals I have ever seen. Time to man the barricades and sharpen the guillotines.
We all forget the original purpose of grades. They have become an end, not a means. Grades were a way to evaluate competency in the first place. I really don’t think a college admits someone because they have a 97 average and their classmate’s is 93. The competition with GPA and scores becomes just plain silly. Admissions should be other stuff anyway, and is already at elite colleges.
I think it’s a great idea to just get rid of grades entirely. Do they continue as a system of evaluation solely for college admissions at this point? One could argue that kids and families need grades (and college admission) to maintain motivation, but that is false motivation in the first place- external, not internal. Are schools so terrible that the only way to get kids to work is to use grades?
Well, back to reality: the truth is that our entire educational system, especially publics, is one gigantic incentive system, based on grades, and the whole system would collapse without them.
That doesn’t mean that in an ideal world, things wouldn’t be better without them. While we’re at it, let’s get rid of our TV’s too.
@compmom – why is incentive an invalid motive? I’d bet that the vast majority of people need external motivation to reach their potential. It’s a good thing.
I appreciate the sentiment, but how on earth would a school like UCLA, with its 120,000 applications a year to get through, want to allocate the extra manpower it would take to read these detailed descriptions for each class evaluation for each student from X school?
@DeepBlue86 Nice article. Thanks for sharing. I’m not sure I agreed with all of it (the BLM kid legitimately seemed impressive to me) but it was very thought provoking.
Funny part is several college classmates* I’ve had advocated similar reforms for high schools. No surprise considering they’d have likely benefited far better in that environment and considering the incessant complaints our undergrad Profs were “too rigid” with deadlines and expectations.
The very complaints which puzzled me as compared to my public magnet high school, the academic expectations were on the manageable…sometimes even easy side and it seemed the Profs were willing to provide extensions to anyone requesting them.
Even in cases where it was very obvious/apparent the requester “needed” the deadline because s/he(IME…almost always a male student) goofed off/left the assignment on the backburner until right before the deadline.
Another case which showed how much more flexible my undergrad Profs were vs my public magnet teachers was one prof who accepted a seminar paper from an older classmate just a FEW HOURS before final grades for the semester were due to the registrar and gave him a passable grade so he could walk and graduate a few weeks later.
My public magnet HS teachers would have told any student who pulled something like that “Congratulations, welcome to super-senior year at our HS.” And then proceed to tell our GC/college office to notify colleges to rescind their admissions.
- All respectable/elite private day/boarding school graduates.
droppedit, the problem with external motivators is that the motivation collapses when the external motivator is removed. An example is prizes for reading: after a few years of that, I have heard kids say they won’t read a certain book because there is no prize. On a larger scale, I have read that some students who finally get in to Harvard et al, become depressed because their motivation is then gone (until they fix on the next competitive goal).
Alfie Kohn’s books are interesting on this subject. Rewards are every bit as destructive in the long run as punishments, and grading systems offer both.
Human nature is what it is, and schools need to run efficiently, so I don’t think public schools will be able to make these kinds of idealistic changes. But that doesn’t mean I think the changes aren’t a great idea. It would also be a great idea to have fewer than 24 in a 3rd grade class but local budgets cannot fund that either.
There were colleges that tried this in the past. UC Santa Cruz in the beginning had no grades, only portfolios. However, the students had trouble getting into grad schools (esp med and law school) and the college started giving grades in some courses and I believe then went to regular grades over time.
http://articles.latimes.com/2000/feb/24/news/mn-2116
Similar issues for big high schools. How can a teacher realistically differentiate among the 100 kids taking biology without using grades? What would the comments be for the 50 kids that got a B or B+? I don’t believe this would change competition either. The highly motivated kids would still want to get the evaluation that says “Suzy is one of the top students out of the 100 I taught this year”.
By height. 
That’s not true that once a motivator is removed, we’ll stop doing it. In fact, any trainer of animals (and humans are animals) will tell you that they’ll keep doing the trick or behavior long after rewards are removed. (Though giving an occasional reward does help with retention.)
Some people need grades as motivators. Some don’t. That doesn’t mean at all that we’ll collapse if they’re gone.
I openly admit that in many of my courses, I really just cared about the grade. Same as many of my grad school friends. Now that we have written evals instead of grades, there’s been no collapse in motivation. Even after the written evals are done.
On the other hand, there are others who only care about the grade so they can get whatever degree because they need the credentials. Yes, for them the motivation may collapse because they had no real motivation in the first place other than they were told they needed the grade. But they’ll more likely just put their energy towards the new requirements to get the degree.
My high school had over 6k people. Written evals are not even in the realm of possibility.
I agree with @compmom this (giving no grades) could be a great idea. It should work if they get rid of the coachable standardized tests (SAT/ACT) as well. Instead, each college can offer a 2-hr mixed subject test made by freshmen class professors with a few questions from math, English, CS, arts, etc., with no need for preparation. Low degree of agreement between HS evaluation and the college test leads an application to the trash bin. That saves HS students on test preps and test taking unless one wants to apply to too many colleges.