This seems a little telling being it is the end of the semester for those who are still in school but here goes any way however you want to look at it
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grades in high school didn't concern me one way or the other, because a lot of the grade was based on daily drudgework... worksheets and such. i've never been so good at daily work if i already understood the lesson. my grades tended to be As on tests and Fs on small homework.
grades in college tend to be based (at least, in my program) on big projects, papers, participation, and tests... so while i feel that those grades are a clearer reflection of my performance, i also don't sweat them very much... since, if i do the work, i'll get a good grade.
of course, that all got thrown out the window when i started grad school and got all competitive... heh.
i never understood the point of grades and grading. i always did "well" -- As and Bs -- in high school, mostly i think because i didn't think about the grades but did the work thouroughly when it interested me, for the good teachers, and they could see that it interested me and that i put a lot into it. for the lousy teachers, i pulled last-minute-garbage out of nowhere and they gave me As and Bs because they knew i was "smart" and assumed i had put effort in -- i knew how to fake things.
now i go here, and we don't have grades, we have long written evaluations -- which means, i tend to think, that we work a lot harder, because we know we're going to be scrutinized closely and can't just hide bullshit work behind a mediocre letter grade. for some people i think that's really motivating -- but for others it can be frightening and incapacitating, knowing that the work you do isn't just getting "done and over with" now, but will be discussed at length on a page that becomes part of your transcript, and then re-hashed again in your
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Sounds like a very interesting place to go. I go to Monmouth not in New Jersey but in Illinois and I'm not entirely sure I've made the right decision. It's so hard to judge a college.
Grades attempt to establish a baseline for compotency. Unfortunately it's a far from perfect system and only conveys a brief glimpse into what a person may know. At the very least it shows that at one point a person was capable of learning the material.
Is it a good gauge of how smart someone is? No, but it gives you a rough idea. Enough of an idea to get you to the next level or get you through the company doors. If someone is consistently hitting a 4.0 mark semester after semester, you can at least assume that they are capable of picking up new ideas (either through hard work or natural talent).
Projects, big projects..projects for industry or research projects, now those are a much better gauge of one's personal skill. They require a person to be assertive and motivated enough to seek out the project and a good project will show everyone exactly how smart, creative and practical you may be.
..So go to the grades for the base-line, and look towards the projects for a better idea of how good someone really is.
The ultimate failure of typical grading systems lies in one of the realities of life: getting the one important answer right out of many may be more significant than being correct on the higher percentage of trivial ones... but which ones in real life is the important one and which the trivial? A pity that very little of the educational system I have encountered or endured seemed to deal with this little question...
I have been on both sides of the spectrum... I just recently (over a year ago) graduated from a fairly competative college and now I am a math teacher at a high school
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grades in college tend to be based (at least, in my program) on big projects, papers, participation, and tests... so while i feel that those grades are a clearer reflection of my performance, i also don't sweat them very much... since, if i do the work, i'll get a good grade.
of course, that all got thrown out the window when i started grad school and got all competitive... heh.
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now i go here, and we don't have grades, we have long written evaluations -- which means, i tend to think, that we work a lot harder, because we know we're going to be scrutinized closely and can't just hide bullshit work behind a mediocre letter grade. for some people i think that's really motivating -- but for others it can be frightening and incapacitating, knowing that the work you do isn't just getting "done and over with" now, but will be discussed at length on a page that becomes part of your transcript, and then re-hashed again in your ( ... )
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Is it a good gauge of how smart someone is? No, but it gives you a rough idea. Enough of an idea to get you to the next level or get you through the company doors. If someone is consistently hitting a 4.0 mark semester after semester, you can at least assume that they are capable of picking up new ideas (either through hard work or natural talent).
Projects, big projects..projects for industry or research projects, now those are a much better gauge of one's personal skill. They require a person to be assertive and motivated enough to seek out the project and a good project will show everyone exactly how smart, creative and practical you may be.
..So go to the grades for the base-line, and look towards the projects for a better idea of how good someone really is.
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