In Mongtgomery County, we have some pretty crazy grading policies which take a lot of grading control out of the hands of the teachers
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To me the most ridiculous part is the rounding. A value doesn't become bigger when you round it, you're just displaying it differently. If the cutoff is 60%, then the cutoff is 60%, and no amount of rounding will make 59.5% "equal" to 60%.
I suppose they really mean the cutoff is 59.5%, and they're just saying 60% as a shorthand. But I think that leaves students with a misunderstanding of what rounding is.
I guess rounding is appropriate if you're concerned about precision, but grades have infinite precision anyway, right? At least on multiple-choice tests that's true.
(In my high school Latin class, the teacher required something like 900 "points" for an A, 800 points for a B, etc, and if you didn't get that number of points, you didn't get the grade. It was harder to argue that 796 points "rounded up" to 800, maybe because you're dealing with whole numbers instead of fractions.)
So on the other end of the spectrum, have you had any parents come in and ask you to give their child an A they didn't deserve?
The nice thing about teaching Physics is that most parents don't have any understanding of Physics -- so they very rarely argue whether an answer was right or wrong. So in that sense no, nobody's asked me to change a grade based on that.
Most of the parent e-mails I get are of the variety, "I looked online at my kid's scores and saw he/she is getting a bad grade. What should I do? Should I hire a tutor? Is my kid coming for extra help?"
Also, parents don't come into school to yell at me. They all yell at me via e-mail. Come on man, get with the 21st century.
Also 21st century: Parents blame themselves when their kids screw up. They rarely blame the teacher, and they only occasionally blame the kid. I love the job the media has done on parents. Hee hee.
So, if the tests / quizzes are multiple choice (4 choices), could they pass the class purely by guessing as they'd get 62.5% on average?
Maybe if they had a better grading system that encouraged them to work harder they'd learn that they could guess their way to passing grades and not have to work at all.
Not really, because then they would score a 25% on the test, which the grading computer would recognize as a 50%. (Possible scores you can enter into the system are Z, or a number between 50-100. Other numbers are turned into 50's. A Z means a Zero for not doing the assignment at all, and counts as 0.)
Also I don't give multiple choice tests or quizzes. Sometimes there may be a MC section of a test which is 1/5th of the total test.
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I suppose they really mean the cutoff is 59.5%, and they're just saying 60% as a shorthand. But I think that leaves students with a misunderstanding of what rounding is.
I guess rounding is appropriate if you're concerned about precision, but grades have infinite precision anyway, right? At least on multiple-choice tests that's true.
(In my high school Latin class, the teacher required something like 900 "points" for an A, 800 points for a B, etc, and if you didn't get that number of points, you didn't get the grade. It was harder to argue that 796 points "rounded up" to 800, maybe because you're dealing with whole numbers instead of fractions.)
So on the other end of the spectrum, have you had any parents come in and ask you to give their child an A they didn't deserve?
Reply
Most of the parent e-mails I get are of the variety, "I looked online at my kid's scores and saw he/she is getting a bad grade. What should I do? Should I hire a tutor? Is my kid coming for extra help?"
Also, parents don't come into school to yell at me. They all yell at me via e-mail. Come on man, get with the 21st century.
Also 21st century: Parents blame themselves when their kids screw up. They rarely blame the teacher, and they only occasionally blame the kid. I love the job the media has done on parents. Hee hee.
Reply
Maybe if they had a better grading system that encouraged them to work harder they'd learn that they could guess their way to passing grades and not have to work at all.
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Also I don't give multiple choice tests or quizzes. Sometimes there may be a MC section of a test which is 1/5th of the total test.
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