Education vs. Grades Education is essential in a flourishing society and it is needed in order for society to advance. We start learning when we are first born and we never stop learning until we die. Formal schooling takes up the early stages of our lives; people start from five years old to twenty-two years old or even longer. The results of learning is shown through the concept of grades. A grade is a measurement of learning and it is used by colleges and employers to find how skilled you are in certain subjects or overall. While many may think a grade is a deserving measurement of achievement, there are many reasons why grades are not an adequate benchmark. Teachers and educators have been discussing how to help students enjoy learning. …show more content…
The developments that society made through education are being abused and students are taking note. They are loading answers on to their calculators and are using phones during tests. Students cheat because they want to get a better grade and will do whatever is necessary for an A. After confronting students, principal Mike Murphy at Golden High School later stated “... some students don’t think of it as cheating, or they try to justify their behavior” (Meyer). Murphy also explained, “‘A lot of kids are under pressure to do well grade-wise. They are looking at college. Success is certainly something that drives people. These are good kids. They just made a bad choice.’”(Meyer). This concept that grades decrease may not help students learning and instead influence students them to make bad decisions later in life is not unknown. Teachers at one school decided to take away the concept of grades and instead focused on teaching students. As anticipatedNot to their surprise, the students responded incredibly well. They realized that there was low risk and high reward, whichand this led to incredible engagement from students. After six weeks, all English teachers met together and discussed the outcomes of the experiment. With this experiment, the teachers tested the effect that intrinsic motivation has on students (Lamb-Sinclair). In …show more content…
These are not measures of learning outcomes, but rather completely unrelated (“Grading vs. Assessment…”). Sometimes if a student does not do well on an assignment, then the teacher might skew or pad the results of the students work which leads to an inaccurate picture of a student’s learning. A report by the Huffington Post states that “Teachers feel compelled to ‘grade,’ any and all student work, believing that a letter or percentage will indicate to students and parents a measure of skill.” (Rubino). This quote indicates that some teachers feel that they must grade all work that is handed out. Some of the work handed out should not need to be graded. From the same article it brings up the fact that people including teachers and students often forget what an A or a B stand for. The primary function of grades is to communicate mastery of performance and today they do anything but that. Grades do not provide meaningful feedback for improvement or growth to parents and students, which does not help both of them. The needs of the student needs to be at the forefront of the conversation and for this to happen we need individual one-on-one teaching with a parent to help students learn (Crouch). If this was to happen, students would learn better and we could communicate the needs of the students better than
In her article, “The Case Against GRADES”, Alfie Kohn discusses the grading system and its faults. She opens her argument with information from an older psychological study that proves the negative impact of the current grading system, and she reinforces this with the proof that “no” research has contradicted this statement. Also, she gives many key reasons including: “Motivation”, “Achievement”, “Quantification”, and “Curriculum”. Kohn supports these topics with other reasearch for why the system is failing the students. She asserts that, “… the absence of grading is a necessary condition for promoting deep thinking and a desire to engage in it.” As support, she offers other solutions and then debunks them by proving that they would not solve
According the three leading effects of grading outlined in Kohn’s paper, the number one effect of grading is “grades tend to reduce students' interest in being taught.” I would agree with his argument grading and testing puts pressure on getting excellent grades and takes the focus off understanding and on “performing” acceptably. When I was younger, I was ferocious reading lately the only reading I accomplish is required for a class or studying a textbook. It was enjoyable since I loved reading; I was not required to read all the books I read due to my genuine love for reading and words. Because of that, I excelled in English.
Education is one of the most important tools that society possesses. The right implementation of this tool is one of the greatest ways of assuring the quality of life within a society. The ability to better ourselves, is one of the strongest inherit abilities of the human race. At its most basic definition, education is nothing more than the teaching of ideas. The early stages of schooling instill more attitude and social skills than knowledge. The younger stages of a person's life are usually the most definable years of their lives. As the age and skill level of the student increases, more education is based upon the interest of the student. For society to progress and excel, every generation must learn just a little more. Education is important and the ways that it is tested should show the most accurate measure of achievement. SOL's (Standards of Learning) is the testing I am going to explain, and why it should not be required in high school as a form of measurement of a students achievement.
In today’s society we feel the need to be graded in order to learn. The topic of the grading system has sparked three essays, by three different authors, about the pros and cons of the grading system. First, Jerry Farber, professor at University of California at San Diego, wrote A Young Person’s Guide to the Grading System (333). Next is Steven Vogel, professor at Denison University, who wrote Grades and Money (337). The last two authors in this compilation are Stephen Goode and Timothy W. Maier. They both are journalists for Insight on the News. While each of these authors have their own point of view on the grading system, all three essays talk about how being graded affects learning.
Education is the most powerful weapon a person can possess. An abundance of examples could be given to further prove this statement as well. Albert Einstein used his to show the world that everything is made of atoms and that light is made up of energy called photons. Marie Curie used hers to discover radium. Martin Luther King Jr. used his to fight for equal rights for African Americans. The list could perpetually go on to describe many people who used their education to influence change in this world. However, one country’s list of influential people seems to gradually dwindle as the years go by. The reasons for this could be never ending, but the root of the problem is the education system. This country
In conclusion, I believe that the grade system is important to the success of the students so can know where they stand in a course as far as grades are concern, and they are able to motivate themselves to light their grades up higher than before as well as the Instructors can see where students need help and they can play an important role in a students career as far as them knowing what areas they need assisting in so they might succeed.
In Artie Kohn’s “The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation” in Bergmann’s Academic Research and Writing, the author is skeptical regarding if the issue of grade inflation is really existent. It is shockingly apparent after reading the portion of the essay stating Harvard University’s two headlining quotes, each quote’s dates were spread apart by over a hundred years (Bergmann, 2010, pg. 260). Those representing Harvard University in the quotes come off as rather egotistic and overly confident in nature. The author states within the essay “To say that grades are not merely rising but inflated – and that they are consequently ‘less accurate’ now…is to postulate the existence of an objectively correct evaluation of what a student (or essay) deserves,
One change institutions should make to the grading system is to eliminate all factors that have noting to do with learning outcomes from affecting the students’ grade. According to the article, “Assessment of Learning Outcomes: What’s the difference?” written by Carnegie Mellon University, grades are often based on more than learning outcomes. Instructors usually include factors unrelated to learning outcomes such as attendance to class, participation, improvement and in some cases, grades are boosted a bit due to how hard the student is working.” These factors are
Academic knowledge is the basis on which future prosperity, and financial security has been determined. As a consequence, students feel inclined to perform above average in school. Now, as students perform less and less, they sink to obtain good grades by cheating. This method to acquire the desired grades will only harm the student, instead of the imagined result. Prompted by a child’s inability to perform basic tasks throughout his education , academic cheating spawns numerous negative consequences.
But humanity cannot help but cheat, we’re competitive, always seeking to be better than others, and having better grades, a better GPA, a better score on a single test all contributes to this superiority complex. While some individuals work extremely hard for their accomplishments, many others find the modern-day cliché: “work smart not hard” to be more applicable, as it is much easier to copy down information than it is to understand it. A localized example of this is human interaction in Sherwood High School. Because Sherwood High School divides work periods into five one-hour class sessions, it allows individuals in later periods to gain preordained knowledge about an assignment or task beforehand, providing an upper-had at the cost of their academic integrity; the reason this phenomenon occurs so often is attributed to the pressure placed upon students to perform, pressure from peers, parents, siblings, and the schooling system creates a larger emphasis on the grades and results in cheating to achieve desired grades. The letters A, B, C, D, and F, now hold so much power that it forces many students to focus on achieving the letter through any means necessary than learn the
Kids’ grades go down at least once a week due to homework assignments. They go down because kids don’t get the assignment. They didn’t understand it because maybe the teacher didn’t explain it very well or the homework was to hard.
It's June, and another graduating class is hoping, among other things, to achieve high grades. Of course, "high" is a subjective target. Originally a "C" meant average; today however, the expectations and pressures to give and receive "A's" and "B's" takes its toll on teachers and students alike. This nullifies the value of the traditional grading scale and creates a host of entirely new problems. The widespread occurrence of grade inflation seriously affects the credibility of secondary and post-secondary education in America.
Traditional methods of using grades to motivate students often don’t work as we hope they will (Stiggins et al. 38).
...ke school something that the students can look back on and think that it was a meaningful time where they learned a lot about life instead of a time where they thought they would have a break down because they got a low score on a test. School should be a time to make mistakes in a safe environment that they can learn from, not a place that they are petrified to make a mistake for fear of retribution on their grade cards. Its time to change the school system to save future students from becoming stress crazed and to let them know that there is more to this world than a grade card and in the long run it is a very small fraction of life.
At the beginning of one’s journey of gaining more knowledge, most children don’t mind school, for it is a change of environment for them. The majority of elementary school adolescents even enjoy school to some degree. As time wears on, we usually, and sadly, begin to see a change of heart. Children become fatigued from school and therefore don’t take pleasure in going anymore. Maybe their teachers didn’t teach them in the way that they learn most efficiently, or maybe students just become bored with the whole “school scene” itself. Whatever the case, it is apparent that by the time they reach high school, their interest for learning alone has died out.