Mrs. Anderson,
I would like to start by stating that everything I say here is said with all due respect and will not be shared with other students in any way.
The issue I alluded to during our conversation does not simply deal with one assignment. It is an issue I've experienced multiple times throughout high school and is most egregious in your class. This issue is the fact that different students are graded differently based on some arbitrary measure. When a teacher grades each student's assignment to a different standard, it devalues the work of the students.
I experienced this most recently last year in AP US History. The tests we were given in that class have answers that are completely up for interpretation by the reader. The feedback
…show more content…
We seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot at the start of this year. My first semester in this class was rough to say the least. I spent the entire first marking period trying to get caught up on the summer work for a class I didn't even want to take, but couldn't switch out of. The second marking period was better. What brought me down there were, quite frankly, the useless and unnecessary blog posts. There is no better textbook definition of "busywork". I can write you another email dedicated to this atrocity. Every blog post I made was complete nonsense and I'm sorry you had to read them. There was also the matter of the Frankenstein DIscussion grade. I got a failing grade on that assignment? An assignment that is majority participation? When I asked you about it, you said that my contributions to the conversation were not in-depth enough. I simply nodded, smiled, and went on my way. To myself, I thought, "That feedback was awful." Isn't the purpose of a discussion to share ideas? What were my contributions missing that warranted a failing grade? I still believe that I was one of the handful of students that contributed my genuine thoughts and ideas to the conversation. I can name names of students who just went to the analysis section of the Sparknotes and read from it verbatim to sound intelligent. I know this because I read the Sparknotes as well, but didn't use that information in the discussion unless it came up organically. I …show more content…
I chose to take the classes that I am in now. I could have dropped two of them, CHS Latin IV and AP Calculus, and graduated just fine, but those are two of the classes I actually like this semester. That means that I have three AP courses and a CHS course all in the same semester. Therefore English, as my least favorite subject, took the bottom slot on my to-do list. Given my workload, I never got to the bottom of my to-do list. By the way, I am referring to a physical list I have on my phone, not an imaginary to-do list. The problem I am frustrated with here is that when I do complete work for this class, I do not receive the same grade that it seems everyone else is receiving for the same quality work. The mind map we just did is a prime example. There are still students that have not submitted the assignment and you were trying to tell me mine was late. A student from the alternate class made a mind map with such little information on it I'm surprised they did it at all. The grade of the former is yet to be seen. The latter received full credit. By grading my work with greater scrutiny, or by nitpicking, what do you
The solution to this seems to be neither giving away answers or lazily doing assigned reading in order to find meaning within the text. The student needs a heathy mix of assigned reading, and classroom help. This is vital, to the education of a student. He must be challenged to arrive at conclusions on his own, but also not left in the dark when he did not get what was asked of him. However, these “wrong answers” that the student came up with, should not be discouraged so quickly
as an illustration, but also to the hole in the students lives as a result of
Pressure is being exerted on students to pass, and teachers to enable their students to pass the standardized tests being presented to them. This takes much classroom time that could be spent instructing students on what might be more valuable information, and instead study for the test by what some consider rote memorization (Silva). Experiments have been done seeing how much different teaching approaches were before and after the implementation of standardized testing (Desimone). These experiments demonstrated how vastly the difference between teaching to the test and teaching what the instructor believes is the most valuable knowledge and the best way to present this knowledge. If there is a disconnect between what America’s teachers believe is best to know, and what is on the examinations, then one of the two is flawed, and it is not likely to be what the teachers are teaching.
In other words, two teachers may give the same assignment two completely different grades based on their own grading style. This puts an incredible amount of stress on a student because they need to complete assignments that will satisfy their current teacher, whose expectations and grading style could be very similar or very different from the student’s previous teacher. Alfie Kohn believes that the influence grades have on a student’s life doesn’t help this situation, and may even make it worse by providing students with a false sense of security about their knowledge. In her article “From Degrading to De-grading”, she states that scores on tests can be largely based on how the test was written and what skills were tested (Kohn 240). Therefore, it is up to teachers to identify what topics students must master in order to be proficient and score well on standardized tests. But when the class is not structured with a consideration for the material used on such tests, students enter the test blind to the skills that they will be expected to know and use. Anyone can memorize a list of facts off a study guide and score well on a multiple choice test the next day, but skills such as analyzing literature and interpreting a handful of graphs containing data from a scientific experiment are skills that require time and hours of instruction to master.
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.
In the regular grading scale, grades do vary widely because of these four factors: a teacher's conception of achievement, a teacher's sense of equity and rigor a student's effort. The student's knowledge is based on the graded assignments that the student has completed. Getting rid of these standardized testings removes the insecurities that student's have due to low score and many more factors. Abolishing this test can lead to recognition of our grading differences and create a common conception of achievement on our own based on what we need to work on
In the course of this semester of writing, I grew more than I ever had in my ability to write well. I remember on the first day of class several other students were talking about how hard this writing professor is. I was a bit worried and even thought about switching to an easy professor for a guarantee A so I can get a 4.0. Now, I am grateful that I chose to decide to work hard for a 4.0 instead. Even though I may not get it, I am still glad I stayed because for once, I learned and became a better writer. I can see that my knowledge of conventions definitely improved from last semester. I really loved the feedback for my assignments, since it allows me to realize what I need to improve on and what I should keep doing. Unlike the previous semester, the writing professor only told us our grade on the very first assignment after two months. There were no feedback on how I could improve either, so I had no idea if I was having trouble with anything. Prior to this course, I always had trouble writing sentences and organizing them in such a way that flows and delivers my idea well. I also rarely outline or plan out how I will write a paper too, and even when I did, it was very vague. Out of the five learning outcomes, I grew the most in rhetoric knowledge and writing process from the reading responses and 4 assignment.
“I think most importantly in my role, you just own up to your mistakes as quickly as possible, I’m going to screw up. I have and I will again.” In life and politics, disappointment and criticism from our mistakes is inevitable. The best thing to do with our misfortunes, is to accept that it happened and take that knowledge we obtained from them as a lesson. As a college student, I don’t always earn the grade on a challenging paper that I anticipated. However, constructive criticism on my work from my professors will help me learn how to write more superior work next time. Despite having a perfectionist attitude about my grades, I need to accept that one cannot learn without having a slip up every once in a
One of the issues, which Boyer points out , is that teachers and students have different expectations from college education. She says that the teachers are mainly concerned about students’ comprehension of the material, their attendance and attention while students’ hopes are to get good grades and to be well prepared for exams. It seems that the system of grading pushes students to not care too much about what is being taught from an understanding perspective, but only promotes more concern about grades instead. Some students don't really pay attention unless the instructor mentions an exam or something that will be graded. Furthermore, be...
By nature, most students are brought up in an academic environment motivated to get A’s and B’s on their report cards. Those grades sometimes don’t thoroughly report how much a student has learned or gained knowledge in each topic. Some instructors throw in factors totally unrelated to learning, when the main objective of academic institutions is to learn. In order to clearly demonstrate how much a student has learned in the classroom, schools should change their current grading system and teach students how to learn.
Some teachers have teacher’s assistants, also known as TAs, who come in and grade for them. For those students grading assignments adds a little more work on their part. TA work is not easy to begin with so when people turn in an assignment three weeks late the struggle is finding back the section and putting in the grade. It may not sound like much but when teachers or even teacher assistants have to do that with six different students that have five different assignments it is not fun. After turning in an assignment late there is a little bit of Guilt-Bating the TAs and teachers (Ni 2016). This is when a manipulator failures or successes are blamed on the one the manipulator is targeting. An example of this is when students blame his/her own grade on the person who had graded the assignment. Most would not understand that it actually happens in the life of a teacher or TA. Those people who find a way to make sure he/she does not look lazy, so he/she will pick the only person who they can think of that would have a say in his/her grade. He/she looks at the teacher’s assistant and blames them. For the manipulator it is easiest to target the TAs because he/she starts to question their grading abilities. An argument for this statement could be well why are they a TA? Students in high school when TAs he/she is getting a feel for what a teacher does. This could help the student decide what he/she
...at previously, sometimes in the midst of a discussion, people forget that there are two sides of a story and not everyone has to agree to yours. What we learn from our books or our studies is not what is necessarily important. What we learn from our peers and our professors is what’s important. Learning is more than absorbing fact, it is acquiring understanding, and it is being passionate about the material you are given. Each piece that we have read in class, and each comment that we make impacts a person no matter how little it seems. The education systems focuses too much about effective methods of teaching and not enough about effective methods of learning. However, this course felt like we were learning something instead trying to finish the curriculum. As Albert Einstein once said, “education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think”.
Students are unique individuals, and each one learns differently. As Patterson remarks, “When grading students, in the name of
When students have easier grading criteria, it increases their ability to learn the material instead of focusing on earning better grades without understanding the material. Students sometimes need grading criteria that will allow them to focus on their studying more than focusing on how they will be able to pass their classes with good grades that will not affect their GPA’s. For example, I have taken many classes throughout my college career such as Psychology, Philosophy, and Statistics, some of them I need as major requirements. I took the classes and I have no idea until this moment what I have learned in those classes. As said, I have learned the material for these classes to pass the exams, and forget what I have learned the day after the exam. In this case, I do not blame myself that I have not learned the material as I have to, because I learned it to pass the class with a good grade instead of passing the class with the
During the course of this class, I have had the opportunity to read literature from authors who come from different backgrounds and places in the world. Some of the stories and poetry we read were straight forward while others were confusing and sometimes required a second look. But one thing is clear, it changed the way I think about literature in a few ways that I wasn’t expecting. Three works in particular stand out in my mind. “ I Wont Let You Go” by Rabindranath Tagore, “To New York” by Leopold Senghor, and Pedro Peramo by Juan Rulfo all had an impact on my thinking for similar yet different reasons. They all incorporate their cultural backgrounds into their work through the setting of their pieces. They also compose their pieces in a way that makes you want to research their history to find the deeper meaning. Finally, a couple of the authors write about things they are emotionally connected to. Some of the examples we will look at, really opened my eyes to going beyond a superficial understanding of literature.