“Equity grading”: forced regression towards the mean
[Hat tip: Ace.]
We can’t have students feeling bad about their grades – unless they’re smart and high-achieving students. Then it’s okay.
So let’s eliminate the tails, says California. All students will be equally – or almost equally – mediocre:
No D’s and F’s? No extra credit? Will Bay Area schools’ switch to equity grading help or harm students? Dublin Unified School District says the public school grading system is unfair
Hrihaan Bhutani is already thinking about college. The Dublin High freshman is taking four Advanced Placement classes next year and has crammed his schedule with extracurricular activities to better his chances of getting into an Ivy League school.But a change at the high school designed to get students less focused on grades has done the opposite. Suddenly, in some classes, A’s are almost unachievable, unless you score 100%. And F’s don’t exist. For high-achieving students like Bhutani, the pressure to be perfect is even more of a burden.
“I feel more stressed … now with this new system,” said Bhutani, who is especially sweating his biology class, one of dozens trying a variety of new grading scales under a two-year experiment. “Even if you’re at a 99, you would get moved down to an 85,” he explained, which translates to a world-ending B.
Dublin Unified’s new grading policy will go into effect for all 6th through 12th grade classes next year and is part of a national shift toward “equity grading” — a controversial concept that moves away from traditional grading to better measure how well students understand what they are being taught.
Traditional grades measure how well students understand what they are being taught, if tests are decently designed and assignments for writing papers are relevant.
More:
Next year, the district will restrict all letter grades to a 10% range and remove the practice of awarding zero points for assignments as long as they were “reasonably attempted.” The new policy will also remove extra credit and bonus points that elevated grades, and provide students with multiple chances to make up missed or failed assignments and minimize homework’s impact on a student’s grade.
If an assignment is “reasonably attempted” it wouldn’t be getting a zero anyway. Zero is for not turning it in at all. And the new policy eliminates many opportunities for good students to do exceptionally well at the same time it gives more opportunities for poor students to do better or to seem to do better (“minimizing homework’s impact” – why?).
Here’s the bottom line:
“This will up kids graduating, it will up their numbers,” said Laurie Sargent, an eighth grade English teacher at Cottonwood Creek, a TK-8th grade school in Dublin. “They’ll have fewer kids failing and then that looks good. It’s strategic.”
It’s all about the numbers, and if you eliminate failing than your numbers automatically improve.
I have come to loathe the word “equity,” which has been used in an Orwellian manner for way too long.
This whole nonsense of having youngsters compete for grades is so demeaning! We should just award them a high school diploma with straight A’s they are born. To do anything else is just so unfair.
Will the American (non)educational system ever get beyond the destruction of education?
The enforcement of Equality kills all diversity, wherever pursued hard enough.
Not the only thing it kills…
“This will up kids graduating, it will up their numbers,” said Laurie Sargent, an eighth grade English teacher at Cottonwood Creek, a TK-8th grade school in Dublin. “They’ll have fewer kids failing and then that looks good. It’s strategic.”
Funny. I look on it as further devaluing a high school education. Some strategy.
This kind of reminds me when I was in law school. My school forced a mean of 81 in each class with more than 10 students–but it didn’t force a standard deviation. Some profs were “speakers” who gave both high and low grades–and others were “clumps” who gave almost everyone between 76 and 86 (kind of like equity grading-lite). The lazy and less intellectually endowed students flocked to the “clumpers” and the highly motivated students took courses from the “spreaders.” And of course, everyone liked the small sections where the 81 mean wasn’t enforced–those students were in Lake Woebegone and most received high grades.
It’s not even a little clear to me why every school doesn’t force a mean and standard deviation for every course. But I guess we’re heading to a world without standards. I predict lots of highly motivated young people starting their own business rather than submitting themselves to the tyranny of the equal outcomes crowd.
Just one more example of the left’s denial of reality. They refuse to accept that in every population there are smart ones and dullards. Then factor in those who may make up for their lack of intellect with hard work, and the smart kid who is lazy and makes no effort.
It really shows the left’s basic rejection of the fact that each individual is unique. They much prefer the identical drone model for humanity, except for themselves of course. They are the superior beings.
Chad King:
I don’t think the quoted teacher was praising the situation. I think the point was that it was a scam to make the administrators look good.
When I went to school, grading on a curve was the norm. But it was bad, too. I once took an exam that was very easy, and the whole class did very very well. I got a 99, which was a C because they graded on a curve. Not good.
its not bad enough that the lockdowns destroyed two or three years of educational development, now they want to squelch anyone who made it past that stumbling bloc,
There is the fairly universal goal of unionism. Ever upward spiraling salaries alongside ever downward spiraling output and productivity per employee.
An intelligent but left leaning friend of mine used to complain a couple decades ago that unions aren’t much of an issue in the private sector because only 8% of corps. were unionized. Yes, that’s because they killed off the other 40 or 50%.
Of course, schools will manipulate the numbers to mask their poor work.
“I once took an exam that was very easy, and the whole class did very very well. I got a 99, which was a C because they graded on a curve. Not good.”
I agree Neo. That is a travesty. I made huge efforts to write exams so that the average was near a C+. I would then grade on a curve as long as the curve did not punish as in your case, then went to straight scale as it was obvious I was at fault.
A very smart guy I know says ,,modern civilization was built by white guys with an IQ of 115 or better. What happens when they quit participating in the charade.
Teacher of college English here. Students asked to do even the most minimal amount of work get AI to do it for them, so why does it even matter if they learn anything in K-12? I mean, sheesh, as long as they know how to use AI, what’s the problem???? (Sarc, in case it wasn’t clear.)
(I posted this at Maggies Farm)
Equitable Grading?
The push from the principal at the majority-minority school where I taught math for one year was to do all you could to give a passing grade. Which means that lazybones got promoted, and also did poorly on the standardized statewide test.
A math teacher at a neighboring majority-minority middle school gave out flunking grades to a third of his students the first marking period. That was also his first year teaching. His students got the message. They ended up doing very well on the standardized statewide test. Definitely the best in his school, and maybe the best in a majority-minority school. Don’t remember.
After teaching 2-3 years, he took his talents to the tech industry. More money, less aggravation.
Students are not stupid. Many find out what the bare minimum to get by is, and calibrate their efforts to that bare minimum.
I taught when computer application to teaching was in the beginning stages. I wasn’t even aware of spreadsheets. If I had to do it over again, I would post weekly and maybe even daily grades. Much easier to do with a spreadsheet. That way students get quick feedback.
I cannot decide who is worst. State education department apparatchiks? Teachers’ college faculty? Local administrators? School board members? Teachers union bosses? Teachers? So many bozos from which to choose.
Dear Mrs. X:
Many years ago I had a discussion with another parent who thought teaching handwriting, especially cursive, was a waste of time as everything would be done on a computer. Now research shows that students who take notes by hand remember more of the lecture than those who type them on a computer. Students who rely on AI will find that they are handicapped when their job requires “out-of-the-box” thinking.
I foresee a return to a day similar to the early days of the Industrial Revolution when workers were mere cogs in the machine or on the assembly line. If robots/AI can do the complicated work better and faster, why use humans?
Chad King, you beat me to the Keiiler line. Well done!
of course ‘we’re soaking in the stupidity’ I saw the way they were mandating the teaching of division, in the elementary schools, one has to refer to that brando aphorism in apocalypse, ‘the horror, the horror’
who are we fooling, they are creating a generation of students are barely numerate, bare literate in any language, ignorant and contemptuous of our history and traditions,
Art Deco
I don’t know either, which is worst. Instead, I ask, where does the education nonsense begin? My take is that it begins with the Ed Schools/Teachers’ college faculty. They indoctrinate the prospective teachers. The teachers become the administrators. State education department apparatchiks, most of whom got their doctorates from Ed Schools, get their indoctrination from Ed Schools/Teachers’ college faculty.
Teachers’ unions? I taught in Texas, which has weak teachers’ unions, so I will pass on that. It does appear that strong teachers’ unions do not improve the quality of education.
While I have unmitigated contempt for our Ed Schools as currently constituted, there is a place for pedagogy, for instructing prospective teachers about what works and doesn’t work in formal instruction. It is not inherently obvious what is the best way to teach a given subject to a given student population.
There has been formal classroom instruction for some 2,500 years. As such, there is a record of what works and doesn’t work in formal classroom instruction.
Prospective teachers need pedagogy. They do not need the next big thing that will revolutionize education, because the next big thing has never been sufficiently researched, and five years later is replaced by the new next big thing. Which also gets replaced in five years.
Both my parents got their initial degrees from teachers’ colleges, though only my mother actually taught in high school. Both of them believed that knowledge of the subject trumped all the Ed School courses in becoming an effective teacher.
From my two years of teaching math in 8th-9th grade, my conclusion is that while knowledge of the subject to be taught is necessary to be an effective teacher, it is not sufficient. I had a 3.5 average in my 30+ credits of math courses, but was not successful as a teacher. A teacher needs to be a persuader, and persuading didn’t come naturally to me.
Is there a separate set of transcripts for college apps?
I think the best system we can hope for, and the one that you already see in most law and medical schools around the country, is to give all the black students straight A’s (or their equivalent), and grade all the other students fairly. While it provides the most desirable/necessary result (the black students all come off as brilliant), at least the high-achieving students will get their rewards as well.
Shrink them standard deviations, baby!