Exams

[LordShiva]

Grades do matter

[Jon Miller]

I had a B+ average in highschool, and got a good scholarship to college (I only applied for one good one and one poor one).

I had a B+ average in college, and applied and got into some of the best graduate schools in the US (not the very best, but top 20 - almost top 10).

And in graduate school, as long as you don't fail, grades don't matter at all.

JM

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi

Not really. If they were then the employers would be the schools themselves and the students would be working and paid for directly by them.

Why so?

In most countries, including New Zealand when I was young, the state paid you a small wage if you were a student, contingent on you keeping an acceptable level of academic performance.

Even in Canada, the public is picking up a substantial portion of your tab. In return they expect you to work hard and benefit Canada.

As it is the model is more like the entertainment industry. The students have a roster of professors, and they get to choose the professors and the courses that they want to take in order to get a degree. They pay the professors to teach them.

And this is the attitude that is slowly destroying higher education. Students are not consumers. There will often be compulsory courses and sequences of courses, so it's not quite the same. University is not that much different from high school, except you don't have to go to university.

It's this sort of attitude which is leading to mickey mouse colleges offering mickey mouse degrees.

If the students were getting paid I can see them being held accountable for their work, but the reality is that the students are the ones writing the cheques for the professors.

In most universities in the world this is patently false. Even in New Zealand, the public is still picking up 3/4 of the tab.

The current situation is inefficient. But then again, a lot of problems in education are down to ridiculous post 60s left wing reforms.

That was the other one. Her 'lectures' if I could call them that were 20 minutes long once a week. I would leave before the 'discussion session' was over because I had other things to do. She didn't like it and I asked her why a 3 hour class was only 20 minutes of lecturing from her, and of that 20 minutes, none of it was real history. I had 'history of urban spaces' and 'history of canadian education' with her and the C-'s I got were for a paper on the bridge construction of WAC Bennett and the subsequent postwar suburb boom in Vancouver and another on St. Boniface College, which founded all the schools we now know of in the west as part of their Catholic mission.

Sounds awful.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by -Jrabbit
My grades went up significantly when I started paying my own way.
OTOH, I'm paying for my daughter's college, and she's doing brilliantly.

She must take after her mother.

[Ben Kenobi]

In most countries, including New Zealand when I was young, the state paid you a small wage if you were a student, contingent on you keeping an acceptable level of academic performance.

In the business world the one doing the evaluations is the one writing the cheques. This is why they have direct accountability. If you don't perform to expectations you get fired.

If the state is paying for the students entirely, then there isn't any accountability on the party of the student with the teacher. It would have to be accompanied by the teacher having limits on how many he was allowed to pass in order to keep up his quota.

Even in Canada, the public is picking up a substantial portion of your tab. In return they expect you to work hard and benefit Canada.

Then why are the courses offered so soft? I tried to pick the hardest courses offered by my history degree, and very few of them were content driven. Most of them were fluff.

If it were in the best interest of the state, then the courses would be as rigorous as possible. The reality is that the student gets exactly the same degree for taking fluff courses, and is often rewarded for doing so through higher GPA throughout the course of their term.

That would be the second consequence if the folks who make the courses are not the ones paying for the students. Then it becomes most advantageous to have soft courses because the students wouldn't want to risk their scholarship by taking harder ones.

And this is the attitude that is slowly destroying higher education. Students are not consumers. There will often be compulsory courses and sequences of courses, so it's not quite the same. University is not that much different from high school, except you don't have to go to university.

It's this sort of attitude which is leading to mickey mouse colleges offering mickey mouse degrees.

I agree. I feel my high school education through the international baccalaureate program was of higher calibre because the folks designing the curricula were in no way connected with the funding associated with the number of seats they filled.

I would think if the university were paying the entire cost, they would have much more rigorous standards because the incentive would be that they want to attract the best students, because then they would be more likely to make a return on their investment.

The current situation is inefficient. But then again, a lot of problems in education are down to ridiculous post 60s left wing reforms.

Agreed. I'd much rather see a revival of the old Classics curricula of a century ago, with the 'Great books', and some private universities are going back to the old system. I had a few courses and professors who still believed in that model, I'd say 5 of the professors I had at university tried to do this. The other two were horrible, and represented 24 credits out of 60.

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
It's a pretty pisspoor way of doing that. I accept that coursework isn't ideal for the exceptional student but I suspect that's because when there are criteria that do not account for you reading around the subject, any fool can learn the syllabus. The exceptional student will read around and coursework represents a fabulous opportunity for the bright student to demonstrate that. We just need to get out of the "box-ticking" mentality for education pre university imo.

I sort of disagree with that, sort of don't. I have a few suppositions that leads to that opinion.

1. Your grade in a college course should reflect the degree to which you understand the material (in a lecture/'knowledge' course) and/or the degree to which you can discuss the material (in writing or verbally).
A = 100% understanding / Complete understanding of the subject | Expert Ability to intelligently and accurately discuss the subject
B = 80% understanding / Good understanding of most of the material on the subject | Ability to discuss the subject with no significant inaccuracies and reasonably intelligently
C = 60% understanding / Basic understanding of the material on the subject | Ability to discuss at a basic level the subject, but with some inaccuracy
D = Low understanding / Significant lack of understanding of basic material | Inability to discuss the subject on any level beyond very basic, significant factual inaccuracies
F = No understanding / No understanding of the subject matter or ability to discuss it
It goes without saying that I'd consider a D a failing grade (as do many good colleges). It is valuable to tell a person how much improvement they need to make when failing them.

2. I consider grading in college useful to help a student understand how well they understood the subject, not as a competitive marker. College is not about 'getting good grades' or 'being the top in your class', but about 'learning the material necessary to do X'. Even for academic majors (ie philosophy, literature, etc.), it is still fundamentally about teaching you to do something - to discuss/write about material and to understand what you are writing about.

3. As such, I don't consider a grading scale that is aimed to 'identify bright students' to be a good one. I don't care how **** bright you are (and I was considered very bright in school), if you understand the material and can discuss it intelligently, you've done well. Students who need their egos massaged to remind them how smart they are, need to learn how to deal with things better; they're the ones who in performance review time in the business world are pissed that they didn't get a top rating, when 'top rating' means something more than just 'intelligent'...

4. So, ultimately, I think that exams are the best way to go (and written essays of course). Not necessarily *timed* exams, mind you (as you object correctly earlier in the thread), but not coursework at all. Coursework is for you to better understand the material, and to the extent that it is corrected/turned in (only in lower level classes where your ability to know if you understood the material might be questioned) should not count towards your grade. Almost as bad as counting 'attendance' as many discussion courses are like to; frankly if you don't attend, you won't be able to show your understanding and ability to discuss the material, and so your grade will suffer, but that should be apparent with or without the 'attendance' portion of the grade.

My perfect grading system would be take-home essays (in the real world you can use google, your understanding of online resources is just as important as your understanding of the actual material; and trust me, I can figure out if you copied an essay rather than just using source material) and in-class exams that had relatively relaxed time schedules (you can stay in the room as long as the room is free). Timing an exam gives some value - namely, the ability to QUICKLY recall information has value in the real world - but knowing the material correctly >> knowing it quickly, as a lot of BSers will quickly answer the question but answer it incorrectly, and do more harm that way.

[Ben Kenobi]

Disagree.

In an exam they are testing your knowledge, and collaboration isn't permitted. In a take home, I saw first hand how many people did them, they sat in the library in a big group and answered questions together.

I was the only one who walked in who wanted the challenge.

I think a fair way to do it would be to allow students to bring in a cheat sheet which they would submit in with the test. This way preparation would be rewarded and greater precision could be asked for in an exam.