A Student Perspective
I posted a question about grades on my class blog and got a very interesting comment from a student. I thought that you would all be interested.
"I actually think that the division of grades into subcategories is more important than the overall grade, and that to me presents a problem. If a person is graded on the basis of subcategories alone, perhaps having grades only in the subcategories for a said class, it should allow for a more personalized view of what a student's strengths are, which subsequently allows the teacher or employer to see even without the aid of teacher comments how the person will do in the class or position in question. For this idea of grading to work, however, there need to be many and varied categories, even more than there are now, personalized by the teacher of the class, and the overall grade feature needs to be eliminated. From the comments stated here and from my own experiences I can tell that the overall grade only distracts from the actual performance of a student. The information this grade gives now can be accounted for, of course, in different subcategories."
"I actually think that the division of grades into subcategories is more important than the overall grade, and that to me presents a problem. If a person is graded on the basis of subcategories alone, perhaps having grades only in the subcategories for a said class, it should allow for a more personalized view of what a student's strengths are, which subsequently allows the teacher or employer to see even without the aid of teacher comments how the person will do in the class or position in question. For this idea of grading to work, however, there need to be many and varied categories, even more than there are now, personalized by the teacher of the class, and the overall grade feature needs to be eliminated. From the comments stated here and from my own experiences I can tell that the overall grade only distracts from the actual performance of a student. The information this grade gives now can be accounted for, of course, in different subcategories."
posted by Crosby at 11:13 PM
3 Comments:
I think this is very interesting - thanks for sharing. I think this student is thinking along some of the same lines I am, that in my perfect grading world it would be all about the feedback, not the grade. I just don't know how to get there from here . . .
Amanda, can you make sure this student takes my class? What a great attitude!
How thoughtful. The student obviously was thoughtful about the subject of grades, and you were thoughtful to share! I also appreciated your thoughts, Amanda, when we met as a small group and I was struggling with catagories for grading math. :-)
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