This is why trying to rank/judge/grade everyone by a uniform standard is almost universally terrible.
Students should be encouraged to try their best in every subject, allowed to make the mistakes they are naturally going to make at whatever level they are currently, and helped to improve over time. Punishing people for being less prepared than peers who did more practice or for making ordinary and expected mistakes actively gets in the way of their learning, as well as making them feel terrible. It's pretty bad for the students who are more prepared as well, as many of them internalize the idea that they are inherently good at some things and inherently bad at others, which is sometimes temporarily gratifying but often stops them from pushing themselves to try anything new or hard.
The problem here was too little testing, not too much. If they tested the students on music before they started they would have been put in classes where they belong and they could have gotten the teaching they needed.
I agree and disagree. I agree in that pressure is good, I disagree that audits are bad because of no pressure. Audits mean that is low priority which means that it will fall off when your busy schedule of "actual" courses have deadlines. Which is not a refletion of your ability nor interest to learn but of your workload.
This is the main reason I hold resentment towards GE's. Not because I don't want to be a well rounded person, but because when 3-4 other major classes are already crushing you the last bit of "pressure" needed is some random music theory or history course quizzing you. I never really got the time to breathe in college, and taking my time woulda been a $20k+ decision on top of the $80k I already had in debt. I literally could not afford to learn properly.
Moreover, the hope is that GEs would mean more well rounded students, liberal thinkers. There is little proof of that outcome being achieved. I wouldn’t want to scrap them though, out of fear of what less well rounded graduates might act like.
> I wouldn’t want to scrap them though, out of fear of what less well rounded graduates might act like.
They would act like Europeans and the rest of the world where GE's aren't a thing. What that means depends on your biases, but it doesn't seem too bad to me. And since silicon valley is mostly foreign software engineers today it doesn't seem like a bad thing for their performance either.
You're right about that, I took an economics class which turned out to be a Marxist indoctrination course. I wasn't interested in wasting time on fairy tales. I then satisfied the GE requirement by taking classes like financial accounting, which I expected to be useful in my career.
External pressure can work in the short term, but it disincentivises taking risk (which is where life-long learning happens), it steps on internal motivation (which is where life-long learning happens), and once the external pressure is removed, the interest in learning drops to further below where it was before the pressure was introduced.
So yes, it works in the short term, but I believe it's a net negative overall.
Grades are great, but not for the pressure they apply on students -- they are a measure of how successful the teacher has been in reaching their students!
> Grades are great, but not for the pressure they apply on students -- they are a measure of how successful the teacher has been in reaching their students!
The students do have some responsibility to learn the material.
> This is why trying to rank/judge/grade everyone by a uniform standard is almost universally terrible.
The point of grades on a universal standard ought not to have anything to do with the students; it should serve as a diagnostic metric for the teacher.
And it can be far more coursely grained than it often is today. In fact, most teachers don't need a finer signal than number of passing and failing students to figure out how well they are doing.
Much like I use the uptime percentage as a signal for which code needs bugfixes and how bold I can be when introducing new features, the teacher can use the fraction passing to determine what needs to be taught differently and how quickly to introduce new material. Of course, schools don't work in a way that makes teacher-led learning possible...
I often end up in this concept of the "real world" when talking about kids and their up-bringing. Iv'e always felt school needs to be much more individually tailored, and this connects to my real-world thinking about kids: I envision how the world "outside" of the family will treat my kids, and what they need to do well out there. Same thing applies to school, really. And in the real world we do not expect everyone to know the same things, do the same job, or have the same personality or talent as everyone else. So why should schools be like this? Its just stupid.
It's usually the teacher who creates the exam. I've seen plenty of bad teachers give extremely easy exams where everyone gets awesome grades even though no one understood anything. Standardized exams are few and far between.
I do agree that there is plenty of destructive stigma associated with repeating a class or grade, but there is no alternative, assuming your grades reflect your actual learning level (which tends to be the case for the low grades, in my experience, even if it doesn't for higher grades). You can't move on to a higher grade if you just didn't learn the basics, you'll be even worse off. What possible point would there be in trying to teach comparative literature to someone who didn't learn to read or write properly?
So, we need to get rid of the stigma, not the practice.
I agree with the sentiment. But I feel the sentiment is comparable to saying we need to rid society of violence. Maybe at a university level we can apply this, but we 1000% need to bring down the cost of tuition before considering spending more money at college.
for grade school, I'm at an impasse. I don't like complaining without offering something actionable, but the scale and existing inequalities of schools is so dire that I don't know where to start. The realistic answer over the decades has been to simply lower the bar overtime, but that doesn't exactly help either.
You are telling me that giving them more education is punishment? No matter how you do it they get left behind, if they continue to get put in classes they aren't ready for that is bad as well.
There are many reasons why students don't learn everything they can from a class and inability to grasp the material is only one one of them, yet it is the only reason that ensures they won't learn more the second time around.
it is massive punishment due to social consequences with peers.
Get better peers? What you're saying is that it's better for students to keep failing so as not to upset their milieu. Oftentimes, the best thing you can do for a struggling child is to take them out of the environment that's holding them down.
No, that one is actually systematic result. That was original reason why they stopped doing it. It did not helped anything. Special help, additional tutors who are actually trained in behavioral and learning issues, those sometimes help. Keeping them back a grade, not much.
> Get better peers?
This real world we live in does not provide better peers. Peers are other kids, those are how they are.
> What you're saying is that it's better for students to keep failing so as not to upset their milieu.
What I am saying is that when they are hold a grade, the system is keeping them failing. They dont get better. It does not magically turns then into better performing students. They will just suck in a way similar to original suck, except that it also leads to them trying even less then before.
More time absolutely helps, people do much better the second time they take a class. Teachers are a good example, they typically didn't get good grades, but after having seen the class over and over so many times they get good enough to teach it. It works, repetition leads to mastery.
It is just that practically it did not happened with elementary school students. Special help class with more repetition and teacher trained in learning issues do help.
Also, the issues of failing students are not easily fixable with repetition. They have often attention issues, learning disabilities, behavioral issues, mental health issues etc. that are not helped by repetition at all.
Where I am, those kids with deeper issues preventing them to learn as quick as others often have to repeat a class, fail again and then get send to special schools.
In theory they should get more appropriate help there, but normally there is not more funding in these special schools and it's even harder because all of the pupils have bigger learning deficiencies. So often these kids are left behind.
The only solution that gives every kid an equal opportunity would mean a massive increase of funding of schools and teachers.
But even if that would happen, we currently do not have enough well educated teachers and the job is also not very popular due to high stress and low pay and new teachers take many years to be available...
with the way our education structure is setup, yes. you fall behind your peers, you are assumed to be dumb or even unteachable, if you're a rising senior, a bad grade (be it sue to external or internal factors) can rescind future prospect.s And after a certain point you have to be kicked out of a school for legal reasons so now you need to work around some other way to earn a GED.
If we're talking college, you now need to either spend more time and especially money to repeat a course, or drop out and give up entirely. it can also disqualify you from scholarships and grants, so it is a direct financial consequence in two ways. Unlike the workforce, you are not given adequate opportunity in academia to fall behind, let alone fail.
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I agree in theory that there should be no shame in needing to redo classes and reinforce your learnings, but current societal expectations in traditinal education does no support such a mindset. Another reason I wish there was more awareness and accessibilities in paths outside of grade school -> university to figure out what you enjoy and how to learn it.
Same way we do now: based on who's parents can donate a new wing for the campus to build.
But sure, it's the same problem with any other prestigious venue. Demand far far far outstrips supply. So they don't really need to pick "the best" students. Merely students "over the bar of quality". There's no problem in the eyes of the venue, so there's nothing to change.
I think the implied assumption in this question is flawed to begin with in that not everyone needs to be at a famous institution to succeed. But if you want my likely bad take: sports coaches actually have a pretty decent method of scouting by... well, scouting. seek out local/state/national talent and nurture them years before an app goes in. If they can build a relationship, that's a personal referral that goes farther than any essay prompt.
It's the most flexible method because scouters can tailor from culture to culture, based on qualities that traditional education metrics wouldn't take into account.
It's a good idea! The Math Olympiad was a thing when I was in school. Just need to turn that into a more mainstream competition and build up a much larger culture and business around succeeding in it.
