Tag Archives: evaluation

Boxes Made to Fit

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William (Bill) Ferriter shared a post on LinkedIn about the struggles his daughter is having at school. While I will share a key quote from his post, I encourage you to read the full post here. Bill said,

Should we be failing students who pass unit tests and quizzes but don’t turn in practice tasks? Were those practice tasks essential as a vehicle for preparing students or assessing learning if a student can demonstrate mastery on the unit test without them? How many assignments do we really need to determine if a student is working at or above grade level? Could we use something other than zeros — think codes like INC or placeholder grades like 50s — to report on missing work? Does every student have to do every assignment?

On a more philosophical level, are we cheapening our professional credibility when we report that a student who passes most/all of our quizzes and tests has failed our class? Are grading policies with rigid consequences for missing work effective for encouraging learning? For changing behavior? Is the purpose of grades to report on student mastery of essential outcomes or to report on the ability (or lack thereof) to keep up with schoolwork?

I left Bill the following comment:

In my first year teaching a colleague (also in his first year) was experimenting with grading and asked a simple question that has stuck with me:
“Are we counting marks or marking what counts.”
(See the first half of this old post – if you go past the first half, sorry that the image links seem to be broken.)

My daughter was training 24-26 hours a week in Synchronized Swimming and missed some gym classes going to Provincials and Nationals. Despite consistently being the second fastest girl doing their weekly runs (behind a Provincial level soccer player), she was told at the end of the year she would only get a ‘B’ unless she made up a run and did a volleyball rules quiz she missed.

I share this because it exemplifies the idea of just counting marks.

To me this undermines the professionalism of teaching. It says, ‘We only care about the numbers’, and that my friend is exactly what AI can do better than us. I hope to see educators around the world thinking more deeply about what really matters to students in school. We need to stop building schools and courses like boxes students need to fit into and more like boxes made to fit students!

Why letter grades/percents?

Shared this on Remi’s blog post as a comment. I thought I’d share it here for now, before I expand it into a full blog post on Pairadimes some time (soon). 

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Why letter grades/percents? It goes “Beyond TTWWADI” (Google it)!

Fear has a lot to do with it… what will the parents say? What will the admin say?

Well, I actually did it… and in Grade 10 too!

Students got 2 marks (percentages) all semester for Planning 10 in my class. They got a mid-term and a final mark, required on report cards, and I didn’t chose it, they did! They picked a mark and then we discussed it based on conversations, expectations and comparisons with what I thought was exemplary work. In 2 classes of 28 and 29 students, I helped guide a total of 4 or 5 of them up or down a few percents, and beyond that, they picked their own grade… doing a very good job of it I might add!

One interesting anecdote from that experience, I had one class that was almost all IB students where marks really mattered. Anecdotal feedback without marks attached drove them a bit crazy to start… but, one kid at the end of the term, after picking his own mark, told me, “That’s going to be my lowest mark this semester.”
But he wasn’t arguing, he was only making a statement. He knew he could have done better and he also knew he could have done more and earned a better mark, (you see I also allowed students to go back to their digital projects and improve them at any time, because Learning Outcomes don’t come with teacher timelines only semester timelines. He was willing to accept the self-imposed low ‘A’ rather than put more work into it.

So, what’s stopping us from purely anecdotal report card up to Grade 8? The marks are not needed for university… there are no excuses but FEAR and TTWWADI!