Grading Alternative?
Is “grade inflation” really going on at local colleges? Perhaps at all colleges? When the majority of grades being earned are “A”s these days, what’s going on? I have a proposal:
What would you say to making 80-100 be an A? But there’s a catch. Tests would be very difficult, with questions that would challenge even the brightest students. A score of 85 would get an A, and a score of 95 would get an A. But, the percentage would also print out on the grade card.
Why do I suggest this change? I have many students for whom earning ‘100′ on tests is not a challenge. Information is memorized and spit back, matching of answers is done, and little application of what they learned is expected. Just how high can those students score, given a truly challenging problem? That is, given new information, can you apply what you’ve learned in a “but we didn’t do this in class” situation.
Have we become a society where less than perfect (100%) is unacceptable? The grades at Duke and UNC certainly seem to say that.
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I hope I don’t, uh, let a few people down, but everybody has different abilities, and we should create different levels within each grade for L.A., math, SS, and science. There should be different levels for assessments for each person or group of people. In SS, we have questions that are picked out of text hard to find in the book. These are questions I like. We should imitate colleges so that 100s are definitely out of reach for everyone, and 70s will be average.