Exactly! Give me my A and then we can talk about reform in grading and assessments. I definitely think we are testing who does the best under pressure. I think we in engineering are too lazy and too comfortable with numbers and grades to even acknowledge that there may be alternatives. If we try, I am sure we can come up with ways to evaluate without the pressure of tests or grades. The qualifier and prelim in EWR is a great example of that. But who will take the time and put the effort for such rigorous evaluations, when you can feed the multiple choice OCR sheets and grade 40 exams in 10 mins.

Thanks for the post, Lauren. You have an interesting perspective to this week’s discussion. Assessments were created to manage a large number of students, and I think most of us will agree that they are doing a shoddy job of being a tool to compare students (grade inflation, dilution of education standards etc.). I agree that the current system is probably not the most conducive to implementing reform in assessments. I mean, at the end of the semester, you have to submit grades to VT. So how do we bring change…..

Sara, thank you so much for your comment. I am totally with you, we need to reassess what is consider knowledge to educators.
In my personal opinion, nowadays memorizing facts or formulas do not make sense. Moreover, do not reflect knowledge quality, but for me, it is more about how to apply and use the skills gained through a certain process (experiences, facts or others).

Grades and grade-point averages can be incredibly misleading. Perhaps a student had a bad day when they took the exam or they had challenges beyond the classroom when they needed to write that final paper. Perhaps a student did not have the support needed to write a compelling paper?
There are so many factors that shape grades and extend well beyond the classroom not just to social situations, but relate to deeply personal facets. Each of us learn in a wide range of ways, and it is our duty as teachers to explore those ways for our students – many of our students have no idea how they learn, because they have not had opportunities to explore this in any course.

I firmly believe that bad grades in no way reflect student achievement, but rather suggest the failure of teachers to cater to, recognize, or even to consider the different learning needs of students. Now I am not suggesting that every student should receive an “A” grade, but that the teacher is, in many ways, partly to blame for a student receiving a “D”. Perhaps the teacher was unapproachable? Did they explain a concept in a convoluted way? Perhaps they did not explain it, and some students learn better from a lecture than the lousy textbook assigned at the outset. I do not mean to suggest that teachers need to jump through all kinds of hoops for all of our students, but we should at least admit our own role in the delivery of content and for thinking about ways for our students to engage with materials in a meaningful way.

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This is fabulous, I really enjoyed reading it. We all need a little more acknowledgement of uncertainty in our practice of teaching – or in just about anything for that matter. Those questions beyond complacency keep us curious, engaged, aware, and determined to continue learning and teaching.

I got here first! I’ll take that A, please. Thank you for this insightful post, Bethany.

I had a few questions for Dee:
1. What prompted you to homeschool your children?
2. Were you ever worried your children might lag behind their public school peers of the same age?
3. How much of a time commitment was this for you? Was this your full-time job?
4. What kind of support/guidance did you receive from the community?

I am fascinated by the whole concept of homeschooling and how homeschooled students integrate with others in the higher education setting. I didn’t even know one could be homeschooled and be eligible to go to college until I moved to the US.

This is so interesting, Bethany. Even though everybody is different, it reflects some of my hunches about how learning works for many different types of people. Even though I was never homeschooled, I went to an alternative, arts-focused high school where we did not get grades. All classes were pass/fail and at the end of each, we’d get a written report. Also, students’ individual interests were pretty strongly supported. This openness had a huge influence on my life, and even though that system worked better for some than others, I think it’s a great model overall. My peers and I generally did really well on the SATs and a lot of us have gone on to have interesting careers (and be, I think, interesting grown-ups…!).
I’d love to hear from your mom, by the way!

I’m curious about the demand for certain grade distributions. In my department, this is definitely not true. If it were, I’d explicitly object! Quantifying student performance and self-assessing with a standardized grading system can be perfectly fine in many cases. But calibrating students’ grades on the basis others is completely unfair. I think grading on a curve and having to meet certain grading quotas is always wrong.

Grades sometimes can misinterpret the understanding of a student. For example, in my graduate life, I got As in two very tough classes, however, I am only 20% competent in those. In one of my classes, I got B+, but that class is really helping me now with my research. Sometimes it depends on whether you are interested in that class content or not.

This post seems very logical in terms of how the grading history of a class dictates the enrollment in that class. Students are getting more inclined to classes which offer easy grades. They often prefer classes with less intellectual value because of less workload. However, I was wondering whether there is a criterion to separate a class as easy or hard. Whether the instructor can play a role in this.