Over at Inactivist, DA Ridgely has a pretty interesting post about grades and standardized testing. As a member of the (Smoke Free) Class of 2000 in Oregon I was one of the lucky sots used as an experimental rodentia for the CIM/CAM [warning: PDF]. The CIM/CAM was, and as far as I know still is, Oregon’s way of trying to measure student performance without having to give those peskily objective standardized exams.
Ridgely’s point is that the reason students do poorly on standardized tests in comparison to their class grades is that classes are graded incredibly easily. For the most part, I think he’s probably right. My elementary school didn’t even have letter grades until you hit sixth grade, and I went to a public school in the Portland, OR suburbs. Also, like Ridgely, I have always done extremely well on standardized tests: never below the 92nd percentile on anything, and the only time I was below the 95th was on a math test in third grade. I scored 1360 on the SAT without prepping, I got a four on the AP English exam without ever taking an advanced English course in high school, again without study. On the other hand, I was always a middling student. My GPA in high school was just a hair below 3.0 because, frankly, I didn’t care. School, especially once you realize that the rules are arbitrary and capriciously enforced, is often useless and usually tedious. I didn’t learn anything in my US History course my Junior year that I hadn’t learned during the US History course I took in 8th grade, I learned little in my Sophomore Government course that I hadn’t learned in Government in 7th. Primary and secondary education is more about keeping kids in line, making them behave, and getting them to conform to the whim of authority than it is about teaching them anything.
Is it any wonder that teachers give up and start handing out grades kids don’t deserve? I’m sure most teachers, especially in the public schools, feel brow-beaten and unappreciated. There’s no meritocracy, you can’t teach the way you want to, and to top it all off if you give little Biff a bad grade his lawyer mommy will come down and yell at you on your time off. So you give the kid a B and you shuffle him along.
This system serves no one: kids are bored and uneducated, parents are frustrated, teachers are at their wit’s end. Short of a massive structural change in the way we think about education (hint, I think cutting administration, reducing centralized planning and giving teachers more autonomy can’t hurt) we’ll continue to face exactly the same issues. Granted, in Libertopia there wouldn’t be compulsory education or public schools…but given that there will be, because they are extremely cherished if extremely faulty, there simply must be a better way. In my opinion, the best solution is to let failure happen. When there are consequences for failure, things start to shape up pretty quick.
