Give 100 Percent?

http://samanthadouglas.wordpress.com/2011/07/28/give-100-percent/

by ColinWright • 15 years ago

375 106 15 years ago

samanthadouglas.wordpress.com

glimcat• 15 years ago

Great anecdote; learning and education are often at odds.

bprater• 15 years ago

Isn't this part of the Montessori model -- no grading?

msutherl2• 15 years ago

The Montessori model is a particular 'no grading' model.

Apocryphon• 15 years ago

So there's more than one way to not grade.

perlgeek• 15 years ago

Also the Waldorf model - you get a "testimonial" at the end of the year, but there are no numeric (or alphabetic) grades on it, just verbal description on how well you performed, highlighting both strengths and weaknesses.

hardy2632• 15 years ago

From the title I thought "give 100%" meant putting in your full effort, rather than the mark you got. Maybe change it to something less ambiguous?

kqr2• 15 years ago

Same here.

Title should be: How to kill the drive to learn - give grades

ColinWright• 15 years ago

That's the title as I originally submitted it. The mods, in their infinite wisdom, changed it.

I think my title gave a better idea of what the article was about. The mods changed it to the article's own title. I do not believe my title was editorializing, I believe it was providing useful information.

<shrug> The mods know best. Well, they have the power, anyway.

Personally, I'm disappointed. I put some time into finding a title that I thought didn't editorialize, but did give better insight into what the article is about, helping people make a decision whether to click on it or not.

It's different when you've already got the article in front of you - no further clicks required.

nandemo• 15 years ago

Surely the ambiguity is intentional.

random422• 15 years ago

It is original article's title. Lets keep it the way original author intended.

planckscnst• 15 years ago

Why? The submitter's description was much better at letting me know something about the subject of the link.

The author chose that title for her audience. We are not her audience. We do not know she is a school teacher. To us, "Give 100 Percent" conveys something entirely different than to her audience.

abiekatz2• 15 years ago

I wonder why some people end up being intellectually curious while others are not. I think intellectual curiosity is very important, especially now since the majority of the world's information is available for free online.

The person who grows up being intellectually curious will have a big heads up in the job market since they will have acquired more information than the other applicants. Plus, I think a lover for knowledge can enrich an individuals life as well.

I don't know exactly how schools and parents can instill intellectual curiosity into their students and children but I think the subject matter should be researched and prioritized.

hardy2632• 15 years ago

Well, that was what the author of the article was trying to tell us, wasn't it? Don't give marks and they'll be intellectually curious.

Anecdote: I was really good at school at a young age, and I would get easy 80s in all my classes, so I never cared about marks, so that made me intellectually curious at a young age.

abiekatz2• 15 years ago

The post provides a great anecdote but I am just saying that more research should be done on the issue.

Yeah, I think not giving grades is a great potential way to encourage intellectual curiosity. Has there been any controlled experiments on this issue? Also is this practical during primary and secondary education? I don't know.

I think some students without marks would become more intellectually curious while other students might just not do the work and just play video games instead. It's a tricky topic.

randomdata• 15 years ago

An alternative anecdote: I often received poor marks in school because I was curious about learning things that were unrelated to what was being taught at the given time.

I distinctly remember sitting in high school math class solving some mathematical problems that were to be taught later because it was interesting and applicable to my learning needs at that point in time. The topic the teacher wanted to teach that day was not applicable to the problems I needed to solve at that moment, so it made no sense to learn it on that very day.

If marks had been a concern of mine, I would have had to have given my teachers at least some attention, taking time away from my education.

yoshyosh• 15 years ago

This is a very interesting point, if anyone has any links to any resources or experiments that talk about stuff like this please do share :)

jwn2• 15 years ago

Do a search on Amazon for Alfie Kohn, specifically "Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes"

saraid216• 15 years ago

When you dig beneath the surface of the education systems, you find a host of alternative and progressive models that successfully cultivate and maintain intellectual curiosity.

The issue isn't really a lack of research; it's a lack of interest. Pundits like to claim to be "for the children" or whatever, but they are generally more interested in tangential agendas that can leverage fear from threats to children rather than a sober analysis.

I'd suggest starting by looking up who Alfie Kohn is. He is not a scientist, but he acts as a good aggregator.

ams6110• 15 years ago

Personal opinion: it's at least partly genetic. I think about how human societies evolved. You needed a few leaders and a majority of hunters/gatherers/soldiers. A few people are born with more drive, ambition, intellectual curiosity, call it what you will. The majority are content to be told what to do, in exchange for having their basic needs and security taken care of. Its fundamentally the same thing that leads to "alpha" wolves in a pack.

law2• 15 years ago

> The person who grows up being intellectually curious will have a big heads up in the job market since they will have acquired more information than the other applicants.

I unfortunately do not agree with you. Despite how much it kills me to admit this, intellectual curiosity (at least in the legal world) is more of a cancer... you don't want people who will bury themselves learning as much as they can about a topic. This mindset is discordant with the concept of deadlines, because it's almost impossible to estimate the duration of something that is by definition factorial in complexity. As such, employers in fields so heavily dictated by deadlines are not looking for people who thrive on learning...they're looking for people who thrive on completing the task that they're assigned--even if it means suppressing their intrinsic desire to learn in favor of an extrinsic motivator: $$$.

GiraffeNecktie2• 15 years ago

Being intellectually curious does not, in any way, mean you are incapable of following directions to complete a task. And it actually might mean that by questioning what is the desired outcome, you complete the task a lot faster or perhaps even determine that working on task X is actually a waste of time for everyone.

_delirium• 15 years ago

I mostly agree with this; I think a reasonable degree of intellectual curiosity is necessary to do well, but that the most successful range is "a moderate amount". Read some, but not too much, and get quite skilled at some in-demand skill, while staying flexible enough to adapt it and pick up related skills. Having too much intellectual curiosity can reduce focus (harder to be content with a fairly limited job, even if well-paying), can cause angst if you do too much digging-into-foundations (i.e. don't just excel within the parameters of your task, but try to understand why it exists or is set up the way it is in the first place), etc.

Not that that means intellectual curiosity is bad, I'm just not sure it's income-maximizing or good-employee-maximizing, at least in the normal case.

yxhuvud• 15 years ago

People thriving in learning is still an amazing resource to have around if the company manage to steer that learning into how their business works. I believe the usefulness isn't about if there is a lot of deadlines or not, but if the field of business is complex and rewarding intellectually.

mtrn2• 15 years ago

Another anecdote: when I was young, I just wanted to be on top in class - that kept me busy, but might would have killed my curiosity.

Just in time, I changed to a high school for five years where we could visit voluntary courses in biology, electronics, math, sports, computer sciences, chemistry, drama and everything - no marks. We would even come to school before our first regular class, just to listen to a teacher philosophizing about some travelling salesman problem (we were about 13) and similar miracles from a math perspective. This school cultivated an atmosphere of both curiosity and competition - and could actually deliver - half of our teachers were PhDs - most of them eager to teach, learn, experiment and messing up labs until sunset.

blackguardx• 15 years ago

Where was this school?

tuttefrutte• 15 years ago

>how schools and parents can instill intellectual curiosity

They can't. But the good news is that all small children possess curiosity.

Parents and schools can help by not damaging it. This entails, among other things, no bribery or punishment.

wccrawford2• 15 years ago

Or, don't give a '100%' until everything is learned? If they've giving up before the work is done because you told them it was done, don't tell them it's done?

I get the moral of the story. But if there's more words to learn, how could they possibly have mastered the test?

There's more wrong here than just the grades.

Vivtek2• 15 years ago

I think the flaw there is imagining that "everything" can be learned.

wccrawford2• 15 years ago

He obviously has a list to learn from. That's 'everything' in this context.

VladRussian• 15 years ago

marking their work prepares the children for the next thing which will be even more cooler shower upon their curiosity and enthusiasm - money/salary/financial incentives distribution system in the economy.

logjam• 15 years ago

"In time...six months; five years, perhaps...a change could easily begin to take place. He would become less and less satisfied with a kind of dumb, day-to-day shopwork. His creative intelligence, stifled by too much theory and too many grades in college, would now become reawakened by the boredom of the shop. Thousands of hours of frustrating mechanical problems would have made him more interested in machine design. He would like to design machinery himself. He'd think he could do a better job. He would try modifying a few engines, meet with success, look for more success, but feel blocked because he didn't have the theoretical information. He would discover that when before he felt stupid because of his lack of interest in theoretical information, he'd now find a brand of theoretical information which he'd have a lot of respect for, namely, mechanical engineering.

"So he would come back to our degreeless and gradeless school, but with a difference. He'd no longer be a grade-motivated person. He'd be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He'd be a free man. He wouldn't need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors assigned him were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He'd be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they'd better come up with it.

"Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn't stop with rote engineering information. Physics and mathematics were going to come within his sphere of interest because he'd see he needed them. Metallurgy and electrical engineering would come up for attention. And, in the process of intellectual maturing that these abstract studies gave him, he would he likely to branch out into other theoretical areas that weren't directly related to machines but had become a part of a newer larger goal. This larger goal wouldn't be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing."

-- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

chops• 15 years ago

Thank you for that. ZatAoMM (whoa acronym) has always been on my list to read, but this little excerpt has helped to propel it near to the top of my list.

So thank you muchly!

nbashaw• 15 years ago

It's a wonderful book. I read it before I'd been exposed to too much other philosophy and I thought it was the greatest thing that had ever been written. Then in college I started reading a lot of other philosophy and didn't ever quite reach the same passionate reaction I had with ZAMM. It's both engaging and deep.

sadlyNess• 15 years ago

Off Topic: What do you use to remind you what books you may want to read?

edit: Please answer here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2853370

bherms2• 15 years ago

Fantastic quotes. I'm about 3/4 of the way through this book and can't recommend it highly enough. Really a must read.

rimantas• 15 years ago

I actually enjoyed "Lila" a bit more.

phugoid• 15 years ago

At the risk of arguing with Robert Pirsig, I have a mechanical engineering degree, and I can assure you that no amount of curiosity could motivate someone to get through that curriculum.

For instance, your curiosity about boundary value problems will likely be sated around the second lecture.

levesque• 15 years ago

What is the difference between this book and the one by Matthew Crawford, "Shop Class As Soulcraft"?

Is it worth reading both?

ianterrell• 15 years ago

Grading is, psychologically, a special case of gamification.

There's a debate on this point, but many smart people believe that gamification should only be used to provide an extrinsic motivator for things that A) have no intrinsic motivation, or B) have a steep learning curve that is discouraging at first. In the latter case, the game mechanics should be removed once the difficult first step has been conquered so that the intrinsic motivation can supplant the extrinsic ones, leading to a naturally reinforcing cycle of growth (and flow). If it isn't removed—or if it shouldn't have been there in the first place—then the game mechanics can completely overwhelm the intrinsic motivators.

Here we see that learning is intrinsically motivating by itself; no external rewards necessary. As another commenter mentioned, the Montessori method acknowledges this.

wisty• 15 years ago

In Australia, continuous assessment is the fad. Shudder.

I see it as a vicious cycle. One teacher (or lecturer) sets lots of highly weighted assignments. Students work hard in their class, and ignore the ones that "don't matter". So the other teachers (or lecturers) have to also ramp up, or no-one will study for their classes. It's a tragedy of the commons, and the students are the commons.

lutorm• 15 years ago

Continuous assessment should happen every time someone's teaching. This is "formative assessment", and is essential for informing teaching practice. That doesn't mean you give the students grades.

hugh37• 15 years ago

Grading (which I'll call marking for the rest of this comment) has three purposes, and you've only described one -- motivation. The second is to let third parties (parents, universities, potential employers) know how well a student has done.

The third is the most important: low grades. If a student does poorly then it lets everyone (the student, the teacher, and potentially the parents etc) know that something is wrong. Maybe the student hasn't been working hard enough, or maybe the student has misunderstood some key concept, but getting feedback when your work is bad is vitally important.

Doesn't matter much when you're a bunch of five-year-olds studying ancient Egyptians, but if you're studying stuff you actually need to know then you need to know whether you in fact do know it.

pnathan2• 15 years ago

In a funny way, that's like graduate school: the good parts of it, at least.

It's just you, and striving to learn something, in depth, with understanding. You have access to immense knowledge in the form of the University library and the faculty. You can learn, really learn, in a way that isn't sneaking it or being the disruptive one. It's okay to learn.

(Yeah, there's also advisors, other students, student loans, classes, the U bureaucratic world, and the rest of the bad parts.)

kingkilr2• 15 years ago

For those interested in this subject, Alfie Kohn is a good author to read.

jwn2• 15 years ago

I second that. Reading his work has strongly influenced my parenting philosophy for my 3 young boys.

sp332• 15 years ago

Yeah, but how did they turn out? ;-)

xal• 15 years ago

Read Dan Pink's "Drive" for an incredible full overview of what we know about motivation. Alfie's work is source material for Drive. You can drive deeper into this aspect later and pick up his works.

csomar• 15 years ago

Unluckily, this is the truth. This develops even further. The aim become how to optimize to get good grades and not actually learn to get them. This develops even further: You don't want to learn unless you get rewarded for it. The result is the decline in the quality of work you do.

This might explain the current economics: The smart always (most of the time) find a job or a way to live. Those who care only to take a job are the jobless (because they create less value and also there are many of them).

entangld• 15 years ago

>>The smart always (most of the time) find a job or a way to live.<<

You're talking about expedience not intelligence.

yrislerlhf• 15 years ago

I'm torn. On the one hand, my understanding is that the concept of a Montessori school is based on the notion of exploratory learning for young children, and there was an article recently that remarked on the unusually high rate of Montessori-schooled individuals in places of power. So there is some sort of lesson to be drawn from this idea, namely: send your kids to a Montessori school.

But I don't like the characterization of the preferred drive for approval in writing from an adult as a "cancer", and I think it obscures the fact that at some point grades and such will become important because society is going to have to sort them, and grades are just the sorting mechanism.

I think that for each socio-economic stratum there is going to be some optimal transition age which puts the students in the best position to succeed, make money, have families, found companies, make great art, heal people better, make scientific discoveries, etc... and ultimately have more kids.

Link: http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/05/the-montessori-...

fleitz• 15 years ago

It is a cancer and I could care less how useful grades are to society. I treat society like it treats me, a mark on a piece of paper somewhere. I'm not a grade I'm a person. If not having a great means society can't sort me then all the better, I don't want to be anywhere near the people who care to be sorted.

keithburgun• 15 years ago

Check out the book "punished by rewards". Also explains why achievements in video games are such a bad idea.

hugh37• 15 years ago

To save me the trouble of reading an entire book just to get the one point I'm interested in, why does the author think that achievements in video games are a bad idea?

timr• 15 years ago

I'm torn. I think the post has a point, but in my experience (as a teacher and as a student) the people who complain most vociferously about grades also tend to be the people who get the lowest grades. More importantly, the correlation between grades and competence isn't perfect -- but it's also much higher than zero. Most of the people I've met in the valley have earned fantastic grades, at the best universities. You can argue that this is mere correlation or selection bias, but regardless of the reason, the relationship still exists.

To paraphrase Churchill: grades are the worst system of measuring accomplishment, except for all the others we've tried.

olalonde2• 15 years ago

Not true. I've always had fantastic grades despite despising our education and grading system. That being said, I've always tried to make a conscious effort to not let grades interfere with my education.

argv_empty• 15 years ago

You're trying to refute a statement saying a trend exists by providing a single example which does not follow the trend.

jessriedel• 15 years ago

If you were only interested in measuring accomplishment, you'd keep the grades secret (say, until the end of the year). Instead, grades are used as a stick/carrot for motivating students.

hugh37• 15 years ago

And as feedback. Students need to know whether or not they're doing well.

In some subjects it's obvious to the student whether they're doing well, but in others it's not.

danenania• 15 years ago

Most people are afraid to go against the norm and do what they think is right, children and teens in particular. A pretty high percentage of the very intelligent people I know consider a lot of what they did in school busywork and a waste of time, but most still submitted and completed the pointless assignments. People are weak when faced with societal (or familial) pressures and will adopt all kinds of stupid and counterproductive behaviors if the alternative is lowered prestige or exclusion. It doesn't mean the system has value.

samanthadouglas• 15 years ago

Hi, I wrote the post, and just want to clarify, I have had the top grades of my class for my entire life. This is more so concerning with the need for grading and assessment more than competence. A five year old shouldn't be structured to only want grades because they aren't even in that environment yet.

forensic• 15 years ago

My grades could not be any higher and I think grades are incredibly lame. I wish I went to Rice. I will unschool my children.

I never told my teachers this because I wouldn't want them to lower my marks. An important component of getting high grades is to convince the teacher that you like them and that you're enthusiastic about the material. Have you ever stopped to consider that all those bright and shiny kids who love your class are just putting on a show to get what they need from you?

peng• 15 years ago

Back in the second grade, my teacher would offer extra credit math that brought your percentage over 100%. I remember competing with the other kids to get ridiculously inflated scores like 361%.

Of course, everyone who made it to 95% got an A, but the "bonus XP" aspect of going over 100% was a fun incentive to keep you trying harder.

goblgobl• 15 years ago

Grades have this affect because they become psychologically tied to your self-worth. Where does it start? I don't think small children care or are even aware of the significance of having good grades (what 5-8yr old is gunning for Harvard?), but they can certainly sense which end of the spectrum is desirable if they seek to maximize love, affection, and acceptance from adults and peers.

You take the organic process of knowledge acquisition and now you've added game mechanics to it. For children the prize is acceptance, and for college students its social status, employment prospects, and respect. Now you have scores and outcomes, and critically, the outcomes do not have to be tied to any intrinsic motivation for the thing you are trying to learn.

So children might do things not because they're interested in them, but because it makes them look smart. People will chase lucrative jobs in fields they don't particularly care for, or want to join particular institutions just for the prestige, and a wide range of other behavior thats driven by rewards of performance and not of one's real interests. Learning for learnings sake takes a back seat to all of this.

mannicken• 15 years ago

I realized this shortly before I dropped out of high school. Nobody who hired me ever asked for my grades. I appreciated teacher's critique of my work if I thought his own skill was significantly superior to mine. Yet ultimately I did not give a crap about whether I had 2.5 or 4.0 GPA.

I was surrounded by perfectionist people who would retake a class because of A-, but after a while I realized they were just playing a game I wasn't interested in.

I am interested in creating impressive graphics code/designing things that don't suck/creating things of high aesthetic value. I am interested in getting paid because it allows me to have independence and concentrate on creating those things, and not feel like a parasite. That is my game, so to speak.

I did not see a very strong correlation between grades and the above so it ended up low on my list of priorities. Just like a game of chess, it made me smarter at those things I wanted to do, but I couldn't dedicate a lot of time to chess or gaming the teachers, just because I did not give a crap about those things.

I know I'm going against the zeitgeist here but I think grade, SAT scores, or degrees don't mean a lot in life.

I recently had to work with legacy code written by a guy with the highest degree possible in US. The code was hard to read, did not use clearly superior architectures, lacked documentation, and quite frankly, I could've done a lot better. There was no empathy at all to the person who will inherit the project but the "I HAVE PHD" feeling of smugness I felt strongly.

One of the worst math instructors I knew had a graduate degree which she liked to brag about more than everybody thought was appropriate to her skill.

On the other hand, I was in touch with several professors who were clearly brilliant and well-spoken... obviously education doesn't necessarily fuck up your sense of humility and introspective self-critique.

michaelochurch• 15 years ago

One of the ways in which most grading systems are fucked up is that there's more downside than upside. One failure cancels out 3 or 4 successes, no matter how great. If a teacher decides that any late work gets a zero, then being half a day late on one paper nullifies several great, on-time papers.

I think it's a vicious cycle. This sort of system is designed to produce the sort of risk-averse rule-followers required by old-style industry: people destined for jobs where creativity isn't required but following orders 90% of the time is failure. But for that system's defense, it's good practice for real life. Humans are vindictive and focused more on stigma, gossip and the aversion to failure than in seeking out excellence and creativity. Hence, they create societies (like our society at a macro level, like most corporations, and like many school systems) that punish failure brutally but don't really value (or even fully trust) excellence, and which actively discourage the risk-taking usually required to excel. (And no, our society's outsized reward for economic fortune is not "rewarding success" since most of those people at the top are effective social climbers or hereditarily-placed parasites.) The "vicious cycle" is closed if one believes that the vindictive, punitive nature of people comes from how they are taught. Or is it innate? I'm really not sure.

The way I think grading should be done is an inverse of the current system. Make the problems really, really hard. Some should be so hard that the hardest exam problems go for years without being answered. Make it so hard that 20% is passing and 60% is exceptional-- instead of 70% being passing and 95% being exceptional-- and so that students are used to it (and therefore they don't panic when they take an exam and can't solve half the problems). I argue for this because the reality for the most creative, hardest-to-get-right pursuits is that for 60% of one's efforts to succeed is exceptional.

All that said, I think grading is important, but it shouldn't be started at such a young age, and that grades should generally be internal (for the student's and school's benefit) only. Many business schools actually prohibit their students from disclosing GPA or transcripts, only verifying which courses were taken and passed. If I were running a college, full transcripts would be available only to academic graduate departments-- not to future employers or professional schools. I'm not going to do their job (sorting) for them.

zitterbewegung• 15 years ago

60% of your efforts to succeed are successful? I have gotten published in poetry journals and the real ratio is more like 90% of what you do is meaningless and 10% is publishable. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY&feature=playe...

notahacker• 15 years ago

I'm not sure that the majority of students will "get used to" a grading system where given their aptitude they will be unlikely to score more than 30% - particularly when their reward for thorough preparation is likely to be a mere couple of percentage points on top of a dismal looking score. If anything is likely to condition the median person into scraping the minimum necessary requirement it's drawing attention to how far ahead their smarter peers are. Smarter peers who have more outlets for demonstrating their aptitude other than dwarfing the average test scores, and who are probably smart enough to realise their test scores are a poor proxy for real life success anyway.

Skewing the scoring still doesn't make exams resemble real life; one doesn't analyse their successes in percentage-points-from-perfection. If we did, most people would have a serious inferiority complex. Interviewers who screen out unexceptional candidates are normal; those who waste insufficiently exceptional candidates time repeatedly proving they're not creative or excellent enough for the job might even be considered sadistic. There's a difference between failing 90% of interviews and staring blankly at the interviewer as I fail to answer 90% of the questions, knowing I'll have to repeat the experience until someone appreciates the 10% I get right.

Likewise compensation packages expressed as a percentage of most productive employees compensation won't garner much interest, even though incentive structures within conventional companies is usually skewed heavily in the favour of less productive employees.

If I were running a college, I'd probably accept the reality that job sorting is one of the main reasons my students value the course...

pnathan2• 15 years ago

As a former TA... there needs to be a clear distinction in discussions of students. Not everyone is good.

Some students are 'bad'. Incompetent. Lousy. Shouldn't be there.

Many students are just banging out what they need for that degree. Why are they wanting the degree? Money. Stability. Cause dad said so. Cause it's what ya do. Do they care? No.

And then there are the bright students/hackers. They were so interested - it was so very fun working with them.

I reckon the breakdown was 10/80/10 or thereabouts.

Good teachers work for all those students. There are different strategies to try to get/maintain interest/excellence. Some try fear, others lots of homework, some general disinterest (sink or swim).

(Un)fortunately, we want to have ratings on people who we hire. "Is this guy any good? Yeah? How good?"

So... like any project, we have a metric, and like humans we are optimizing for the metric instead of success. This last hundred years, the metric is GPA.

And, for what its worth, my recollection of the grades we gave is that it was a rough correlation with the student's ability.

Anyway, my 2c.

pbiggar• 15 years ago

So you might be interested to know that universities in Ireland (and I think England, where we inherited our university system from), everyone aims for a 70% grade. That's a "1st class honours" degree, and is basically the best you can come out with.

Below that is "2nd class honours, I" (colloquially 2.1, pronounced "two one")). With a 1st or a 2.1, you're considered a high achiever (like a good job, or grad school, might require a 2.1 or better). A 2.1 is between 60-70%. Pass is 40%, and exams are marked harder to make the numbers work. (I believe harder questions are asked than equivalent US universities, but that's just rumour, unless you really do get multiple choice questions in university).

It leads to interesting dynamics. In the Arts and Humanities, students are basically marked out of 80, with scores above that reserved for truly great work which is seen relatively rarely.

In CS or Mathematics, where you truly can answer perfectly, sometimes you can get close to 100% in a exam, which throws off the marking scheme. For project work though, 70% means "great job", and 80% means you've done something truly excellent. For my undergraduate thesis, a piece of novel research on sorting and branch predictors that I truly poured my heart and soul into for 6 months, I got 94%. The feeling at achieving that grade was truly exhilarating, in a way that it could never be if I people didn't normally get 72% for great work.

joelhaasnoot• 15 years ago

Having attended an American high school but being Dutch, I know that this whole 100% thing is a very american, cultural thing. Here in The Netherlands we've decided as a society that you should aim high, but our grades are out of 10, and only top students actually get 10/10. The American system is built around the fact that if you do everything as required, you get an A+. Here, we reserve 10/10 for truely exceptional , over the top and amazing work. As such, exams are written to have harder questions...

noonespecial• 15 years ago

The American grading system has a severe lack of dynamic headroom. The measurement system saturates at 100% for even mediocre effort and there is no way to measure achievement beyond that.

I once argued in a paper at university that we needed a logarithmic grading system like decibels. I got a C.

polshaw• 15 years ago

> unless you really do get multiple choice questions in university

Having gone through the UK university system, i can honestly say that multiple choice questions can be some of the hardest questions there are (not that I ever had any on 'finals'). They can instill doubt where otherwise there was none, and a subtle, minor change can screw you over.

Perceval• 15 years ago

there's more downside than upside. One failure cancels out 3 or 4 successes

Some should be so hard that the hardest exam problems go for years without being answered. Make it so hard that 20% is passing and 60% is exceptional-- instead of 70% being passing and 95% being exceptional

I think what you're getting at here is the question of scale. The students in the linked story quit upon reaching 100%. But obviously they had not learned 100% of the words in English, they had only learned 100% of the words on a very short vocabulary list.

One way to keep their motivation might be to scale their accomplishments relative to the total number of words. There are somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 words in English (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Number_of_word...). The teacher might keep track of the total number of words the students have learned. Basic English is about 850 words, and newspaper literacy is somewhere between 4000–10,000 words. Regardless of how many they learn in class, they will always know how many more there are to learn.

You ideas about higher downsides to grading and scaling the 'exceptional' point to a shift from averaging grades based on mastering course content to cumulative grades based on mastering field content. Does that sound about right?

tzs• 15 years ago

OT: if you are on an iPad, be aware the site uses that broken OnSwipe theme, which has a good chance of running your browser out of memory and crashing it. Might want to wait until you are on your desktop or laptop.

tassl• 15 years ago

In some sense, I had this feeling when I came to the US for the first time. I was used to study in Universities were the failure % could be easily below 10% for some courses (Calculus, Algebra being an example). In most of the courses the best grades were below a 7 out of 10. And no, there were no A+ to anybody if the grade was not 9+ out of 10.

In the US, though, it is difficult is to fail a course. I really think that failing a course requires big amount of effort.

I think that neither of both systems are really effective. The spanish version can be depressing and the students are not willing to study for the sake of learning but to pass (the average number of years for a engineering undergrad is 7 years back when the engineering was 5 years of study). On the other hand, most students in the US lack passion and are not going to study since most of the time they don't need to study to pass the courses.

minikomi• 15 years ago

Japan is even worse - with most tertiary education considered a break between high school and company, and your entry level position mainly determined by the name of your school... Hence the mad situation where your adult life hinges on one year of grueling study for the uni entrance exams!

arasraj• 15 years ago

This blog post echoes what is said in the book MindSet (http://mindsetonline.com/). Never praise children because they accomplished a task. Always praise the effort done to do so.

clobber• 15 years ago

Would love to read this if it wasn't for Wordpress using OnSwipe. Why is this awful startup breaking website usability?

nazgulnarsil• 15 years ago

This highlights a deeper problem in human psychology. It takes many otherwise intelligent people years to realize that the approval of some abstracted authority is not a useful measure of accomplishment. Many people never get over it.

digikata• 15 years ago

Grading?!? Wait til they get a budget, a schedule, and major requirements that change weekly...

More seriously though, this is a fascinating glimpse into an aspect of human motivation.

Kilimanjaro• 15 years ago

"Men will die for colored ribbons" Bonaparte.

Give 100 Percent?

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