7 Math teachers are leaving Richard Montgomerry HS
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Anonymous
You should review the study Starr initiated and compare the recommendations in that report with what’s going on now. He maybe gone but MCPS is still paying for his legacy. |
Anonymous
The suggestion that *any* teacher of *any* subject "likes to write tests that generate abysmally low test scores" is patently absurd. If you don't want a single bad test grade to tank a student's grade, this can be accomplished without the 50% rule. You simply put an upper limit on the percent of the overall grade that is determined by each test. Of course, these kids are going to be in for a rude awakening if they go to college. What happens when they take a class where 70% of their grade is collectively determined by two midterms and a final, when they have no 50% rule and no reassessment policy to fall back on? |
Anonymous
They'll figure it out, eh? And if they're unable to figure it out, they're not ready for college anyway. |
Anonymous
The suggestion that a teacher deliberately designs tests hoping to give grades bellow 50% is facetious; however a math teacher that doesn't understand that a properly designed test assigns grades between 50% and 100%--the meaningful universe of grades--is showing shaky number sense. 50% is failing, 58% is failing, there are no deeper levels of failing, there's no additional information gleaned from a grade bellow 50%. How do you (as you suggest) put an upper limit on the impact of an individual test? You give more grading opportunities. But given that this will be some finite number, and there's a limit on how *high* a score can be, this still gives scores bellow 50% more oomf than scores over 50%. The median is 75%, 20% is not a meaningful grade, for the same reason that 130% (on the other side of the median) is not a meaningful grade. The 50% rule (with the elimination of extra credit) is a way of forcing teachers to work within the bell curve of the grading system, even if they don't realize it. It doesn't reward failing students. It simply prevents a failing student from being doubly penalized by a teacher who's too busy looking at numbers to understand what grades mean. As far as what happens in college. Curves, curves happen in college. |
Anonymous
Retakes happen in college. Extra Credit happens in college. Colleges are rated on retention and 4 year graduation rates these days. |
Anonymous
Also true. |
Anonymous
| Luckily this hasn’t been needed yet, but I’d want to know whether an E my child earned was 5% or 50%. I’d value that info. |
Anonymous
There was some confusion last year. When we went to open house, math teacher there said my kid in TPMS magnet Geom could go into Pre-Calc, but the teacher at the info night after acceptance said she would have to do AAF. DD sat in on AAF, and it seemed pretty remedial to what she was already doing. The teacher at the info table suggested that AAF was equivalent to Blair's pre-calc. I said I didn't think the Blair faculty would agree w/ that assessment. She looked at us and said, "Well, I guess you should go to Blair then." Yikes! DD chose Blair even though IB would have been a great fit for her subject-wise. |
Anonymous
Why? 50% is cause enough for alarm, once it's an F I'd want to see the test, the score doesn't carry the information. |
Anonymous
Getting less than a 50% can doom some kids to failure. Staff typically give one assessment per week, so if a C student gets an extremely grade, it puts them in a hole that is very hard to climb out of for the rest of the semester. The kid can basically say, “ I am going to fail anyways so why bother trying for the rest of the quarter.” The 50%rule for minimum effort/success gives the student a fighting chance not to fail a class. |
Anonymous
| The head is rotten. |
Anonymous
Yes. Even though grades are reported as a percentage, the meaningful scores are supposed to be a distribution between 50 and 100 with 75 as the median. Then one failing grade and one perfect grade average to a 75--sensible enough. If scores bellow 50% are introduced it means more than one assessment is necessary to even hope to fight back to a mediocre grade, and this disproportionally hits students who are already struggling. This isn't a new concept, when people talk about letter grades, this is the implicit meaning. It's only when scoring is taken too literally, that there needs to be a rule. The way to avoid it is for the rubric to assign 50% of the points to the failing student. English teachers usually don't have a problem with this--there's no urge to put a 20% score on an essay that receiving an E, 50% is already rock bottom. |
Anonymous
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"The suggestion that a teacher deliberately designs tests hoping to give grades bellow 50% is facetious; however a math teacher that doesn't understand that a properly designed test assigns grades between 50% and 100%--the meaningful universe of grades--is showing shaky number sense. 50% is failing, 58% is failing, there are no deeper levels of failing, there's no additional information gleaned from a grade bellow 50%. How do you (as you suggest) put an upper limit on the impact of an individual test? You give more grading opportunities. But given that this will be some finite number, and there's a limit on how *high* a score can be, this still gives scores bellow 50% more oomf than scores over 50%. The median is 75%, 20% is not a meaningful grade, for the same reason that 130% (on the other side of the median) is not a meaningful grade.
The 50% rule (with the elimination of extra credit) is a way of forcing teachers to work within the bell curve of the grading system, even if they don't realize it. It doesn't reward failing students. It simply prevents a failing student from being doubly penalized by a teacher who's too busy looking at numbers to understand what grades mean. As far as what happens in college. Curves, curves happen in college." What would happen if instead of thinking that the "50% rule" is artificial and that writing tests where you have to make a large part of the test easy enough to produce "failing 58%s" tests/quizes were graded like classes, you know, 4, 3, 2, 1, AND ZERO? This would give the administration what it wants and allow teachers to give no credit where no credit is earned. Of course, coming back from a 0 on a 4 to 0 scale is much easier than coming back from a 20 on a 100 to 0 scale. |
Anonymous
I'd guess it wouldn't agree with the current MCPS grading standard, but there's nothing wrong with the system. Still assigning and averaging grades on a scale of 0 to 4 is exactly equivalent to assigning grades on a scale of 50 to 100. Simple change of variables. What's wrong with coming to terms with the fact the 50 points isn't a give away, it is in fact no credit earned--a failing grade? The advantage of using the traditional system, is familiarity. |
Anonymous
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"a properly designed test assigns grades between 50% and 100%"
Says who? I have a master's degree in education. At no point when I was learning about writing assessments did I hear of any such concept. "50% is failing, 58% is failing, there are no deeper levels of failing, there's no additional information gleaned from a grade bellow 50%" Only if you are looking at it from a pass/fail perspective. But if you are concerned with what your child has actually learned, there's plenty of additional information to be gleaned. A child that has earned a 50% on an assessment has mastered twice as much of the course material as a child who has earned a 25% on the same assessment. "this still gives scores bellow 50% more oomf than scores over 50%" Right, which it should. A student who earns a 50% on a test should have a higher grade in the course than a student who earned a 25% on that same test, if their other grades are otherwise equal. How could it be fair otherwise? "As far as what happens in college. Curves, curves happen in college." Except for when they don't. I took plenty of classes in college that were not curved. |