Aspen - grades posted late and incorrectly

[Anonymous]

The lost assignment issue has happened to both of my kids at Hardy. It’s one thing to try and spin it into a learning opportunity for self-advocacy but when a 6th grader is in tears because the teachers keep misplacing assignments, it’s just not appropriate.
I now have my kids take photos of any paper assignments they turn in. my kids have also had to ask multiple times to get teachers to accurately update Aspen to reflect the electronic assignments that clearly show as completed in Canvas, just to make sure they get the proper credit. It’s infuriating and while I’m not surprised to hear this is happening at J-R, the stakes are certainly higher for these types of recording errors in high school.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:My favorite form of “self advocacy” that my kid developed during HS was keeping files of all graded work (like an actual file drawer with carefully labeled folders for each class and assignments filed by date) so that when teachers recorded work that had been turned in, graded, and returned as “missing” they could provide the teacher a copy. They learned to provide a copy because more than once a teacher took the original back from them and then continued to claim that the work had never been done.



At the end of the advisory, they would typically provide at least 2 teachers with multiple copies of work marked as missing (like 5-7 assignments).

This is why parents should love online platforms like Canvas. It is time stamped and you can prove something was turned in. I know on the flip side that’s why some teachers like it. Kids can’t claim to their parents that they turned something in but the teacher lost it.

As an IT guy, this stuff makes me crazy. Teachers assign and grade stuff in Canvass, right? Then do they have to manually enter grades in Aspen? If so, that’s nuts.

Also, JR and Walls kids routinely have chat groups for classes where one kid does the assignment then posts a picture for all the other kids to copy. Technology can easily solve this.

There is no need to individual teachers to create new and unique homework assignments and tests for standard HS classes. You could easily have sets of thousands of questions, and each kid completes homework specific to them (and tailored based on questions they missed previously in a subject like math or foreign language). The work could be multiple choice or require typed answers, and grading could be automated or at worst the teacher could grade online and grade book would be automatically updated.

Teacher time could them be spent discussing subject matter with kids or helping individual students.

I’m a HS science teacher and love these suggestions. Teachers spend so much time recreating the wheel.
It is inefficient and a waste of time.

I played around with gpt a week ago just to get an idea of a quiz it might write. It wasn’t good.

You might want to check out the research on how to use the tools. In several experiments, changing a few words in a prompt raised the efficacy of a LLM in completing a complex task from an average of 40% success to an average of over 99% success. And how best to prompt is often not intuitive. In another experiment, researchers convinced an LLM to do a task that it initially rejected (“I’m sorry, I don’t have the ability to do X”) by lying to it and prompting with “sure you do, you’ve done this for me before.” Also, many LLMs perform better when you prompt them politely. It’s pretty strange.