Reply to 7 Math teachers are leaving Richard Montgomerry HS

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]"[b]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.[/b]

"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.[/quote]

OK, so what were you taught about turning scoring rubrics into letter grades, because there's an issue there.  If you look at a typical scoring rubric that assigns 0-5 points, and ask what sort of student (in terms of letter grade) gets this score, the tails are easy.  All the points is an A, no points is an E.  But typically 3 points sounds like C level work 4 points sounds like B work, and even 2 points doesn't sound like out right failure.  So at the granular level, points are assigned on a different scale than the course grading scale, and they only agrees at the tails (roughly 0-30%=E 40%=D 60%=C, 80%=B, 100%=A).  So then at the end of the course what is C level work?  Is a "C" student someone who does "A" level work 70% of the time, or is a "C" student also someone who does "C" level work 100% of the time, or should it be both?

Without some sort of correction, someone who does C level work  100% of the time, will only get 50% of the course points from every rubric and a 50% for the course.  Is that actually someone who should fail the class?  There needs to be some mechanism to bring the two systems into agreement.[/quote]

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