Reply to Message from Jack Smith about Grade Inflation

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Reply to "Message from Jack Smith about Grade Inflation"

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[quote=Anonymous]I think there is room for far more rigorous grading AND grade recovery programs. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Grades are a measurement. You can do this infrequently and without recovery allowances to use grades as a ranking tool or you can give them frequently and with recovery options to give feedback and incentivize learning.

Students don't know what they don't know and grading can or written feedback can show them where the gaps exist in their learning. Quality instruction requires quality feedback and grading. If the student has a motivation like grade recovery to go learn the material then you are more likely to come out with a positive outcome on all fronts. Allowing this for assignments, tests and quizzes leading up to a cumulative exam is a good method for K-12 students. This approach significantly helps kids in the middle of the performance curve who may struggle but are willing to work hard or are very smart but don't always follow instructions the first time around. It doesn't help the kids at the bottom unless the school intervenes and pushes them to do the recovery efforts.

What MCPS is doing is avoiding rigorous grading at every level and just inflating the scores, there is no cumulative end of year exam and many students move on with gaps in their understanding. These kids weren't accelerated too fast or unable to learn the material -they simply received inferior instruction and feedback. Teachers are being forced to spend more time collecting data for MCPS than rigorously grading student work. Teachers figure out that the system doesn't care if they give kids easy grades as long as they report data that central office likes to see.

I would prefer that teachers spent far more time grading student's work more rigorously than reporting up data to the central office for their random spin efforts. [/quote]

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