Reply to Kids who bombed the SAT - getting good college results

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Hate the game? Definitely.

The problem is that very few kids can get great grades at some very competitive schools without cheating. I got sick of my DC getting crap grades during distance learning and moved DC into my home office so I could monitor them during the school day. I was appalled at all the cheating that is going on. It's actually so normalized that I don't think they even understand that they're out of line. It's different from when I was the smart kid in HS that everyone else cheated off of. Now, it's that they all exchange work with each other, even the smart kids. Granted, DC is at a super competitive HS so it's a different pool of kids than those I went to school with. But, if anything, this seems far worse ethically because these are the &quot;top&quot; kids who are cheating in order to achieve and maintain a high GPA. When I let kids cheat off my homework or exams 30 years ago, all that happened was the kid managed to pass and not flunk out of high school. Nobody was worried about how those kids' GPAs might nudge them out of the top 10% of the class or give them a leg up for college admissions.

At one point in HS my kid was caught cheating on an assignment. We had to go in and meet with the teacher and punish our kid. But what was most upsetting was that when I spoke with DC about why they felt cheating had been necessary, their answer made total sense to me. There is no way that a kid who isn't a genius can keep up with the workload at a school like theirs. These are kids that are eventually passing the AP exams with 4s and 5s, so they aren't dumb. They know the material. But the sheer volume of work is unrealistic and is essentially an invitation to cheat. When the top kids in the class are &quot;sharing&quot; work with one another, everyone else has to do this in order to not fall too far behind and still sleep for at least 6-7 hours a night. It's a huge problem that's entirely created by stupid adults setting &quot;higher&quot; standards. My sibling is a high school teacher in Texas where one's class rank now determines whether you get to go to UT Austin and become a Longhorn. It's become a cat and mouse game with the top kids all devising new tricks to raise their GPA by 0.05 over that of their classmate.

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This is one of the problems with reducing a student down to a single letter grade for each subject.  We get what we measure in life. If we measure by letter grades, kids are going to chase the letter grade by whatever means.  It’s time to rethink that system to have one that incentives learning, rather than grade grubbing. Universities were around for &gt;1000 years without them.   Socrates did not give Plato letter grades.  They came into vogue about 100 years ago as a way to lessen the burden on teachers, and not as a pedagogical tool to benefit students.  [/quote]

Agree.    With one already in college....another issue with letter grades is that they can [b]discourage students from tackling difficult challenging courses because if the concern that a poor grade will drag down gpa[/b].  How do we incentivize and reward learning over chasing grades?[/quote]

Bingo.

By giving qualitative evaluations and rewarding risk taking in academics.  My DD’s school, e.g., has 2 components to grading.  A 10-12 page spreadsheet that gives 0-4 on each individual skill.  0 is not covered and 4 is mastery.  So the math portion accounts for about 2 pages by itself etc.   And they do a 4 or 5 page written summary in addition.  About 3/4 page to a full page by each teacher.  They do this 3 times per year, in conjunction with PT conferences.  Which portion is the more constructive? The narrative portion.  But they are both better tools than the single letter grade my DS gets.[/quote]

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