Sneak Peek: Students’ Reform Proposal

In the past month I have gotten together a team of students to help work on an Education Reform Proposal.

The following is just my section: Student Evaluations (and a little bit of Teacher Evaluations.)

Please note that this is not meant to discredit any teachers at Air Academy. Our objective is a more holistic view of the system in general. We are thankful for all our great teachers at AAHS.*

 

I have cheated the system.  Yes, I, Cody Maynard, am coming clean and admitting to my wrongdoing.  I have worked tirelessly my entire high school career simply by manipulating the grading system.  Yes, I have a 4.4 GPA, but I can only accomplish this by working towards the grade and not for the actual knowledge.

The thing is that I am not alone.  I am not an exception to the system.  Most high school students intentionally manipulate the system to make themselves look better than they really are.  This epidemic is not only one of academic concern but it is also of moral and cultural significance.  What will we, as current students, be teaching our children?  Will we tell them to just focus on the assessment and their number in a grading system, or will we teach them the importance of learning and how knowledge is empowering?  With absolute certainty, I know the latter has not been fostered enough by the current system.

I am not by any means saying that we should abolish the grading system, because I know that there needs to be some sort of evaluation system to determine and reflect which students are more adept in certain areas than other students. The problem is that the current system works in theory, but according to our personal experiences, my team and I can point out the many flaws and loopholes in the current system. Many of the ideas we have come up with we know we would hate; however, I know that a different system would be good overall because I know that oftentimes my intentions are insincere and would rather just get a good grade without trying than actually do the work.  But to reiterate, I am no exception.

The first thing that educators and legislators need to realize is that students in the current system are more focused on getting points instead of on understanding concepts. The current system is supposed to champion the hard workers.   Some educators may say that such a large portion of the grade should not be determined by tests because some people are not “good test-takers,” but in reality, it is how the tests are written that concerns educators (but also partly because students don’t like taking tests; while that’s understandable, that’s too bad).

If tests were not multiple choice tests, then we could obtain a more accurate assessment of student knowledge. This would in turn promote an attitude of “it is OK to learn things that aren’t specifically on the curriculum,” hopefully averting teachers from “teaching to the test” in a robotic manner. I hate it when I ask a question and teachers say, “Oh, don’t worry about that; that won’t be on the test.”  Multiple choice tests used to be OK when, if a student understood the concept, then there would be one clear answer. Now, all of the answers actually work, but one “works better than the others,” which is not the point of education. A student can completely understand a concept but get a C- on a multiple choice test because he or she answered some questions “right, but not totally right.” By changing a test to free response questions and not limiting a student’s knowledge to whether or not they know a specific fact, a student’s knowledge can be more accurately assessed.

Let us negate some immediate speculation: math has a “yes or no” answer, but softer subjects such as English or social studies should be a lot more flexible in their answers. If a student can justify his or her reasoning, and that reasoning is just as viable as that of another answer, then this should be rewarded accordingly. It is important that educators promote students’ thinking of their own accord, rather than being spoon-fed information that students will regurgitate at the end of the week, then forget after the chapter test. Students should be encouraged to think freely and develop their own conclusions. Again, this shift from multiple choice tests to free-response tests will primarily be in subjects such as history and literature. Obviously, a statistics or calculus problem only has one correct answer.

 

Another thing that educators do not realize is how often we copy each other’s work or simply fill in a worksheet with rubbish because our teachers are just looking for “completion.” If a worksheet is only worth a completion grade, there is no reason for us to actually try and learn new information. This is what students classify as “busy work.” This work can be beneficial only in two circumstances. First, if teachers actually grade our worksheets thoroughly, then we will be actually inclined to do the work intelligently and in-depth; however, as teachers have 100 students each, very few teachers are currently willing to thoroughly grade 100 assignments every night.

The second proposal prevents students from simply copying the work: teachers could give and collect the same amount of work but not factor it into the grade. Then, when test day arrives, those who did the work are represented through the grade on the test, while those who didn’t and who would otherwise just copy the work are not. This is also insurance for the teachers. When some students may claim, “Well, you didn’t teach it,” the teacher could say, “Well, you didn’t do any of the homework, so it’s your fault.” In the widespread current system, students can simply copy all of the assignments from other students in the class and fail the tests but still get a B- in the class, because the classwork is often 80% of the grade, while the remaining 20% is actually a test of knowledge.

Another problem that I have yet to solve is the fact that the current system does not factor student growth into the equation. If a student’s writing score was poor at the beginning of the year, or if my quality of Spanish-speaking was poor at the beginning of the semester but has improved by the end of the class, what percent best quantifies how well I know that subject?  Should the final grade be the average of all of my grades (including the beginning tests that I did not fully comprehend), or should I just take the very ending grade?  There is currently a type of grading system that attempts to do this called the 4-point grading system. Basically, students’ work is scored on a scale of 0 to 4, and whatever the last few assignments’ grades are, these represent the grades that the students are supposed to receive in the class on the whole “because that’s where the student has grown to.”

Again, this method works in theory, but what I have seen from personal experience is that this system generates lazy students who are unwilling to do anything until the very end of the semester. So where is the happy medium? If I didn’t understand the chapter five test, but I use the same skills in chapter six and mid-chapter six, and the light bulb comes on, and I suddenly comprehend the concept used in chapter five, should it be factored in that I didn’t comprehend it before? Maybe, but definitely not as heavily.  This would obviously have to be broken down into identifying trends of related coursework of the student’s course. Ideally, a line-of-best-fit would identify a student’s work throughout the course of the semester.

 

Many criticize the current grading system because when colleges are looking at grades, the colleges have no way of discerning how well this student actually did, because he or she could have had an easy teacher and received a really great grade.  Alternatively, he or she could have had a very difficult teacher and have received a low/average grade, but in comparison with the rest of the class, this grade is outstanding.  This is one of the benefits of having students take a state-wide, subject-based assessment that can reflect both the overall knowledge as well as each student’s comparison with the class. This way, a check on both the teachers and the students simultaneously can be established.  For example, if a student scores relatively lowly compared to the rest of the state, then colleges can then examine how well the student did compared with the rest of his class, and if that student still did very well compared to the rest of his/her class, then the college can assume, “Oh well, this may just be a bad or overly lenient teacher.” If students score very highly on the standardized test, then there is no need to examine how well they did compared to the rest of the students in their class.

This will hopefully account for the socioeconomic disparities in the college admission process. If a student scores “OK” compared to others in the state, but then scores “exceptionally” compared to those in his district, this is notable. So, in summation: we should rank students not only in how they perform on the standardized test, or overall in their class, but also in how they perform compared to those in their class (to assess their score in relation to the teacher if it is mediocre) and their school/district (to compare in relation to the socio-economic status of the school).

  • *Very briefly I would like to digress into teacher evaluations (yes, I know that I already wrote an article on SB 10-191 but not everyone has read it.)  Currently, our calculus teachers are assessed on how well we as students score on a test that barely evaluated pre-algebra skills, not the actual re learning. On top of this, it should be noted that currently, 50% of teachers’ evaluations are based on how well the school does as a whole.  This means that a bad teacher can piggyback off of the scores of a good school or, vice versa, a good teacher can be hindered by the scores of an unsuccessful school. Of course, this is not to mention that even teachers who don’t teach subjects that aren’t on the TCAPs are still being evaluated on student’s TCAP scores. So, the current legislatures think that it’s fair to grade our gym, ceramics, and foreign language teachers should be assessed on our TCAP scores in basic math and English.  How does that make sense?
  • What fellow student Sam Chiacchia and I have come up with is a statewide assessment that is different for every subject which will act as the final for that class. Honors physics will have a statewide final. Pre-Algebra will have a statewide final. Spanish level 4 will have a statewide proposal. Every core class will have a statewide final. Educators can then more accurately assess what students are learning in each class. Yes, we realize that there are some socio-economic disparities between the groups of kids that teachers are teaching so that will be factored into their evaluation. However, if we have two Geography teachers at the same school and each receives a simple random sample of 80 students, and one of the teacher’s students’ average is 87% and the other’s is 65% that is statistically significant. This is much like how many AP teachers want to use their student’s scores on the AP test as a form of assessment, but the legislatures won’t let them do that….why? I have no idea.*

 

Another issue is with reporting scores to colleges.   Principally, there should be more than just 5 (A, B, C, D, F) classifications on a Grade Point Average.  Instead, colleges should look examine the percentage. An 89.4% is significantly different from a 79.5%, but both still count as a 3 on the total Grade Point Average. This disincentives students to study hard when it is most essential: for the final. Hypothetically, say that a given final is only worth 20% of the final grade. If I have a high B, and I know that I won’t receive an A on the final, I will not worry about studying at all, because I only need to get a 40% on the final to maintain my B.

My last point is that because we are standardizing the tests of each subject, the honors classes are supposed to be significantly harder, so there will be a harder curriculum and  in turn, a harder test. As a senior in high school who has just recently applied to colleges, it frustrated me that colleges did not give enough weight to honors and AP classes (they sometimes only look at students’ unweighted GPA). If we are standardizing the final tests (or simply factoring in a student’s AP test score into his GPA), then we could potentially add a given percent “cushion” to classes depending on the  difficulty of the curriculum/final test. For example, an AP course would have a higher cushion than an honors class, and an honors class a bigger cushion than regular. This new system would solve the problem that GPA consideration often serves as a deterrent from taking difficult and possibly interesting classes.

 

I like to work with a mindset of, “it is easy to tear something down, but much harder to propose how we fix it.” I know that this system is very complicated and often times “out-of-my-league.” But I think that we, as students, have a unique perspective on our own education and we are entitled to have our own voice. Thank you for humoring me, and please leave your thoughts in the comments below.