Re: Justification for the SAT

["Dr. William C. Cala, Ed.D." <wcala@SERVTECH.COM>]

I would agree that the elimination of letter and numerical grades and the
use of narrative would be an improvement.  There is research on information
retention when narrative evals are used in lieu of number and letter grades.
>From a motivational standpoint, grades are a negative (see Richard Ryan et.
al. University of Rochester).  The extrapolation that teacher evaluations,
however, are worse than company standardized tests will not hold water.
Teachers know their kids.  Your language in your post sounds like teacher
bashing and also sounds like you need to engage more teachers.

BC
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric Crump" <ecrump@INTERVERSITY.ORG>
To: <ARN-L@LISTS.CUA.EDU>
Sent: Saturday, September 01, 2001 10:17 AM
Subject: Re: Justification for the SAT


> On Sat, 1 Sep 2001, Stephen McGinnis wrote:
> > The fundamental problem is the inherent bias in the assessment reform
> > community.  There is an unquestioned belief that somehow teachers assign
> > grades in a perfect manner that never contains bias.
>
> Not entirely unquestioned. I may be in the minority, but I think grades
> are worse than tests. A number of reasons, including: They are inherently
> and profoundly subjective evaluations disguised as objective by people
> (teachers) who really ought to know better. They are more deeply embedded
> in the education system, so deeply, I think, that they might be considered
> part of its bones (therefore reform of evaluation is difficult because
> people rightly sense that if you pull grading out the whole skeleton will
> implode).
>
> If you (or anybody else) is interested, I host a discussion list on the
> subject of (un)grading. We talk about the history of grading, the problems
> with grading, and plot for the demise of grading.
>
> http://www.interversity.org/lists/ungrading
>
> or send email to majordomo@interversity.org and in the message body put:
> subscribe ungrading
>
> Holler if you run into trouble or have questions.
>
> --Eric Crump
>
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