Professor Julius Kelp Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> An open letter to college admissions committees
> Friday, Mar. 23, 2012
>
http://www.fairfaxtimes.com/article/20120323/OPINI
> ON/703239696/1076/something-for-everyone-at-histor
> ic-savage-mill/An-open-letter-to-college-admission
> s-committees&template=fairfaxTimes
>
> As a physics teacher who recently resigned from
> Loudoun County Public Schools, one of the
> wealthiest and fastest-growing public school
> districts in America, I urge you to altogether
> stop considering high school grades in your
> admissions process and decisions.
>
> Our schools are failing. Rarely does real learning
> happen in modern classrooms, and when it does, it
> is often merely a byproduct of each student’s
> pursuit of an independent and potentially
> conflicting goal: high grades. While I can only
> speak to grading practices at my school, I suspect
> that these concerns are endemic throughout high
> schools nationwide.
>
> First, high school grades themselves are very poor
> indicators of a student’s competence. As a
> graduate of MIT and Georgetown Law, I have
> experience in earning high grades and gaining
> admission to competitive universities. My grades
> were in part due to “grade engineering”: the
> process of maximizing grades with minimal effort
> and without regard to learning or understanding
> material. In other words, I received high grades
> partially by exploiting the weak correlation
> between grades and mastery.
>
> At one time, I suppose, grades might have been an
> objective and reasonably accurate measure of
> competence in a given subject. Not anymore. Today,
> they primarily measure how well a student can game
> the system. It is quite easy for savvy high school
> students to pass a course, and in some cases even
> to receive an A or B, without actually knowing or
> understanding any of the course content. Here’s
> how:
>
> They choose easy teachers. Many teachers at my
> school believe that all students are capable of
> getting A’s; not surprisingly, very few of their
> students receive lower than a B. Are these amazing
> teachers who push their students to succeed or
> spineless grade inflators who don’t want to deal
> with angry parents? Because a student’s grade
> depends largely on his teacher’s philosophy of
> grading, students can avoid the annoyance of
> actually having to earn high grades by rationally
> choosing teachers who want to give them.
>
> They harass teachers about grades. Students and
> their parents often cooperate to make a
> teacher’s life a living hell. They pester the
> teacher weekly with requests for progress reports.
> They call the teacher during her lunch break to
> request extra credit or test retake opportunities.
> They write demanding and condescending emails.
> They schedule early-morning parent-teacher
> conferences to negotiate higher grades. They
> complain to the principal. They meet with
> guidance. They flex their muscles and put the
> teacher in her place. During my last week as a
> public school teacher, a colleague actually cried
> after receiving a nasty parent email. Given enough
> harassment, many teachers will either succumb to
> inflating grades or quit.
>
> They cheat. At my school, the likelihood of
> getting caught is low. Students can easily copy
> other students’ homework or plagiarize from the
> Internet. They can even cheat during tests, as
> many teachers give the same test version to every
> student. Even if a student is caught, there is
> essentially no consequence for first-time
> offenders so perceptive students readily make use
> of this free hall pass. Does cheating actually
> occur? In an anonymous survey of my 130 physics
> students, all but three admitted to copying
> homework or test answers from other students.
>
> They get into special ed. Not all of special ed is
> a sham but some of it is. I am not an expert in
> special education and I absolutely agree that
> specific learning disabilities exist that can be
> addressed with research-based interventions and
> procedures. However, instead of a shield, special
> ed (and its even shadier cousin, the child study)
> is often used by parents as a sword to gain
> competitive advantages over other students,
> particularly the small-group testing
> accommodation, in which students are taken to a
> different room by a special ed teacher who may
> “coach” the students. In my experience, this
> coaching tends to involve providing hints and
> interactive feedback that would be considered
> cheating if provided by fellow students, thus
> allowing students who are otherwise clueless in my
> class to ace my tests. Sadly, many students have
> learned to exploit their special ed status as a
> crutch and excuse for nonperformance, resulting in
> higher grades in the short term at the expense of
> accountability and achievement in the long term.
>
> They earn “completion” points by turning in
> all homework, projects and assignments. Completion
> is the new competence. Modern grading practices
> encourage children to turn in lots of shoddy work
> products because completion points, which now
> account in many classrooms for the majority of the
> grade, reward quantity over quality. By copying
> off other students and the Internet and even
> scribbling worthless nonsense to give the
> semblance of assignment completion, a student can
> receive the vast majority of credit on these
> assignments with minimal effort. Even if they bomb
> the tests — reflecting a total lack of
> understanding in the subject — they’ll still
> be able to pull off a B or C.
>
> When students are judged for college admissions on
> an indicator that may or may not bear any
> resemblance to their actual level of mastery, an
> entirely rational response is to focus on the
> indicator itself. Why go through the arduous
> process of actually learning physics if you can
> pull off a B merely by copying homework, getting
> last-minute extra credit points, and having your
> parents harass your teacher for a retake when you
> bombed the test you didn’t prepare for? These
> grade-increasing strategies are now the rule in
> public education, not the exception. Sadly, the
> hardworking students who have integrity, an
> old-fashioned American work ethic, and a desire to
> actually learn are at a competitive disadvantage
> to their less-honest counterparts.
>
> Consequently, the drive for high grades is
> blinding students and parents alike to the real
> purpose of education: learning. In parent-teacher
> conferences, “How can my child bring up her
> grade?” has replaced “How can my child better
> learn the material?” The system’s response to
> angry grade-obsessed parents and disgruntled
> students has been to fudge the indicator instead
> of improving the system in other words, to inflate
> grades in spite of worsening performance. I was
> routinely pressured by parents, students and even
> administrators to inflate grades in the form of
> curving scores, providing extra credit and retest
> opportunities, and more heavily weighting homework
> and projects that are easy to copy from friends.
> It is instructive to note that two-thirds of our
> students are on the honor roll. (That’s right.)
> When a majority of students routinely receive As
> and B’s in all their classes, the distinctions
> intended by a traditional A-F grading scale become
> hazy and meaningless.
>
> Finally, grades are far too personal to be
> effective. When an A student receives a C in
> algebra, for example, she is fooled into believing
> that she is no good at math when, in reality, a C
> is (or should be) an indicator of perfectly
> acceptable performance in which there is room for
> improvement. As a result, her self-esteem and
> confidence take serious beatings and she gives up,
> even though real excellence is molded from a long
> cycle of falling and then getting back up again.
> Teachers are thus given the option of assigning
> honest grades that reflect true mastery — and of
> dealing with angry, discouraged students who have
> not been held accountable for their own education
> — or of deluding C and D students into believing
> they’re A and B students. The latter option will
> result in a generation full of misled
> “straight-A” students possessing few actual
> skills and a subpar work ethic who don’t
> understand why America is no longer economically
> competitive in the global marketplace.
>
> The solution I propose is comprehensive exams at
> the end of each course, much like Advanced
> Placement exams, that thoroughly and objectively
> distinguish students on merit alone. The emphasis
> in each classroom would then shift from fighting
> the teacher for high grades to cooperating with
> the teacher to learn the material necessary to
> perform on the exam. Unlike Virginia’s Standard
> of Learning tests, which are essentially worthless
> baseline tests of rote memorization that do not
> distinguish the most competent students, AP exams
> test a broad array of knowledge and understanding.
> There is no such thing as “teaching to the AP
> test,” because fundamental understanding and
> application of knowledge cannot be mastered by
> memorizing the answers to past exam questions.
>
> The focus on grades is killing American education.
> In my book, “Full Ride to College,” I
> specifically teach students how to engineer their
> grades and exploit the weak correlation between
> grades and mastery, thus giving students a
> competitive advantage without the inconvenience of
> working hard and learning. While I consider this
> strategy to be a mockery of American education, it
> is also effective. Until such time as college
> admission committees stop soliciting and using
> archaic, meaningless high school grade information
> in their admissions decisions, I plan to continue
> teaching grade engineering, because it is the
> rational and efficient response to a grading
> regime in which students are rewarded for
> cheating, harassing teachers, and choosing classes
> based on the ease of grading instead of the
> quality of teaching.
>
> Andrew F. Knight, former physics teacher, Potomac
> Falls High School
tl;dr