Day 27: Grading...Ugh...

The assessments went well for the students who have been working with fidelity.  A few told me that they were confused, so I asked them what they had done to prepare.  They admitted not much.  I'm hoping that I can leverage these experience into helping them develop habits to succeed, if they choose to do so.

I am not going to judge their choices or their priorities, but if they wish to be successful in my class, I can help them with that.

By and large, the most common mistakes that I saw were careless ones.  Students wrote "4 - 3 = 2" and similar transgressions.

While these are irksome, I'm not overly concerned about it.  I don't honestly believe that they think the statement is true.  I think it infinitely more likely that they didn't check their work, moved too quickly or something similar.  Using standards based grading allows me to assign grades and feedback in a more comprehensive way.

In the section assessing the skill of solving absolute value inequalities, one student got the wrong answer for most of the problems, but still passed the section because the mistake were calculation-based.  The work and thinking were clearly displayed, meaning that I was able to see that this student knew exactly what they were doing conceptually, but were careless with signs.

Two students showing the same wrong answers may get different scores based on how they obtained those answers.  I understand there are arguments against this approach, most of which boil down to "in the real world, you're either right or wrong."

Setting aside the fact that I don't think that's always true, you can't argue about the "real world" and yet only allow students one opportunity to show understanding of a memorized topic.  In the "real world" people get multiple opportunities to work on, improve and modify their products.  In the "real world" people have resources at their fingertips, such as the internet.

I began writing a multi-paragraph rant here about the appropriateness of modern education in the scope of preparing kids for the "real world" and decided against it.

I have lots of assignments to grade, my ax-throwing league starts up again this weekend, the book I'm reading is starting to get great and I still have to run today.