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In School, C is the new D
The debasement of American education system continues:
The solution, Simmons suggests, is to eliminate Ds altogether, because he believes many of those barely getting by will up their game to avoid failure. He pointed to a New Jersey charter school that’s already made the transition. […] “Ds are simply not useful in society,” Larrie Reynolds, superintendent at the Mount Olive, N.J. charter school Simmons referenced, told the New York Times in 2010. “It’s a throwaway grade. No one wants to hire a D-anything, so why would we have D-students and give them credit for it?”
If C is now the borderline between passing and failure — goes the thinking — then the slackers will work hard enough to get Cs, rather than the Ds they were earning before. A more likely outcome, however, is that public school teachers will be pressured to drop their standards in order to meet their performance metrics. As a signaling mechanism, it’s a lateral move. Employers and colleges will know that the C-minus student of today is as mediocre as the D-minus student of yesteryear. The end result is that Peppermint Patty gets into the C-minus Hall of Fame instead.
Yet Ds are important in education. They tell the student they’re not very good at that particular subject, either because they lack work ethic, motivation, intelligence, or aptitude. The grade system — assuming it is reasonably applied — provides important feedback. It’s fundamentally no different from any other form of measurement. Imagine a speedometer that never give you the correct speed below 20 mph; that’s the same as a grading system were Ds have been done away with.
The D-Reformers are trying to short circuit the educational feedback loop. Instead of providing real information that can be used to draw conclusions, they want to issue false information that misleads and misdirects. While this may seem kind in the short-term, it’s cruel over the long-haul. Inflated grades give students an incorrect understanding of their talents and abilities. Sooner or later, objective reality catches-up. Often this happens when the student reaches college and flunks out.
A poor grade in school can be a crushing experience, whatever soothing sounds are emitted by Panglossian teachers and parents. Yet the truth still needs to be known, especially by the student whose future rests in the balance. Whatever the immediately consequence, an important life lesson is learned: at some point you are going to fail.
There are plenty of struggling students who, nevertheless, become great successes in life, and a failure at one subject hardly precludes success in others. Even being a total academic failure is hardly an economic death knell. Even at its best, formal education only tests academic aptitude and inclination. The student who is bored hearing lectures and reading books might excel at hands-on learning.
A key reason for the shortage of skilled manual labor in North America is that too many academically marginal students — who might succeed at a particular trade — are pushed into college-track courses. The result is often failure, disappointment, and low self-esteem, the very things two generations of touchy-feely educational theorists promised to end with their reforms. Had these students been flunked in high school, they might have sought another, more suitable path.
The finger for this misallocation of talent is often pointed at the mass subsidization of post-secondary education. The cycle of grants and loans that initially made it easier to go afford college — but now make it absurdly expensive — are certainly a proximate cause. The deeper cause, however, lies in the culture of modern North America.
The big intellectual story of the 20th century is the decline of religion. In previous generations, the central measure of a person’s worth in society was his or her moral conduct. Authors, statesmen, and philosophers spoke of “virtue” and “character” as being essential to a functioning society. The early public school reformers focused as much on character formation as they did on either knowledge acquisition or skill development.
Religion underpinned the importance of the moral self in the Victorian world. Come the 20th century, however, religion was pushed to the board; morality, likewise, became a personal matter with limited remit in the public square. Saying that someone was “virtuous” or “of good character” was just a personal opinion. With religion gone, there was no universal reference point to make moral judgements anything but subjective attitudes.
Into this void steps the intelligent self to replace the moral self. The highly intelligent went from being eccentrics regarded with suspicion to technocrats destined to rule society. Unlike morality, intelligence could be measured with a test. You could even rank people along a curve. Far more precise than hazy concepts like virtue. The human need to find hierarchy had found a new standard.
Whereas before, the unintelligent could take comfort in at least being a good person, in this harsher modern light, “goodness” was just a tactful way to assuage the feelings of those on the wrong half of the bell curve. Complimenting someone’s intelligence today is far more flattering than calling attention to his or her virtue. This is the end product of the fetishization of intelligence. So is reverence for the four-year college degree, a supposedly credentialized proof of an individual’s intelligence.
But now, we can no longer call the unintelligent unintelligent, or deny them the trappings supposedly due to the intelligent. To do so is to deny them the only approved path to self and social worth. That the kind of intelligence being measured is only one particular kind — and that a college degree is hardly proof of high intelligence anymore — hasn’t changed this widespread view.
This unhealthy view of intelligence is behind the panic so many parents feel when they see that their children aren’t really college material. They hope — in the way that only parents can — that some threat or trick might push Johnny away from the terrible fate of being a mere high school graduate.
If we are to step away from our obsession with college — and the consequent desire to rig the high school grading system by any means necessary — we need to question the elevation of intelligence above all other individual capacities and traits.
Published in Culture, Education
I realized very early in my education that grades were essentially worthless and adjusted my behavior accordingly.
Nice post.
“A key reason for the shortage of skilled manual labour in North America is that too many academically marginal students, who might succeed at a particular trade, are instead pushed into college track courses. The result is often failure, disappointment and low self-esteem. The very things two generations of touchy-feely educational theorists were promising to avoid with their reforms. Had these students been flunked in high school they might have sought another more suitable path.”
You have something here. Way back when, there were things in high school called “shop class”. Those kids that weren’t college material took your basic english and math and then took shop classes–masonry, woodworking, ag, mechanics, etc. They usually got out at 11 and then went to work mostly as an appentice. This is exactly what Mike Rowe talks about. These kids learned a marketable skill and became a productive member of society. Now they are forced into classes that they don’t like/understand for something they will never use. We see the results.
“Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it?”
I can see some conservative logic for getting rid of D.
Passing a class implies that one has attained the minimum level of knowledge to be considered basically proficient in the material. Is it not arguable that being able to attain average knowledge (a C grade) in a subject should be the bare minimum for passing a class?
If a student cannot meet the average in a subject, how can one say that that are minimally proficient?
Anything less than average achievement should be an automatic fail, no?
Now, in subjects where it’s more difficult to quantify achievement I can understand the fear that C will be the new D. Teachers are a wily bunch.
However, especially in quantifiable subjects like math and science, I don’t really see much value in D grades.
Maybe as a compromise, there should be a consequence for D grades, like mandatory tutoring and/or remedial training. Maybe keep D for interim grades, so students and parents can get a wake-up call and determine to work harder, but get rid of them for final grades.
At the end of the day, it really seems counterintuitive to me that less-than-average could be “good enough” to be considered minimally proficient.
But then, the very idea of making kids retake a class is pretty much verboten these days. Perhaps a D is a teacher’s way of saying “this kid shouldn’t move on, but I’m not allowed to fail kids anymore.”
Exjoning with report cards now? Sweet.
Maybe it’s just me, but in my experience, Ds were extremely useful feedback. I can remember exactly each of them.
In high-school chemistry, my hard-won D both passed me and informed me that I had no scientific aptitude.
My D in a college course in music theory taught me that my playing the trumpet (on which one plays a single line of notes) was no preparation for a course filled with piano players who knew chords and keys.
And the D in my sophomore medieval history course, whose foreign-born professor’s lectures were by turns inaudible and incomprehensible, taught me to be careful in selecting electives.
Still remember the sting. Keep the D!
All grades should be numerical.
Let’s face it. You can’t “get rid of the D grade” since D simply means 60 percent.
Abolishing D grades is a little like the daylight “saving” notion, which is a little like the old story about the guy who tries to make his blanket longer by taking six inches off the bottom and attaching it to the top.
In fact, it gets more absurd. Colleges will simply say that the C now represents a range of 60 to 79. All of the C students just lost 10 percent. Geesh.
D for Diploma, and C’s get degrees.
University I went to had a “you can have one D letter grade for one course and count it as passing” rule, hence D for Diploma. I don’t know how popular that was among most Universities, but I imagine most had a similar rule.
I see the problem of grades are more systematic than mere grade inflation or debasement. That’s an issue, but it’s really a symptom of the true problem. Grades are being used as targets and metrics at the same time, and we already know that’s a bad idea and this is a natural, and even rational approach to solving the target-metric problem.
I don’t see how keeping Ds around helps with this problem. Instead, a D sends a signal to this kind of student that they don’t need to change tracks because “good enough” will get them through to the next grade. They need to be failed so they’ll pursue different fields, not allowed to squeak through to the next grade with a D.
That’s always how it’s been in the Great White North:
D = 50-59
C = 60-69
B = 70-79
A = 80-100 (A+ is usually 90-100, sorta, kinda, but not always.)
In other words, as long as you can absorb half the material, you pass. It’s kinda ludicrous, since which half of the material you absorb will make a huge difference in the next year.
Eh, in college, a 50% on a problem set or exam might be really good!
I remember coming to a physics professor in tears after an exam: having only gotten through 1/5 of the thing, there was no way I could do better than 20%. I was extremely puzzled when he told me not to worry. Next lecture, when the score distribution was posted on the board, 22% and 20% (my score) were the two highest. Outliers, in fact.
It can be a real shock going from a world where nothing below 90% is considered outstanding to a world where 70, 50, 0r even 20% is outstanding because the problems assigned have really gotten that much harder.
Of course, a curve can be applied to transform the scores for cosmetic purposes, but curving is just a mathematical trick that effectively assigns letter grades in a consistent fashion. Getting a back an assignment or exam marked “95” when your raw score was 50% only means that the grader decided to make 50% an A.
Hey, why not ADD letters to the grading system and get rid of pluses and minuses.
Have each letter represent a 5% range.
A = 95-100
B = 90-94
C = 85-89
etc…
Really, once you start fiddling around with any system of this sort you can really just keep fiddling ad nauseum.
New England schools use 60 to 69 as a D, 70 to 79 as a C, 80 to 89 as a B, and 90 to 100 as an A.
But then the grades are still being interpreted numerically. It’s the only way they can be manipulated–that is, added, subtracted, and averaged.
When I started editing, I worked on a few textbooks for “teachers of teachers,” notably in testing and measurement.
Having spent a couple of years thinking of little else but testing and measurement, I reached the conclusion that one of the authors I worked with was right: a grade should represent how much of the material the student needs to know in order to progress to the next level. No more and no less.
That’s clear, and it’s information that is usable to the student.
How’s this for a compromise: A D could be enough for you to pass, but not enough for you to gain entry into the next year’s class. If you wanna quit the subject after the “101” class you’d be free to do so without losing the credit, but if you want to get into the “201” class you need to retake the “101” class.
Obviously this wouldn’t work for primary education, but it might be an improvement for secondary and post-secondary.
Agreed. At some point, numerical assignments must enter the picture. That’s why schools used grade-points, I believe.
Yes. It’s usable. Informative. Love it.
It’s up to the school administration.
But it’s a starting point.
I’m not going to understand Trig III unless I understand this much from Trig II.
It also organizes a lot of other things in my head too.
[continued]
[continued from 18]
Now this is going to cause a blowup on Ricochet, but it’s coming from well-organized, self-employed editor with a sideline job as mother of three grown kids, someone who has seen education now from top to bottom:
I wish they would get organized.
And I would ask the colleges and universities, heck, even the high schools, to recognize that the cost of real estate has meant that coursework that used to meander over years and years has been compressed into six weeks, and it moves very fast. So the student who isn’t on pace by day 3 isn’t going to get enough out of the course, no matter how hard he or she tries, to progress beyond it. In fact, the result will harm him or her with a failure grade to be born forever on his or her transcript. So I’d create a quiz to give on day 3. A pass-fail quiz, with a fail sending the student off to the advisers.
If I were a university, I’d share the blame for a failed grade. I would remove all charges to the students for failed courses.
The schools establish the curriculum. They–not the student–know how the student needs to progress to the finish line. The schools should be able to say definitively, This is what this student needs to know in order for us to say he or she is educated.
[continued from comment 19]
In other words, the schools have the map. The students need to get from A to Z within six weeks. If the students are not at point C by day 3, they are never going to get to Z. A quiz should reveal whether the student is at point C by day 3.
Can you imagine the moral outrage that would ensue today if an educator were to suggest that some of the students are “dunces and idlers.” Hurt feelings, uproar, and C. S. Lewis would have been looking for employment in the private sector.
Given that this is certainly true (I had a similar test in the courses I taught), wouldn’t a non-linear and more dynamic approach be desirable? Something like Khan Academy, where learning is mastery based. Not based on trying to keep up, but allowing the student time to spend as much time as he needs to really understand something a concept.
I had to repeat Physics myself because I needed another week to grasp angular momentum. I failed the entire course because of that, and I couldn’t keep up after. I retook it and got my A, but that wasn’t necessary. I just needed a bit more time to grasp a difficult concept, and I’m actually better for having been able to fail and retake, although I never really needed to in the first place. I just needed a week.
I felt like most (if not all) of the students are capable of mastery, but some of them had longer spinup times, and would fall behind and fail for that reason.
Just seems to me that the forced march education strategy is wrongheaded, especially considering that alternative systems work, and much better.
There are a lot of ways one can look at grades. Personally, for college courses if a class is required for your major, or an important elective for your major then I think a minimum grade for a person who hopes to be employed successfully in that major is a B, not a B- or below. Advanced courses tend to build on earlier ones, and comprehension at only a B- level meant it was harder to understand the next level.
Any grade below a B in ones major should cause one to evaluate their likelihood for success in that major. If it was due to controllable external circumstances, e.g. one partied too much, just repeating the class might be enough, otherwise changing the major or ones emphasis within the major might be desirable.
In practice the engineers I have known over a 35+ year career who were successful, either never went to college, or did very very well. C students for the most part, weren’t successful, or financially were very successful because they drifted into marketing instead of design and development.
One of my kids had a similar route through chemistry and physics. Changed my view of education from there on. Teachers and professors, please treat the kids with consideration and respect. That’s all I ask. The kids are trying hard to achieve something.
Eliminate grades altogether. They’re so unfair.
Recruiter: “So you went to Harvard Law School?”
Recruit: “Yes.”
Recruiter: “What was your GPA?”
Recruit: “Pardon me?”
Recruiter: “Your Grade Point Average. What was your Grade Point Average?”
Recruit: “Does that matter?”
Recruiter: “Well, yes we think it does.”
Recruit: “I think you’re trying to oppress me.”
Recruiter: “What?”
Recruit: “I may have to sue you.”
Recruiter: “You do realize were a prestigious law firm.”
Recruit: “Not after I get through with you.”
Recruiter: (pauses) “All right, you’re hired.”
Recruit: “What?”
Recruiter: “You’re just the kind of strident obnoxious jerk this firm looks for in a candidate. Welcome to the team. Who cares what your grades were. By the way, have you ever thought about a career in politics?”
That’s so hard for teachers to do though, systematically. Teachers really are forced into the forced march of their students because of the cohort system students are trapped in.
There’s stigma attached to being kept behind a grade, even if that would be tremendously helpful. I (thought not a parent) think they would be viscerally opposed to their student to being held back, even if it was for the best and would help the student out because holding the student back indicates failure in school, not opportunity.
I’m far out of school now, but I fired up Khan Academy to brush up on some math. Turns out I need some review before I get back into combinatorics, but I didn’t feel dumb or anything being told that my algebra was weak. I got to master it. I didn’t have to sweat getting a wrong answer (this actually took some adaptation on my part). They would only lead to future right answers, and the identification of weaknesses I could improve on until mastery, not until it was time to move on because of bad scheduling reasons.
Just felt like that’s how it should have been in the first place.
My husband went through a two year vo-tech electronics course. He went to a State competition & won it. He was supposed to diagnose the problem with a TV (with tubes!) & fix it. It was a timed event; one guy finished well ahead of everyone else. My husband won because he took all his jewelry OFF before starting; the fast guy did NOT, so was disqualified. Fast, yes—smart, no.
He goes to work for an electronics company & works his way up over 37 years. He had 2 years in vocational training, but had bosses that had 4 year degrees on the wall. But, they couldn’t design their way out of anything; they would bring stuff to him & he’d figure out how to make it work. He designed all the test fixtures for production and quality control. He was the plant’s ‘go-to’ guy for almost everything. Yet, he was let go, & his know-nothing boss was kept. He gets a certain evil satisfaction out of hearing about problems caused by his former boss. (Who wouldn’t?!?)
I relate all this because of what was mentioned in the OP, & touched on in comments. We can design buildings, highways, bridges, electronic gadgets, etc., all day long, but can we still BUILD them? People willing to use their hands, backs, & brains built this country—the nation is dotted with centuries-old structures, built with manual labor, before powered machines (I should post a picture of the Seven-Arch bridge, built of stone, by hand.) I fear we have become a nation of BUYERS, not BUILDERS.
I had an interesting experience when I was thirty years old. I hit a tennis ball for the first time. I had tried and tried before then and had given up on playing tennis. Yet I had always wanted to play. Suddenly something clicked one day, and I calmly saw the ball approaching my racket, and I easily swatted it back to the other side of the net. A life-changing moment. I suddenly realized that my own self-consciousness was my biggest enemy. Anxiety was the problem, not innate ability.
Years ago I taught intro computer science as an adjunct at a community college, and we had such a system, unofficially. Students could drop a class with full refund for the first two weeks. 30 – 40% of the new CS students would never make it, because they lacked the basic problem solving skills required to tackle the subject. The intro teachers knew to run a ‘wash out’ quiz focused on problem solving skills near the beginning of the second week, and call in those who didn’t come close and encourage them to drop the course. (This was back when retraining auto workers as computer programmers was sexy, and resulting in a lot of candidates without a hope. Not all: I sent one on to a four year school.)
Exactly. Yes. Maybe the student just needs a detour, the old-fashioned “prerequisite.”