EDM 613 MAC Week 2 Response to Peers @Tim

Tim said:

To be honest I was really being bored to tears with this weeks reading, Art of Possibility, until! I came to a paragraph the just rang out to me. In this paragraph the topic of grades is discussed. I always had a problem with grades as a way of measuring mastery of skills, I just didn’t know why. Well the authors of this book gave me the answer I was looking for, letter grades just compare student against student, and say very little about the actual work completed by the student.

Every student is different and learns at a different rate and in different ways. Taking into account these differences, why should they all be measured on the same scale. How do we resolve this situation? I really don’t know, but it is definitely something that should be studied.

Reading the paragraphs in this book relating to grades had really opened my eyes to something that has been bothering me for a long time. Wouldn’t it be great to get a giant gathering of educators together and have a massive brain storming session and see what we could come up with? Makes me really wonder about the possibilities……


Elizabeth Said:

Tim, in some regular classrooms where special needs kids are mainstreamed, modified grades are given. So, if a special need kid does half the problems or a pared down list, the teacher gives the student a grade based on that, not in relation to the class grading scale ( for example- if a child has 5 spelling words and gets 4 correct, it is still an 80%) where as other kids have 20 words and they have to get 18 to be same percentage. On grade cards, these grades are asterisked so that parents understand that the student has a modified grade. The only problem I have seen with this issue was at the High School level. One of my former students GPA was 3.9 and he graduated top 5. Now, we all now that student did not take Advanced classes or even had all the required classes, but because of his modified grades in his special education classes, it appeared that he was an above average student. I have struggled how to make this a more fair and understandable issue