Comment by ckemere
18 days ago
I visited colleagues in the U.K. and France a couple of weeks ago over spring break. Definitely interesting to compare grading approaches with ours here in the US. Both still have end of the semester in class exams which count for a large majority of the grade.
Things I really appreciated: in the U.K. model - the professors job is not to teach; instead they provide reading material/assignments via which the student will learn by themselves. In the French model grades are out of 20. I asked what fraction of their students get a 20/20 in a class every year, and they looked at me confused - “Students never get a 20/20. A good grade is a 16/20!”.
In France, tuition is essentially free. I think expecting every student to finish in 4 years is a huge loss compared to my experience at big state school in the late 90’s where people routinely did 5 or 6 years. I think we can widespread meaningful learning, accurate grades, and fixed duration programs, but not all 3!
> Students never get a 20/20. A good grade is a 16/20!
This right here I think is a huge factor. Pretty much every top student in my college classes and highschool were essentially just testbots optimizing for maxing out quiz and exams grades. They barely even grasped the material, they just pestered the teachers into telling the class what types of questions would be on the exams, memorized the formulas, and bitched incessantly when it wasn't 1:1 with what they were given. Professors also have to be super careful about what is on the exam because top grade being a 16/20 means the entire class is failing. The whole education system needs to be reworked to punish this kind of optimization that doesn't even reward knowing the material.
Exactly my experience in Belgium where we have a similar grade system. Teachers would give a list of questions in advance, students would just memorize the answers and repeat them at the exam. Most of them had absolutely zero understanding of the material.
Meanwhile, students who need to actually understand what they are learning (I can't memorize like others) before passing a test often end up with worse grades but a better understanding.
Absolutely broken system.
An old teacher's saying from Turkey (where grades were out of 10 back then): 10 is for god, 9 is for me, the best student gets an 8.