SAT scores drop, even as number of students getting A's rises

Grades should be based upon mastery of a well defined set of material or knowledge. Period. The operative word here is mastery.

I don’t want an Engineer or a cashier for that matter who calculates the correct answer 75% of the time.

;)

A great deal of the grade inflation is caused by parents who are trying to get their child accepted into good private schools who are then placing incredible pressure on High School for “good” grades to get there child into a good
college.

I believe the solution is for admissions to be based upon an entrance exam that is not watered down.

I pointed out that, with the fixed scale, it was possible for everyone to get an A. Without exception, they still always opted for the curve.

Whether this was a bad choice or not depends on the nature of the class. I had a statistics class in university (the hardcore, calculus-based one, not the dumbed-down one for business majors) with a professor who was obviously a brilliant mathematician but was an absolutely horrible teacher. We started out with, maybe, fifteen people in the class and by the end only had perhaps six, two of whom I believe failed the class, and the only reason the rest of passed was because he graded on a curve. Often, the highest score on a given test would be around 40%.

The guy was such a horrible teacher that I went to his office hours out of desperation a couple of times (normally I was very good at all math and never had to seek extra help) and I ended up more confused about the subject after talking to him than I was before.

Even the textbook he chose was horrible. I will never forget a particular problem that I had trouble with. I was determined to read and re-read the chapter until I got it, and the section that explained the problem read like this:

Begin the problem with terms X,Y,Z
Set the terms up thusly [insert ridiculously complicated equation here]
"and after much tedious calculation, we arrive at this answer:"

The part in quotes was the literal text of the chapter, and the "much tedious calculation" part was the part I couldn't figure out. That was the moment when I realized I would learn nothing from that class and went strictly into survival mode. Of course, I felt much more secure in my survival when I realized that everyone else was as bad off or worse than me, and, as I said, he graded on a curve. It's like the old saying: "I don't have to outrun the bear - I just have to outrun you."

The slippage begins far before high school. In the quest to promote “higher thinking skills” and technology, the elementary school where I worked punished teachers for teaching vocabulary, spelling and drilling math skills. Traditional teachers were written up and chased off in the name of progress until the scores dropped a couple of years later. Too late to put the horse back in the barn at that point—the talent had left the building.

At the time our principal was pushing the district’s agenda, we knew these kids would suffer when it came time for the SAT. Students need to recognize poor grammar and incorrect spelling and have a vast vocabulary as part of the verbal portion of the SAT. I was a private tutor for a 5th grader who could not add 8+3 without using her fingers and she saw no purpose in memorizing her basic math facts. I kid you not!

And to top it off, this school was in an affluent area and its district was sought after. The parents bought in to the 21st century classroom bs. Literally a tragedy.

see, your explanation seems to illustrate my point well.

These are elite kids, and their AP and SAT scores get them into college. Apparently because their grades are known to be meaningless in context, and the colleges are smart enough to ignore them.

But the fact appears to be that all these kids would be getting “A” grades if they were in classrooms with the “normal” group of kids you find at a typical school And that would be true even if they were being taught the same really hard stuff you suggest they were getting taught.

You are suggesting that the “curve” makes them learn better. I guess it is possible, in the sense that the “curve” sets up a competition where they don’t just have to know stuff, but they have to know it better than the person sitting next to them.

But if the grades are anything that is going to be looked at as indicative of some “absolute” standard, it is stupid.

Because that kid sitting there with the “A” in that class, he could have learned EXACTLY the same stuff, and gotten EXACTLY the same grades on the tests as he did, but gotten a “C” grade, if there just happened to be 5 other people in the class that were even smarter than he was.

So his grade “A” or “C” is meaningless to determine what he knows — it only tells me how he compared to other people in that class.

And if every other class has their own teaching, their own standards, their own curves, the grades are meaningless, they don’t compare this one “C” student in this one class with a “B” student in another class teaching the same subject even.

But as you say, these grades are meant to be ignored. Which is fine then, if you are giving out grades just for a competitive thing, and nobody is going to care what they are, I guess it works. You could do the same with gold stars though.

And it certainly wouldn’t work if you did it for every classroom in every public school, unless “work” means “make grades meaningless so we have to rely on standardized tests”

Which interestingly seems to be the end result of your discussed approach, because these students you talk about apparently are judged not on any grades they get, but on their ACT and SAT tests. Which we could do for ALL students, and then “grade inflation” would be meaningless, just like the grades you mention above on a curve are meaningless.

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