OK, suppose you keep increasing the amount of material, and now the grades are 90-82. You do it more, and the grades are 80-72.
So depending on how much material you decided to cover, your students are either all A students, all “B” students, or all “C” students.
If you don’t get a 3.4 average, you pay more for car insurance. Think about THAT for a minute, like somehow GPA is an indicator of how well you drive, and apparently that works for the insurance companies even with grade inflation.
If we really care about ranking every student in the country based on what they have learned, the obvious solution is standardized tests. But is that a good idea?
Frankly, most of what we do as education seems stupid. Like why do we have tens of thousands of schools employing hundreds of thousands of teachers? Teaching is a skill, and someone is the best at it. And teaching is “presenting information”, and I can “present information” to one room of 20 people, or one room of 300 people, or two 150 million people using the internet.
So, why don’t we find the 100 best teachers for each field, have them teach once and record it, and re-use it every year (100 is because you can get different styles. Then you measure early on and determine the styles that work for each student, and push them into the class with the teacher that matches that style).
We then hire cheaper teachers who are good at answering questions and working one-on-one, and put them in each class to run the projector. Now everybody gets a FANTASTIC teacher, you still get one-on-one instruction, and we are all learning whatever this “same thing” is that we seem to want to teach and measure.
IMUS: "So what does that mean, exactly?"
CALLER: "It means I'm certified to teach kids in second grade."
IMUS: "They have a certification for that? I would think you're capable of teaching second grade once you've finished third grade."
LOL.