Christine Pelton, a biology instructor in Piper, Kansas, is not a hero in my opinion. As I understand the story, this teacher has a little more than one hundred and forty biology students. It was stated in the article that, “Nearly one fifth of her biology students had plagiarized...” Twenty eight of her students plagiarized on a final exam. This teacher quit after the school board did not allow her to fail these twenty eight students. Is this a wake up call to society about the low tolerance of cheating? Is resigning appropriate for the situation in place? Is cheating acceptable to a certain extent or should there be a zero tolerance? Thinking through this article, I have two major thoughts. First, in the students’ minds, product is more …show more content…
The schooling system is broken when it comes to whether students think learning the content or receiving a grade is more important. I was talking to my father about this article, and he brought up an advanced English class at the college he attended. The students who were eligible to take this class were the most talented and the highest in their class. The professor was presented with a problem. He did not feel settled grading these talented students in his class according to the bell curve college classes commonly use. He did not feel right handing out Cs and Bs to these A students. Instead of grading the students on the curve, the professor gave every kid in the class an A, and turned in their final grades on the first day. He expected all of the students to show interest, give maximal effort, and contribute to the class. He understood that they were all talented enough to receive an A. The professor eliminated any stress a grade would bring to these students, and he allowed them to fully focus on learning. I understand that a teacher cannot do that in a high school biology class, but there are ways to prevent cheating and engage learning. This biology teacher may not feel right in allowing these twenty eight kids to pass, but I believe that she should feel obligated in her heart to stay and prevent this from happening again. School is about learning about oneself and growing as a person; school is not about earning a grade and learning biology. This teacher needs to help kids learn about what is the right thing to do before twenty eight of them
In his article “College Students Need to Toughen Up, Quit Their Grade Whining”, Robert Schlesingner addresses the emerging issue of grade inflation, and more specifically, the greater sense of entitlement that seems to prevail in the modern scholastic realm. Mr. Schlesingner begins his address by presenting his background and what standards and expectations were common during his time through both lower-level education and college. During his time [time in what?], a grade of C represented “adequate” or average work, B correlated with “an above average job”, and obtaining an A required “spectacular” performance by the student. [more concise] However, as cited by Mr. Schlesingner, an investigation by the University of California-Irvine seems to indicate that the values of each letter grade has changed, at least in the mind of the modern student with more students now believing that A’s and B’s should be more easily obtained and that the amount of effort put into a task should be considered when grading. Next, Mr. Schlesingner presents his opinions on this topic of grade inflation and the proper influence of student effort on grade. To conclude,
Michael Thomsen argues against the A-F grading system in his essay “The Case Against Grades.” Thomsen even goes as far to say that the A-F grading system is to blame for the difficulty in reforming American education (1). He supports his conclusion with a few thought-provoking studies and statistics, but overall there are holes in his argument and he does not offer a realistic alternative. Thus, I disagree with Thomsen’s conclusion as I think that the A-F grading system is currently the best method for the United States to use.
Have you ever had a bad experience with grades? Do grades create a preference for the easiest task? In " The Case Against Grades" Alfie Kohn argues why grades should be completely erased out of the system. I agree with him, when he says that "grades create a preference for the easiest possible task" and " grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking". I disagree with him, when he says that " Grades tend to diminish students interest in whatever they're learning".
Furthermore, the author points out that grades are not improving because students and education are improving but rather because parents and students are demanding grades to be adjusted according to what they think it is needed not what it is deserved. “Students and parents are demanding -- and getting -- what they think of as their money's worth” (Staples, 216). Students are not receiving the grade they truly deserve based on their work but what the parents and the students themselves
The article “Gimme an A (I Insist!) by Abigail Sullivan Moore is a commentary on grade inflation in high schools. The author discusses how high school averages are on the rise while SAT scores are staying the same. Moore goes into detail about how teachers are giving students better grades in an attempt to spare their feelings. She then covers how this negatively affects our students. The major points that will be covered in this paper are how relevant this article is and how the problem discussed is affecting our students.
In “Making the Grade” by Kurt Wiesenfeld and “In Praise of the F Word” by Mary Sherry, both authors establish an issue with the grading system in schools. Somewhere along the line, love for knowledge died and a generation of indolent students were born. They both however, point the finger of blame in different directions. Wiesenfeld claims society has molded the student to believe he/she can simply charm their way to good grades, whereas Sherry holds complete liability in the pampering of high school teachers.
In his article "Making the Grade," Kurt Wiesenfeld presents a problem regarding the ethical value of grades in modern society. A physics professor, Wiesenfeld opens the article by making the "rookie error" of being in his "office the day after final grades were posted." (paragraph 1) Several students then attempt to influence him to change their grades for the class. What concerns Wiesenfeld is that many of his more recent students consider a grade to be a negotiable commodity rather than accept the grade as an accurate representation of efforts and performance and how much they learned. The author indicates that part of this
In his essay, he states, “the reality is that teacher grading practices can be wildly uneven across schools—and even within them. For instance, one math teacher might be an extraordinarily lenient grader, while another might be brutally hard: Getting an A means something very different” (Churchill). While he has a point in that teachers grade different, why should there be any reason to punish the student for this? These tests do affect a student’s grades tremendously and sometimes determine whether a student graduates or not. For example, at my school, district-issued semester exams count for twenty percent of our grade. It seems irrational to hold a student accountable for an instructor’s inadequate teaching or grading practices, things that student has no control
Schools and college professors, who give you a good grade for excellent productivity on assignments, allow students to perform poorly, but still benefit relative to a person with an A. Two articles that observe grade inflation, find the rising problems of grade inflation, and finding solutions for grade inflation. Stuart Rojstaczer, an author from Grade Inflation Gone Wild, is a professor of geophysics at Duke university, and created gradeinflation.com in regards for his concern about grade inflation. On the other hand, Phil Primack is a journalist and teacher at Tufts University, and published in the “Boston Globe” Doesn’t Anybody Get a C Anymore? While college students, who work with little effort and still attain easy A’s by working poorly on assignments and exams, Primack and Rojstaczer, develop a firm connection towards grade inflation and the solution that can regain control over real education.
For those who have citizenship in America, who are living in “the land of the free and the home of the brave” as the American national anthem suggests, education for all has consequently become a fundamental column in our country. Yet the individuals receiving their education within a school setting have developed different thought processes on what is the mark of a successful student. Are these students successful only if their grade is a B or higher? If the grade does not take preeminence then what does in regard to education? The article “Student Expectation Seen as Causing Grade Disputes”, Specifically points out a common dispute among college students regarding grades. Colleges around the country have been having to handle a substantial amount of perturbed students complaining that they received a considerably
A school system that is entirely based on test scores rather than critical thinking, life skills, and knowledge shouldn’t be considered a school system at all. Being a teacher in America means being forced to follow scripted test prep courses, being criticized by a considerable amount of politicians, blamed for each student whose grades don’t reach unattainable standards, and receiving a mere $39,000 salary compared to a plumber’s salary of $49,140. It’s really no wonder why it is extremely rare to come across a genuinely sophisticated teacher who has a passion for their job and doesn’t continually complain about how they didn’t know what to do with their degree and just needed a steady job. The effect that these futile teachers have on high school students is profound. “I don’t think there was ever a test I didn’t cheat on,” says Winter Park
In “The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation,” Alfie Kohn sets out to determine if grade inflation is indeed fact or fiction. The opening quotes provided by two professors at Harvard University separated by over century has most definitely peaked my interest. It had me questioning whether or not these professors are holding our education system to a “Harvard” standard or is their actually truth to their statements; that feigned students are indeed submitting “sham work” (Bergmann, 260). Kohn goes onto indicate that: “To say that grades are not merely rising but inflated—and that they are consequently ‘less accurate’ now, as the American Academy’s report puts it-is to postulate the existence of an objectively correct evaluation of what a student (or essay) deserves” (Bergmann, 263). To theorize grade-inflation is to question the judgment and teaching of all the previous and future educators of America. It also raises the question of why has not there any concert data to support this claim. Why is our educational system delaying this investigation since this concern has been around for years? Especially, now that grade inflation is starting to gain more momentum.
Christine M. Korsgaard argues in the article ‘PERSONHOOD, ANIMALS, AND THE LAW’ that non-human animals, although may not be categorized as ‘persons’, should be regarded as ends in themselves and the subjects of rights against human treatment.
One example demonstrating that grades lead to limited learning of material, can be illustrated by a study that was conducted of students, some of whom were graded. One group of students was told about being graded and the other group was not. The group who was “told they’d be graded on how well they learned a social studies lesson had more trouble understanding the main point of the text than did students who were told that no grades would be involved” (Kohn). This experiment shows how students concerned getting a good grade detracts from the students overall understanding. In my experience, students have so much homework, activities, and pressure to excel that it becomes challenging to learn topics outside of those being assigned. For example, in order to complete history worksheets, students do not always read the passages to find the answers, but rather skim the passage for keywords
Schools are and will forever be learning institutions, but learning isn’t limited to purely comprehension and fact memorization that can be found in books. Furthermore, knowledge is an unquantifiable metric and similarly, grades and scores have a multitude of factors that could affect the results. This is not to devalue good academic standing but rather raising a question of “Do we want to develop students holistically or