a modest proposal; watching the Wendling skate; Mao as manager

[sistawendy]

I just read a post by teacherla that reminded me of an idea I had a long time ago. Institutions like employers & higher education use grades to rank applicants, so why not cut to the chase, dodge the problem of grade inflation, and replace grades with ranks? In other words, Student Alice ranked ith in a given class of size n. What do you do if you're a teacher and you really have a tough time saying which one of students B and C deserve a better rank? Let the number of ranks m be less than or equal to n, but no less than a constant k>1, with no more than ceiling(n/m) students in each rank. The substitute for Alice's cumulative GPA? Cumulative rank: the product over each class c that Alice took of (i_c/m_c)^j_c where j_c is the number of credits in class c.

Tonight I went with m'boy to a school outing at Skate King in Bellevue. I didn't skate this time because I messed up my knee pretty badly last time, and, well, I just didn't wanna. You know what? It's hard to teach someone to skate verbally. Either my boy hasn't had nearly as much practice as the other kids in his class, or I just saw another example of the Aspie lack of coordination. Le sigh.

Maybe a year ago in the Economist, somebody wrote an only slightly tongue-in-cheek article about lessons in bad management from Chairman Mao. One of the lessons was drawn from the Great Leap Forward and the other hyped campaigns of the Mao years: substituting activity for progress. It's been much on my mind lately.

Comments

[alton-lust.livejournal.com]

Heavens, I wouldn't want to be ranked. Everyone would have to be better/worse than everyone else in the class. Demoralizing! At least with grades you can hide in the B-C crowd.

I loved skating. It was the stopping I never got the hang of.

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

The thing is, with grades you're already being ranked. There's just no way to avoid that because that's what the consumers of grades want. The real trouble with grades is that they're inaccurate and too easy to game. If it's made abundantly clear that such gaming will screw some classmates, I think there will be less of it.

[alton-lust.livejournal.com]

but with your way even if two kids do about the same one of them HAS to lose. I don't think that's good pressure for the kids or the teacher. (IMHO)
Instead of giving both kids a B.

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

Nu uh. That's why I said you could have m ranks where k≤m≤n, at the teacher's discretion. That's a little like what they do at Oxford where m=3, or at least it used to.

[alton-lust.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was a word problem and I did not grok what all the random letters were supposed to represent. It's alphabet soup to me! :)

you can guess my math rank!

[alton-lust.livejournal.com]

No wait, you said that the number of ranks could be equal or less than the number of students in the class. Which would mean that a class of 30 could have 30 ranks and teacher would have to make one student the loser.

And why is this better or worse than a GPA? I'm lost! Lost I tell you! Call LOCKE!

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

1) Grade inflation.
2) Grade grubbing by students and, these days, helicopter parents.