Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site ut-sally.UUCP
Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!seismo!ut-sally!riddle
From: riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: Grades -- do they help or hurt??
Message-ID: <710@ut-sally.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 2-Jan-84 12:47:45 EST
Article-I.D.: ut-sally.710
Posted: Mon Jan  2 12:47:45 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 4-Jan-84 02:36:33 EST
References: <387@psuvax.UUCP>
Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas
Lines: 98

I found this summary of different grading schemes very interesting.  I
would like to add an additional argument against scheme #6, "Base EVERY-
THING on a final exam":  this is extremely prejudicial to people who, for
one reason or another, know the material but perform poorly on tests.  Some
students suffer from what is known as "test anxiety", and have severe
emotional and even physical reactions to test-taking which prevent them
from doing their best on exams.  (I had a mild case of this in high school,
and I know what a vicious circle it can be:  I was a straight A student,
but whenever I had to write an in-class essay, my hands would shake so much
that I couldn't even read my own handwriting.  Soon the fear of the fear
itself was enough to trigger the reaction.)  Other students may not be made
particularly nervous about taking exams, but still don't do as well when
expected to shoot from the hip on an exam as they would on a paper, a
project or a take-home.  As anyone who has prepped for an SAT or a GRE can
tell you, test-taking is itself a skill, and grading based entirely on
exams gives unfair advantage to those who may not have an outstanding
knowledge of the material, but who have mastered the art of taking tests.


Last year I had a bit of exposure to a very different grading scheme when I
spent two semesters as an exchange student in Munich.  The German university
system seems bizarre from the American point of view.  First of all, there
is really nothing which corresponds to the American undergraduate program at
German universities:  students are expected to attend graduate-style seminars,
do research, and listen to lectures on the intricacies of their professors'
own research from day one.  This is partly justified by the fact that German
students are a year older than Americans when they begin at the university, and
German universities accept only the cream of the school system (trade schools
and apprenticeships are the usual route to many careers which call for a
university degree in the U.S.).  Nevertheless, I found that many German
students I talk to spent their first two years or more just trying to figure
out their place in the chaos around them before they could begin to study
seriously.

In Germany, there is no such thing as failing a course.  Students are required
every semester to sign up for more courses than it is humanly possible to
attend (the equivalent, I would guess, of 25 or 30 semester-hours at an
American university).  Out of those, they pick a few classes to go to
regularly, the number varying a great deal according to how serious the
students are.  Many of the courses are simply lectures, for which no credit is
available.  Others are seminars, in which the students may do anything from 0%
to 100% of the talking, depending on how the professor wants to organize
things.  In some departments, seminars are chummy little sessions in which
students and professors wrangle over problems of mutual interest, but I once
tried to attend an introductory philosophy "seminar" for which over 100 people
showed up!  Attendance typically drops over the course of a semester, until a
lecture which was packed during the first week may have only half a dozen
students at the end.

At some point, students decide which classes they want to try for a grade in.
The number varies a great deal here, too, but among my acquaintances, two or
three successfully completed courses in a semester was considered a hefty
load.  There is no minimum requirement, although a student who goes several
semesters without making any progress toward a degree may be kicked out.
Getting a grade in a course usually involves writing a single, long paper,
sometimes an exam, and more rarely may require that the student gave one of
the lectures in a seminar earlier in the semester.  Homework, quizzes and
smaller projects are extremely rare (although I am told they are common in
"lab" courses, which are of secondary importance to the courses described
here and which are rather sparsely offered by American standards).  Thus
grades are based almost entirely on a single spurt of activity at the end of
the semester.

Not only that, but the real measure of a student's performance is delayed
even longer:  grades don't matter as much as comprehensive exams, which
come up once every few years in a student's career.  There are three major
sets of exams: a qualifying exam after two or three years, an exam for the
master's degree a couple of years later, and a doctoral exam several years
after that.  Each student must have a major and two minors through the
master's level, and a major and a minor for the doctorate.  Latin is still
a requirement at all levels, although students may successfully absolve it
early on.  And, of course, a thesis or a dissertation is also required for
a degree.

The near total lack of pressure most of the time, punctuated by deadlines when
all the knowledge the student is supposed to have been accumulating suddenly
comes due, has exactly the effect you would expect:  procrastination followed
by furious activity and/or despair.  Suicide is a serious problem among
German students; I lived in a highrise dorm in Munich from which, regular as
clockwork, students would fling themselves at exam time each semester.  Some
students learn to handle it, to pace themselves so that they are ready when
deadlines arrive without having to panic.  Such students are rather shocked
if they come to the U.S. and see the day in, day out little pressures of
our undergraduate student life.  They don't like being treated like children
and told exactly when and how they must learn a given set of material, and
I understand their point.  Still, I wonder about the others, those who sink
rather than swim;  are their losses worth it?  As someone who has serious
procrastination problems himself, I am glad to have grown up in a university
system which provided me with enough structure to get things done.

I hope that you'll forgive my rambling (and any inaccuracies of detail which
the Germans out there may be able to correct).  My point, I suppose, is that
there are models out there for the "all the eggs in one basket" school of
grading, and that I don't particularly like their results.
----
Prentiss Riddle
("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.")
{ihnp4,seismo,ctvax}!ut-sally!riddle