Science Forums 2

[redneckscholar]

The education system is totally unstructured and overspecialized in my opinion.

I believe that a factor of uncertainty regarding what is required of them plays a major part in how student's grades eventually play out, and that this is shameful. If a student knows they must do exactly X in order to get a certain grade, then they can simply decide what grade they want and do the associated work. If it REALLY proves to be too time consuming for them, possibly because of their natural limitations, then they will simply decide on a lower grade or give up on the material.

In reality what happens is that perfectly capable students end up doing poorly because it is not clear what is expected of them until their grade is already significantly handicapped.

It is my belief that the efficiency of the education system greatly suffers for this reason.

The problem is that it is not an easy task to create such a clear path that a student can see to the grade of their choice. Many naive approaches do not really work, for instance, the idea that you can simply tell them to do a certain amount of reading is invalid. One student may need to read something 10 times, and another may learn that same material just from listening to the teacher's lecture.

Another problem is that irrelevant factors end up playing a part in the grading in many cases where there is no objective and precise means of grading. This occurs because a question on a test does not logically necessitate the class of answers that is accepted. It is especially a problem in courses where there is little or no objective standard such as English or literature courses.

Because the path varies from student to student, it seems like the only way to give a student such a picture is to have some way that their earlier grades do not provide a huge part in their final grades, thus giving them time to adjust their strategy to the teacher's style. Each teacher's testing methods are different and different material requires different testing methods as well and so a new training period is required when either of these things change. The testing methods must be objective and precise so that the student knows exactly why they lose any points and that it represents a valid deficiency in their knowledge (and consequently their study habits).