Quote:
Originally Posted by modest
Not since grade school has my grade ever been a reflection of more than assignments and test and quiz scores. Actually, that's not exactly true, participation was a part of my grade in "speech" my first year at K-State. Come to think of it, at K-State you had an option to get credit for a course by testing out of it. If you started a class and found it easy and didn't see the point in going they had a test you could take as a pass/fail credit.
I don't think manipulating grades based on behavior is really very common (at least, in my experience). I suppose other schools and other teachers might be different.
~modest
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Yeah... I wasn't talking about when there was a class that on the syllabus said "5% participation". That is a subjective grading criteria and it is kind of silly when they put it on there. It is on the syllabus sometimes in college though.
What was being discussed was something a bit more subtle. It involves things like a logically invalid question... that is were the form of the question doesn't necessitate the class of answers the teacher expects. Or just an open ended question to begin with. Then they have some latitude to "interpret". Then if they decide they don't like a student they straw man all of his answers or nit pick in ways that don't even make sense.
In the case of the poorly formed questions, sometimes there is a class of answers the form necessitates and answering that way gives a perfect opportunity for them to do this.
There are a ton of other subtle techniques teachers can use to do this. It is wrong to think that just because they are not obvious that they are not there.
However there is one way that is just blatantly obvious and powerful that is unequal distribution of partial credit - especially in classes where the test questions were unexpectedly hard or poorly formed and the whole class does poorly.
