Why the concept of a "good student" is just silly and wrong

[Kriminal99]

A lot of teachers talk about how much studying they expect students to do, or judge student behaviors and use that as justification for manipulating their grade. However the line of thinking behind this seems faulty.

Imagine you work in a business environment, and develop a system for dealing with a problem that seems to work pretty well. You become attached to this system and get warm fuzzies up your spine from operating it. You trust it so much, that you don't even bother to look at how effective and efficient it is at achieving your goals.

This is an inefficient behavior and directly applies to "being a good student". If a particular student doesn't need to study in order to get A's in their classes, it is simply silly and wrong for them to adhere to some teacher's standard of how much they should study.

Additionally, as a result of believing in this invalid reasoning teachers often implement ways of trying to fool students into believing the class is easier than it is, and then keeping that first unrepresentative grade as a significant portion of the student's final grade.

[freeztar]

Fwiw, I think it would be wise to define what you mean by "good student". Is it simply a one to one relation to amount of studying? That said...

In my experience, when teachers have commented on how much studying students can expect, or are expected, to do, they are speaking to the average. Some students will need to spend much more time studying while others will need to spend much less time studying.

It is possible for a teacher's perception of a student to affect the grades given. This can work out positively or negatively for the student. Should this be condoned? Well, that's a tricky question. In some cases, where a teacher dislikes a student for reasons unrelated to academics, then I think it is unfair and unprofessional. The same could be true for students receiving high marks unfairly because of favoritism.

Yet, there are instances where a student meets with the teacher frequently, studies very hard, and shows a high level of participation and enthusiasm yet still manages to not make passing grades. The teacher might decide to curve this student's grades based upon their knowledge of the student's enthusiasm and study habits. They might just decide that it is unfair to fail a student that is legitimately trying to learn.

In some cases, very intelligent and knowledgeable people will fail tests because they lock up during tests. Is it fair to fail these people, even though in a different setting they would ace any questions asked of them?

[modest]

Originally Posted by Kriminal99

A lot of teachers talk about how much studying they expect students to do, or judge student behaviors and use that as justification for manipulating their grade. However the line of thinking behind this seems faulty.

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

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by modest

...
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

it may not be common, but it happens. now mind you that i think kriminal simply failed yet another course (given the context of his long membership & postings here@Hypog) and is making yet another thread making it out someones's fault other than his own, but i do have an anecdote of my own in support of his assertion.

so i'm taking a speech course and we have a group assignment to rank order a list of 20 or so items by importance for survival if stranded on the Moon. for the teacher, there was as set of "right" answers. well, among the items was a compass, which i pointed out to my group would not work magnetically, but could be used to determine latitude by sighting Sun and reading angle from dial. so the group was convinced, but the teacher comes over to listen in and when he hears my explanation he gets huffy, says it' wrong, and do it over, and when i persisted to argue that scientifically he was wrong, he made it clear that if i continued that he would fail me. (you shoulda' seen the looks on the other folks' faces, which you might have except they were all turned away. ) well, that's that, he's the teacher, no whining, so i shut my mouth, and ended up with an A.

so, good student is what you make of it. life is bloody full of compromise, or to quote a current vulgar phrase, life's a bitch. follow that by the antidote current vulgar phrase; suck it up.

[lemit]

Turtle,

I think you might be right about the reason this thread was started. There's just a little too much detail.

Before I write anything else, I should say that I've always supported open, unstructured education, so I think I'm going to give myself something to argue against:

Any school that thinks it's giving a student all the information he or she will ever need is suffering from delusions of grandeur. The best thing a school can teach is how to work hard, how to learn, and how to socialize. The old and tired axiom about giving someone a fish as opposed to teaching someone how to fish should apply, since we are, after all, talking about teaching.

So, teaching should again be a position of trust, requiring judgment based on intangibles. Then, the student who does poorly on the test but has shown a strong work ethic and an interest in learning should be given a better grade than the student that I was, someone who picked up miscellaneous information out of the air, had that damnable ability to write, and could guess at an answer somewhat reliably when that student had no idea what the real answer was. Traditional testing and evaluation confuse education with Trivial Pursuit. We can do better.

And I haven't had a grade to complain about for 40 years.

--lemit

[Erasmus00]

I look at this from the teacher side- I have been involved in teaching college level physics courses. For me, the grade is an evaluation- it signifies a student has attained some level of mastery over course work, and to be honest, I don't care how hard working a student is, how often they come talk to me, etc. I care about the quality of their work.

An A grade signifies the student has mastered the concepts taught, and can apply them to novel problems. B is usually the student can work through some problems, but is largely limited to problem types they have seen before. They are familiar with the material, but cannot apply it in new ways, etc. If a student never studies, but can do any problem I throw at them, why should I fail them? If a student works their tail off but can't do any problems, why should I pass them?

As far as I'm concerned, a good physics student is a student who ends the course capable of doing physics.

[Kriminal99]

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

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.

[Kriminal99]

Originally Posted by Turtle

it may not be common, but it happens. now mind you that i think kriminal simply failed yet another course (given the context of his long membership & postings here@Hypog) and is making yet another thread making it out someones's fault other than his own, but i do have an anecdote of my own in support of his assertion.

so i'm taking a speech course and we have a group assignment to rank order a list of 20 or so items by importance for survival if stranded on the Moon. for the teacher, there was as set of "right" answers. well, among the items was a compass, which i pointed out to my group would not work magnetically, but could be used to determine latitude by sighting Sun and reading angle from dial. so the group was convinced, but the teacher comes over to listen in and when he hears my explanation he gets huffy, says it' wrong, and do it over, and when i persisted to argue that scientifically he was wrong, he made it clear that if i continued that he would fail me. (you shoulda' seen the looks on the other folks' faces, which you might have except they were all turned away. ) well, that's that, he's the teacher, no whining, so i shut my mouth, and ended up with an A.

so, good student is what you make of it. life is bloody full of compromise, or to quote a current vulgar phrase, life's a bitch. follow that by the antidote current vulgar phrase; suck it up.

I have a near perfect GPA I don't know what you think you are talking about. It's true when I was an undergrad I had lower scores because when teachers pulled stuff like this I didn't do anything about it or drop the course... so my records looked like A .. D ... A ... C basically just depending on the emotional maturity level of the professor in the class.

One professor even went so far as to throw a temper tantrum at me and threaten to hit me when I pointed out a mistake in his grading. At this point when I come across emotionally immature professors I will do everything from getting in their face about it and pointing out how they are mistaken, to threatening to grade appeal if they are being really obstinate to dropping the class if I feel it's not worth the effort.

The claim that professors are just above things like that is just absurd. At my university, one professor was recently found out to be a child molester and another killed a few people and ran off into the woods and committed suicide. Stuff like this happened SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE of the ignorant attitude that professors could do no wrong because they were "respected" or whatever other nonsense wording people use to justify tribal morality. They didn't even bother to run a simple background check because that would be like accusing a PHD of being a child molester...

Nobody puts you in a position like that to dictate the truth or place you above scrutiny. They put you there because they think you are capable of discovering the truth and because they think you will stand up to scrutiny. If you can't do these things, you can't point to the fact that you are a professor to overcome it... that is circular reasoning.

Your problem is you have no guts and you are too impressionable. He is only the teacher because he was thought to be knowledgeable and fair. If he makes a mistake like that and refuses to own up to it, the right thing to do is go over his head and teach him not to do it again not give in. Thanks to your weakness, he will continue to behave similarly with other students spreading ignorance and immaturity.

[Kriminal99]

Originally Posted by Erasmus00

I look at this from the teacher side- I have been involved in teaching college level physics courses. For me, the grade is an evaluation- it signifies a student has attained some level of mastery over course work, and to be honest, I don't care how hard working a student is, how often they come talk to me, etc. I care about the quality of their work.

An A grade signifies the student has mastered the concepts taught, and can apply them to novel problems. B is usually the student can work through some problems, but is largely limited to problem types they have seen before. They are familiar with the material, but cannot apply it in new ways, etc. If a student never studies, but can do any problem I throw at them, why should I fail them? If a student works their tail off but can't do any problems, why should I pass them?

As far as I'm concerned, a good physics student is a student who ends the course capable of doing physics.

QFT

What's more, if a student can do the problems with little studying (and there is a reason for this that doesn't consist of the student just being naturally better than everyone else...) why should they go through the motions of trying just as hard as someone else might need to. It's unnatural, its a waste of time and effort, and it makes no sense.

That is like a farmer cultivating twice as much food as needed and letting it rot.

Although... I think it is easier to be objective in physics. The answer is just a number that's just right or wrong... or close because of the number of digits used in calculations. All you could do is curve, I don't see how you could rearrange the curve. You could not have any novel problems at not let the A students stand out I guess.

[alexander]

I am, or was (i guess i am technically a college drop out, for the time being) in no way the best student. I only mentally attended a class to the level of my interest in it. If i really didn't care, grade certainly reflected it, on the other hand if i was interested and learned something i actually wanted to learn, then the grade reflected that too (ofcourse there are always exceptions, high school physics for example, it took me a whole quarter to understand the grading system, and i dropped to a lower level, and then when i finally figured out the system, i got straight A's for the rest of the year, and wanted to go back up to AP) Anyhow, i digress.

So to the reason why i dropped out, upon my endless analysis of this world, it came to my attention that for a while, my school provided no usable knowledge or information. Upon my study of the time spent in school, or doing school work, it occurred to me that i was learning more outside of school opting out of school work then i did in school, in class or out, doing school work and supposedly "learning". That coupled with the time it took to do school work, coupled with the time it took to make the money to pay for school work, all together did not seem to make the school an investment of interest. And really, its not that i dont like school, i love learning, but if learning is something they tell you you are supposed to do and you dont actually end up doing, then school ends up influencing you in some other direction. IMHO, as opposed to giving you knowledge, school educates you more on how to learn, and introduces you to topics you have perhaps not looked at that might be of interest to you, so you learn more about them. That said, i think the tried and true method of teaching needs to change. Directly giving knowledge works till you are out of high school, higher education needs to adapt, to not give kids knowledge, but to give them direction to self-improve through doing their own studying to solve a problem at hand. I mean there should still be a level of giving new knowledge, a more concise and down to the point level of "Here are facts, this is how we got the facts, now research them and apply them to solve this problem". It's kind of like math teaching goes, but it should be the case for the other subjects as well. Also the schools classes often dont debate anything. But if there is one thing that was taught by Hypo is that it's the debate, the need to prove a point that pushes one to investigate and learn new things to be able to use them in the current debates. And that is something that is missing from the schools curriculum, having even a small debate, every 2 classes would raise the interest, outline those who clearly show knowledge in the subject, and perhaps even teach teachers a thing or two.

I'll end with a story of a slightly different kind. I have argued with teachers and proven them wrong, i have opted out and saved my breat at other times (all depending on situation), but this is not a story of an argument, but a story of a respected and respectful teachers that are interested in the subject they teach. I had a history teacher in college, and i mean he basically taught a class of people that really didn't care much for the subject, except for a few people, an older gent and a lady and myself. We used to stay after sometimes and discuss the topic of that day, present new facts, sometimes correct the teacher's notes, sometimes ours. He seemed to be pretty receptive to teaching the right facts. He briefly touched on the 18th century europe, mentioned he got a great book on Peter I of Russia and mentioned some things he read out of the book. We then had to write some sort of an essay on the topics, to which i opted to teach the teacher and wrote a fairly lengthy essay on Peterist Russia, Peter himself as the person, calling on well-known historians with little known facts. We had a lengthy discussion about the essay and my teacher actually really appreciated the information he learned from my essay and the research that went behind it. So, i learned and researched, he learned, mutual plus, and we were both happy to learn. That is how school should work, passionate teachers presenting a subject well, create passionate students that will sometimes go beyone the course agenda to learn about something they were shown why they want to learn about a particular matter...