A picture of disarray

If student evaluation were a love affair between the public perception and actual learning it would be captured in this song by Dwight Yoakum

What would you think of a graduate who regularly scored a 40% for every subject all year for 10 years?  Right.  Me, too.

What would you think of a student who regularly scored Fs or 50s in one school and then switched to a different school, for example a public school, then a charter school, and scored 70s and 80s or Cs and Bs?  Right.  Me, too.

What would you think of a student whose record showed an absentee rate of higher than 20% of a semester and a score of 80?  Right, me too.

What would you think of a student whose record showed an A in one class where the teacher scored 60% of students with an A and a B where the teacher scored only 15% of students with a A?  Right, me too.

This should lead to the question of what the value of a score is of any kind.  In the case of the first example, schools hide this 40% grade by limiting teachers to only giving 10% (usually) of grades of 69% or less, and then further limiting a teacher to giving no grades below 50.  That limits the grading field to 1/2 of the 0-100 range.  So, a 70 is really 35 (70% of 50 points in the range).  A failing grade of 60 or below is really a 30% or below.  The school just uses the numbers of the upper end of the range they cut in half.  50-100 is really 50 points.  Even though a student grade of 70 is given, it is not a percentage, or it would be half as much as a percentage.  So, the school only uses 50 points, but continues to use scores on papers and report cards of the upper numbering of the range 50-100, not the 1-50 that it really is.

In the case of the second example, a charter school is designed for students who are "not the norm" of students in the public schools.  It is still funded by the public taxes, thus is a "public" school, but it is for students who don't do well for one reason or another in the public schools.  So, the teachers count participation much more heavily than tests by memory.  An assignment turned in at a charter school might be turned back to the student as many times as it takes for the student to revise it until a passing grade is "earned."  There are other tricks as well to the more simplified system, such as assigning much smaller (but representative) portions of a text for reading or a smaller number of problems to solve.  Sometimes, only the first half of textbooks are used so that foundational knowledge is the only information given, not the next layer of complexity.

In the third example, problem students many times can do a "community service" project like picking up trash around campus or delivering equipment from field house to playing field for coaches in order to replace failing grades in an academic subject for days missed in school on which tests, quizzes, or homework were taken.  This last example happens all the time, but mostly at the end of semesters so "grades" can be raised.

One teacher has more participation grades than another, or one teacher places more value on a test grade while another teacher treats tests, homework, and classwork all the same.  One teacher teaches by projects, another by reading and writing essays.  One teacher relies on group grades, another on individual grades.  So, what does the average represent?  The answer differs by teacher, department, school, even by elective versus non-elective courses.

One can gather that evaluation is by no means even, fair, justified, objective, or leveled by grade.  The system is in great, great need of change because no one knows really what a passing and failing grade means.  When standards are set, schools and teachers know how to manipulate the systems and hide the reality of the amount of learning that is taking place.  Suffice it to say, that the term "mastery" is not happening as a whole in most educational institutions.  Student evaluation is in total disarray.  The ripple effects of disarray usually last a generation.  I shudder to think...