Education: No Zero Grading Policy Opinions

[EvilRoy]

Canada. Went to a private school in Ontario.

We grade "as is" when handed in incomplete, rarely a flat zero although you could still fail if you didn't answer enough correct. Assignments can be marked down for late, but they're generally generous as long as it's not a repeat habit. Not sure about any other school though.

I fail to see how this is any different from our current system aside from "you don't can insta-failed if late".

That's pretty similar to public where I went, Alberta Canada.

I would have to ask, but I believe it was school policy to allow teachers to assign their own system of reducing grades for late, with the understanding that without a doctors note or some other sort of exception zeros would be awarded if the final deadline was missed. That is to say, teachers could set up whatever system they wanted for due dates/zero grades but they had to keep to it unless someone higher up the line accepted an excuse.

Far as the questions go:

2: I don't really have an opinion. I see positives and negatives that I'll go into for 3 and 4, but when it comes down to it, education is absolutely not my field of expertise. I taught a couple labs as part of post secondary, but uni is not the same as primary education.

3. The problem that I see is a sort of cause effect issue. We see confidence and self esteem in the most successful people, but the question is: does success follow confidence and self esteem, or do self esteem and confidence follow success. Refusing to assign zeros seems to assume the latter, while I myself would favour the former.

Certainly giving a student a good basis for confidence may help them take the first steps, but it doesn't take long to see through the veil of kind words to the underlying thoughts of the teacher. Underachieving students will figure out quickly enough how they measure up to their peers and how their teachers view their progress. Having the reports on their shortcomings sugarcoated could breed resentment of the teachers, and cause a rift to develop.

4. As I mentioned in 3, I think having a concrete basis of self esteem to build off of is a definite positive. Growing up I had what you would call confidence issues, and from memory they stemmed not from being afraid of failure, but from the knowledge that if people thought nothing of me to begin with, I couldn't disappoint them. Actually starting from a non-zero position may have motivated me to try to succeed if only to avoid the penalties (disappointment) of failure.

 

[Nomad]

I wish people would stop basing their arguments on their own personal experience. Your experiences with the school system, and the way you personally turned out, is irrelevant. Anecdotal evidence is not evidence at all. Bring me (sourced) statistics, or bring me qualitative studies on the mechanisms of learning, and then we'll talk. If your statement is not generalizable or transferrable, it has no value as a description of reality.

Noone ever says "No, people can't go to the moon - I've never done it, and neither has any of my friends!".

Err...I'm Swedish and not Norwegian so maybe thing sare different with our west ene...I mean neighbours, but we do give 0's, or F:s, or IG (though we've remvoed that system since it was so shit).

The thing is, we don't give grades at all until students are atleast 14/15 because honestly, grades don't matter before that. I think that's honestly the real big difference, I have no clue where you've got the "no 0's" things from. We simply don't grade people at an early age, other than "good job" or "work on your spelling/grammar/whatever".

What he means is that you don't automatically get a failing grade (IG) for not handing in your assignment on time. You get to hand it in at a later date. You can still get a failing grade on the actual assignment when you do hand it in.

Uh... I think you've got that backwards, chief. No, we actually don't care if the majority of people, after having gone through the public education system, can do algebra, trigonometry, recite Shakespeare, or even understand high school level physics (although it would be great if they could, and would mean they were better-educated more well-rounded people).

But the fact is, I think for the majority of people we really are just trying to drill discipline into them and make sure they can follow orders.


Anyway I definitely think that's a terrible system because it in no way prepares a student for life after grade school. Your university professor isn't going to give a shit that you didn't get around to finishing something yet and you will fail the course. Your boss isn't going to give a shit that you just didn't manage to complete a report on time and your ass is going to get fired.

What's interesting is that you can actually check what we want to get out of the school system by examining the curriculum. It says exactly what's supposed to be taught, in plain text no less. You don't actually have to guess. What is also interesting is that different countries have different priorities regarding what they want to get out of the school system - heck, it even varies over time within the country. The current Swedish curriculum, for instance, basically wants to teach people the exact opposite of following orders. This also tends to be the case in knowledge-based economies, because they tend to be organized around professional bureaucracies.

It also turns out that what your university professor demands from you varies depending on the context in which your professor is acting - what country are you in? What does your curriculum or syllabus say? What subject are you studying? What level are you studying at? What kind of assignment are you expected to carry out? Who is the professor as a person?

Most of these points can also be applied with regards to your boss. Here there is also the added factor of "your ass" not necessarily getting fired even if you do displease your boss in some manner. A lot of countries have labour laws and regulations that make it very hard to fire people without proper cause. Proper cause, in this case, would generally be repeated and gross negligence of your job assignments. Handing in a report late is, in most cases, not going to cut it in this context. Handing in reports late systematically across an extended period of time would merit discussions about your performance, warnings and only in extreme cases where you do not adjust your behaviour, being fired.

 

[FoolKiller]

No Zero Grading Policy is essentially an education grading system that does not give zeroes for not handing in assignments. Instead, they are given multiple opportunities to hand in completed schoolwork, and are graded upon knowledge of the subject.

As I understand, Nordic European countries (like Norway) have been using this systems with great success. They are world leaders when it comes to teaching children.

On the opposite side, there's America's standard for giving zeroes and F's for unfinished work. They aren't even close to the top when it comes to education in First-World countries.

Canada is in the middle of a transition between the two. Some public school divisions are embracing the no zero policy, while others are firm in not changing. Canada is neither at the top or bottom, but in between.

So I have a few questions for you:
1. What did you grow up with? (And where?)
2. What do you think of the no zero policy?
3. What do you think is wrong with the policy?
and 4. What do you think is right with the policy?

I think you're comparing apples to eating live animals.

You seem to draw the conclusion that the no-zero policy is good because a country with a good education system has it and a country with a bad education system doesn't. Correlation doesn't imply causation.

1. I grew up with zeros.
2. Its ludicrous.
3. The point of the homework is not just to evaluate knowledge but to teach structure. What if a teacher decided that they would only return tests and work after the exam? As long as its done who cares when its done. Life has deadlines. This is a life skill that children need to learn. Yes, content knowledge in some cases is important but overall doing the work on time is a skill that must be mastered. And universities don't give a shit about you. All that matters is whether or not the work is done.
4. The focus on learning the skill.

 

[Yan007]

I'm a teacher and I absolutely refuse to give zeroes for a few reasons:

1- It teaches nothing. Grades themselves are very often meaningless in the greater scheme of things when we are talking education. There is only so much I can evaluate in a test and while the quantitative measures matter, the most important variables are not measurable and much more nuanced.

Giving a zero to a student teaches him that it is what he is. I guess you could argue that it would wake up some students and make them work harder the next time, but the great majority of students who ever get zeroes or really low grades are always put down and are well aware that they aren't very good at all. You ever saw a student who only got a single zero? Kids who get them always get a lot of them so it doesn't help.

2- The failure to produce only has a single outcome: You are doomed to produce. Sure, in the workplace your boss may fire you for screwing up, but this lesson does not apply everywhere, including school. Your failure to feed yourself only forces you to work harder to find food else you die. When my students fail to produce quality work (that I would grade B- or higher), they have to scrap the entire thing and do it over again until they get it right. As a teacher, I can't fire my students so let's just assume your boss decided to keep you after you screwed up. What are you expected to do? You're expected to get it right this time.

3- Grades are not a form of payment. Grades are merely a measurement of what a student has done. Using grades as a form of payment is damaging to a student's view of education and stifles creativity. Research has shown time and time again that if you grade an assignment, students are extremely likely to pick the easiest subject to tackle in order to maximize their gains (grades), thus devaluing the real gains (knowledge, experience) they should have gotten from it.

4- Grades are not a form of justice. Grades should never be used as a tool for "justice" where good students have good grades and bad students have zeroes. My job as a teacher is to take every kid and help him become as good as possible and develop his skills. Giving zeroes to a kid does not help him and will not help society. I'd rather have a few dumb kids who enjoyed themselves and liked learning a few things in school work minimum wage jobs because they picked up a few essential skills than having the same kids who were put down all the time and learned nothing get into gangs, drugs or simply on welfare for life.

 

[Raikas]

You really need to listen to what I'm saying.

Really? That's the where you want to go with this?

We clearly come from different backgrounds with different experiences of different educational systems, so I could say the same to you, or we could just assume that some things are going to take clarification since we're not looking at the issue from the same angle.

I'm not sure what relevance this point has- I never said any particular career track is bad. My only point is that you shouldn't force people into a track based on their test results at 14. Why is this so controversial?

If a student fails their first semester in an advanced/academic level class and has to drop down to a general/applied level equivalent, they're still having their future determined by test scores at 14. Sure, you can let them keep taking the class until they pass, but potentially years could pass and they won't have earned their high school diploma, so I don't see that as being a real service to them.

And yes, there will always be exceptions like your physicist friend (I gather his studies were either arts-focused or lower track?), but there are just as many people as a guy I went to high school with whose parents pressured the school to let him stay in the higher level classes, and he took 7 years to finish high school (for which the standard was 5 years for the university-bound), was kicked out of one university for not being able to graduate within 8 years and is now (in his 30s) on the verge of failing out of another one.

As to why it's controversial, personally I don't see why someone who wasn't willing to study for a standardized or subject specific test at 14 is suddenly going to be motivated to study for the equivalent class a few months later. I don't disagree with your point about motivated students learning more, but why are they going to be more motivated just within a few months? Why wouldn't the promise of "this test determines your future" be a huge motivator?

 

[Ushiromiya Battler]

No Zero Grading Policy is essentially an education grading system that does not give zeroes for not handing in assignments. Instead, they are given multiple opportunities to hand in completed schoolwork, and are graded upon knowledge of the subject.

As I understand, Nordic European countries (like Norway) have been using this systems with great success. They are world leaders when it comes to teaching children.

I have no idea where you got that info, but it's wrong.
What do have is a system where we wont be graded til we've started lower secondary school(13-16).
Then until we get to the university we have a grading system from 1-6, where 1 is failed.
In the university it's the standard A,B,C,D,F.

I prefer this system actually.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

I'm from Texas and we had zeroes and such given out. Personally, the system is relatively silly as the process of grading homework, in general, misses the point completely.

Homework is where you're supposed to learn the facts or skills the class requires. Most classes in K-12 attach tremendous weight to these grades so that homework accounts for the bulk of your score. By contrast, when you transition to a college/university environment, most classes assign as little weight to homework as possible! My average math class, for example, only had the homework accounting for 5 - 10% of the total grade and even that fraction was only kept to encourage people to do the work. In my view, homework is the time to experiment and actually learn - to attach a huge weight to the learning process is foolish. It is easy enough to determine if someone has actually learned something with any of a variety of tests at a later date. Attaching tremendous importance (by grade) to the learning work misses the point of such work entirely.

There are exceptions of course and my tirade mostly applies to math or science courses. The various research projects in history, essays and the rest that represent the bulk of the applied work in other field like literature or art certainly should carry significant weight.

 

[Piorn]

Can't really judge these two cases, but there recently was a case here in germany, where, in a private school that didn't use any tests or grades, the entire class failed the final nationally standardized test.
It was the first time in recorded history that an entire class failed.
Hilarious! Who would have thought not forcing teenagers to learn would actually mean they don't learn?!

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

I appreciate the "inclusivity" of the outlined policy but personally don't like it. Students who fail to meet expectations, fail to meet deadlines and fail to meet standards shouldn't be rewarded the same as those that do. It undermines the students who perform by telling them "You can do less work and be equally rewarded". Here in the UK our standards have really fallen and universities in particular are getting caught out by it. Students are taught to pass exams and the amount of very high grades is skewed.

With many As being awarded now (on pass marks that change frequently and are generally never explained) separating the top students, for example, is much more challenging. Many students are making it to university and are unprepared for the demands and lack in ability. LSE (London School of Economics) is one of the country's best universities and they extended *all* of their courses from 3 to 4 years because standards in education have slipped and students now aren't as prepared. "Grade inflation" is a genuine problem as more students get higher marks, meaning it's harder to separate the actual top 10% from the large number of higher achievers.

The UK at least has made one massive change to the way students are assessed, in the form of "Controlled Assessments". Coursework has been scrapped for many subjects, mostly due to plagiarism being rife since the advent of the Internet. CAs take place during lesson time and are supervised by the teacher under kinda exam conditions and students have to do the work in these periods only. Many do prepare ahead of time what they intend to do during the period, but within the CA lesson they have only what they're allowed. Subjects have a given time limit (for example 10 hours) for a controlled assessment over the course of a term and students are graded at the end of it.

Ultimately, assessment and grading, unpleasant though they might be, is probably the most effective way to sort poor, average and top students from each other. Ability distribution falls along a bell curve and top universities are only interested in the top 10% of students. There needs to be a way to separate them while still encouraging and inspiring every student across all abilities to do their best.

 

[Fdzzaigl]

I just think the school system's goal should be for students to learn, both from their work and their mistakes making that work.

Overall Scandinavian countries seem to understand better that students don't know everything yet when they start an education and offer them more freedom and decision power over what they do.

In my case (Belgium), at college, we have a system with singular deadlines as well. Theoretical courses are given under the form of big fat books that you have to learn by hearth, with exams in January and July and resits in August.

The biggest problem with this system is that feedback only really happens after you've done something "right" or "wrong". When you hand in a paper or interview assignment and come for feedback, the teachers usually only focus on what you've done wrong, which gives quite a negative atmosphere. If you fail an important assignment or exam, you're headed for a resit straight away, without a chance to make up for it.

In my opinion, a teacher / professor should give more frequent feedback and shouldn't only focus on what went wrong. It isn't enough to just say: "This and this is bad, so you fail your course, come again in August", instead the feedback should include: "This is wrong, but you did this well. Try to focus more on these strong points, you've got a chance to make up for it." Teaching should be about giving direction too.

 

[Candidus]

The policy of giving 0's and F's for uncompleted work just exacerbates the most prolific first world education method's biggest inherent problem: it teaches you to forget.

That is to say, it teaches you to remember things only for a specific length of time, after which, retention of knowledge collapses. It does this by condensing a great deal of required learning into a short duration, then capping that time with examinations- very threatening occasions of huge consequence for the career inclined.

I liken this to gradually filling a sealed container with both water and a sprinkling of baking soda and vinegar. Water is desirable knowledge and the rest is the stress caused by our model of teaching.

Once the cap comes off, what happens? Vinegar isn't the only thing you're going to lose.

I have first hand experience of this. I did four A-levels. If I had been able to, I'd literally have had them expunged a year later- just for the sake of being honest with potential employers. I remembered so little about what I'd studied that it was virtually as though I hadn't gone to college; and I know I'm not the only one.

So with regards to getting 0's and Fs for coursework... What does lacing the time between your first term and final exams with further threats of demerit do to the state of the game above? Nothing to improve it, I say.

I'm all for the no zero policy, but I think more fundamental reforms are necessary in the long run. The abolition of exams entire would be a good start.

Edit: Corrected my analogy. Not sure why I thought of sodium, that's a bit too extreme.

 

[Yan007]

-snip-

Idle questions for you, even though I think I already know the answers:

1) USA or not?
2) How many students do you have in your classroom at a time?
3) What subject do you teach?
4) Do you actually teach in a public school, or are you a private school teacher?
5) What do you do if a student refuses to do their work? Do you still refuse to give a zero for it?
6) How many of your students will outright refuse to do work?

Because those things sort of make a huge difference in your experience with the public education system.

I have classes of 30+ on a regular basis, and of those, if half of the students refuse to do an assignment (which is quite common) and they won't even copy down the problems that I do with them during the class period for partial credit (which is also common) then I'm sorry, but I don't feel any remorse in giving them a zero for that. If we can't even get them to copy verbatim what we write on the board so they can at least pretend they did something, then why exactly do they deserve to earn points for that? So their feelings don't get hurt? No, that's garbage, you did nothing so you earn nothing. You're welcome to think that you're doing your students a favor but really you're giving your students an unrealistic glimpse of the world, and contributing to the problem in this country where students feel they can pass without putting forth any genuine effort of their own. When a student somehow gets to college despite that he can only read at a fourth grade level, and this continues on a massive scale across the country, it begs the question of why his grade 5-12 teachers haven't been fired because they're clearly giving him grades that didn't reflect his actual level of skill. And that might be nice for their self-esteem but it doesn't do them a damn lick of good in terms of a knowledge base.

Since you are a professional teacher I won't hold any punches. I sincerely believe from what I just read that you are the professional equivalent of a bully, most probably incompetent and at best unaware of the advances made in the field of education in the past 30 years. Teachers like you are exactly why teachers and researchers in our field do not get the respect they deserve.

I worked in rich and poor schools, public and private. I worked with elite students and others who had been incarcerated for murder. I worked in Canada, America and China so far. May I make a suggestion? Drop the course book in a bin and make your own material from scratch. Make sure to involve your students with interesting (and dare I say... fun?) activities. Also, spend some time getting to know them as people and spend the time required to solve your problems, even if it means staying after school ended.

I won't waste my breath on a professional who isn't even aware of basic concepts in education. Suffice it to say though, that if you expect your students to complete a task, you ought to give them one that's worth completing. You probably think giving homework will make your students better (I suggest you do the readings on this matter, who benefits from homework is a much smaller group than is commonly believed).

 

[Raikas]

We clearly come from different backgrounds with different experiences of different educational systems, so I could say the same to you,

My background being a professional teacher with experience including program improvement, curriculum design, and university entrance testing. If I sound irritated, it's because I've laid out an opinion based on years of experience and study, the latter obtained at great personal expense because I love teaching and I want to be the best possible teacher I can for my students. And people are just blatantly annoying key parts of my argument for no good reason.

I wasn't demanding to see your credentials, I was suggesting that perhaps our "angles" were based on cultural expectations or looking at it from a primary vs. secondary angle. But maybe that was unclear (or maybe I should be irritated and just say that you're clearly not listening to me).

I taught primary school in India, I'm current working in corporate training and instructional design in Canada. I moved quite a bit as a child and went to school in Belgium, Canada and South Africa. In all of those places the vast majority of the teachers want to be the best possible teacher for their students - and yet in every country there are huge differences in program and curriculum design. I've read a decent amount of research into theories of education, and looking at them as a whole, the only thing I see is that there's no universal method that will work for every learner.

Personally, I think there are many methods that can work. And I didn't think your comment about giving students flexibility was controversial, I thought that your absolute condemnation of the test idea was too bit strong. My position is that there is no one right answer when it comes to education. Fair enough if you disagree, but that doesn't mean I'm not listening.

 

[Yan007]

Aha! Here we go again!

My last position before my current one was in a high-need school. This school collected students from all over the province who had killed someone, tried to kill someone, or were involved with drugs and prostitution. The purpose of this elementary(!) school was to help the students socialize and re-integrate society so they don't live their entire life as murderers, muggers, drug addicts and so on. My work days began at 4 and ended at 8-9 most of the time. I used the weekends to visit my students' families and help them by teaching simple things like how to manage their budgets so they can afford to have a phone line at home and sometimes more than a single meal a day. So yes, I'm very well aware that families are failing the children in need.

Of course no classroom is alike. If you were really aware of research done in the field (by practitioners or in collaboration with them), you'd realize that the vast majority of researchers in education decry the involvement of the political in the field because it stifles our work, tries to obtain absolute truths that could be applied everywhere and moves policies from a qualitative perspective to a quantitative one. Oddly enough, you seem to have no problem with the systematic grading of students and use of standardized tests. Tests designed by the same researchers of the testing and evaluation industry and policy makers who never stepped into a classroom as teachers.

Also, "I also find this repeated assertion throughout your post that I am a bad educator rather amusing. Mainly because whenever I align my grades with the students' performance on state tests, they tend to correlate rather strongly. More strongly than many of my peers who are engaged in many of the "advances" that you speak of in the field, in fact."

The fact that your grades correlate so well and theirs not is no indicator that you are a good teacher or them bad ones. It signifies that you are good at teaching to the test and attach a high value to quantitative measurements. Also, if I were you I'd sit down with the teachers whose grades do not correlate well with standardized tests: maybe they understood how to teach without teaching to the test? I said you are a bad teacher because regardless of how you really are in real life, you appear here to be a professional bully, not an educator. It is the students' fault they don't understand because they don't do their homework. Then it is the families fault the students don't do their homework and don't understand. Why isn't it your fault for not involving at least more than 50% of your class? You seriously need to step back and look at your practice and how to help the 50% of your classroom who doesn't care. If you truly believe students would be successful if only they would do their "10 minutes homework", what does that make of the value of the time spent in your class? You mean to tell me that you sincerely think 10 minutes outside your class will help them understand a concept you, the teacher, could not teach them in 50 minutes with all your skills?

Furthermore, " I teach mathematics, a subject which revolves around obtaining a set of skills (in math's case, a set of formulas and methods) and then applying them through critical thinking....neither of which they can attain without any actual practice. See, you don't learn how to do something if you never actually practice it, and homework is an opportunity for them to practice it without the teacher stepping them through the problem. Crazy, isn't it?"

I find your assumption that being able to produce results using a formula is an indicator of understanding is flawed. While it shows the student understood how to operate the formula, it by no means indicates the student understood how to internalize or generalize this knowledge so he would be able to use it on his own when needed later in life. As a maths teacher, I assume you are already aware of this difference because of your bit about critical thinking, although from the way your grading system correlates with a system that does not value critical thinking I have to say I find this ironic.

Also, let's do a quick overview of what happens with your homework. The good students obviously have no problem with it. Has the homework helped them if they had already understood the concepts? The bad students, and from what I can tell from your previous post they comprise at least 50% of your student population, will either not bother with it or will not be able to do it. The reason they are bad students is they don't understand in the first place in the classroom - thinking they will understand on their own something they have no interest in is utopian. I guess your homework can help the students in the middle. Maybe you should target these students with optional homework with added incentives?

 

[Billy D Williams]

Well considering this would have bumped my GPA from a 2.9 to a 4.0 ya, that makes sense.