Felton

Many of the better schools have started to discover that their students were being penalized wrt college admissions and merit awards by their more rigorous grading. Have to address that first. When it comes to multiple shots at high grades, keep in mind that America is fairly unique in the way students are assessed on work they have only just learnt. It makes it far mor difficult to set a high standard if students are not given time to master the material. This is one of the reasons England went back to all grades being determined by external end of course exams at the end of 10th and 12th grade (year 11 & 13).

Here in Seattle (where my kids are in school), it's clear the kids understand grading policy incentives (multiple shots at high grades, etc.) and respond to them w/ reduced effort + evidence about the negative effects of low standards is mounting as you'll hear from Mike. 2/2

It's solo @MichaelPetrilli on @educationgadfly and he's on a rant about grade inflation. I'm with him based on gut and evidence! 1/2 fordhaminstitute.org/national/resou…

I suspect that 1992 was when grading really started changing to increasingly prioritize homework. That was the year the AAUW released a report arguing that girls were being shortchanged in school and standardized tests, placing greater emphasis on homework grades was a well known way to favor girls. While this achieved its goal, a possible secondary effect is that if homework is seen more as assessment than learning, this could affect how much of it is assigned.

Students in the US are doing a lot less homework than they used to

Speaking to students who have mixed online courses in with traditional high school courses (allowed by our state), they really miss the shared experience of working on a topic at the same time as other students. It is certainly doable for a motivated student to race ahead in a single subject (usually to address prerequisite issues) but not seeing much beyond that.

@3RenChengHu @_MathAcademy_ I agree this seems plausible to lots of people, but it seems to fall apart. We don’t have any good examples at scale. It seems to matter that the teacher actually teaches everyone at the same pace. That seems to be a key feature of the “technology” of the class.

This thread, and the ensuing kerfuffle, prompted me to sign up for @_MathAcademy_ to review high school and college math the next day. In less than 9 months, on top of a full-time job, I've relearned high school math, three semesters of calculus, linear algebra, discrete math, statistics, combinatorics, and intro to proofs, covering significantly more material than was covered when I took these classes at Georgia Tech ~25 years ago, even all those chapters at the back of the book that your teacher tells you not to worry about. With a time investment on the order of 500 hours, I now know significantly more math than I did when I graduated, after several years of using the "superior technology" of the class. @justinskycak wrote a whole book about why this works better than traditional classes, but in my opinion the thing that made the biggest difference was skipping the lecture. I never got much out of lectures, and did all my learning from the book, so lectures were basically dead time for me. Giving a text explanation and jumping straight into exercises is a huge time-saver. A while back I mentioned to @eduleadership that my experience was very different from his, and he conceded that the real issue was just that he had other demands on his time, and wasn't consistently working on it. This highlights what I think is the only real advantage that traditional classes have, which is accountability. You have to do homework and study for tests, or you get bad grades, and maybe your teacher calls your parents. But in terms of actual pedagogy, Math Academy's system is by far the superior technology. I couldn't have covered half as much material in two semesters of traditional classes.

A mistake to look to AI for a solution. The big problem is that American students are being spammed with large numbers of assessments, several times that of other countries which also use continuous assessment. Deadly combination of high stress and artificially inflated workload relative to outcomes.

@hstaker Hopefully. Would be a terrific development, especially bc we’re falling very short at the moment

The rise of AI will change many things. What schools teach kids should not be one of them.

It's really bad. I asked ChatGPT how many assessments per course continuous assessment systems (not pure EOC exam systems) outside the US typically have and to compare it to the US. Its answer: Number of assessments per course in continuous assessment systems: Outside USA 3–6 USA 10–20+ (often more in K–12) Being foreign educated with American born kids, I was surprised how artificially inflated the workload was, American kids have to work harder to reach the same level as their international counterparts.

One parent wrote: "My child is drowning in the quantity of assignments that lack quality. He needs a third of the busy work and three times the actual time to just think." This parent diagnosed the problem better than most education consultants. The child is not behind. The child is buried under volume mistaken for rigor.

@MatRyanELATeach @rpondiscio @esanzi I am in favor of exams, but if high school diplomas are treated as being equivalent between states and Massachusetts sets a higher standard than everyone else, then their students are unfairly penalized.

@rpondiscio @esanzi Yes. And the state’s teachers union spent millions of dollars to lower the bar.

The word “beyond” is misleading here. It implies more is required to graduate. In this instance, it means “less.” The bar has been lowered in Massachusetts, not raised.

The flip side of the anti-exam trend has been the spamming of students with large numbers of out of class assignments. This becomes unmanageable quickly which is one of the main sources of downward pressure on standards and increasing the pressure to cheat. Some perspective from ChatGPT (of course): Number of assessments per course in continuous assessment systems: Outside USA 3–6 USA 10–20+ (often more in K–12) Check with any foreign educators, most would argue that the above numbers represent a massive systemic failure more serious than students cheating.

I imagine this is hard to report on but the massive amount of AI-fueled cheating high school, college and grad students are currently engaged in seems like an underreported story We are going to end up with a huge percentage of students who basically wasted everyone’s time

What annoys me about Reeves is that he went through a system where his grades came from: exams at the end of 10th grade (O levels), exams at the end of 12 grade (A levels) and end of degree exams at Oxford (seriously they still do that). He is critical of his son's lack of diligence with his graded homework but never mentions the fact that graded homework was never anything he had to deal with (sure the British could be mean to kids who did not do their homework, but it never counted towards anything).

Kind of hilarious that I've been pointing out for five or more years that boys are doing fine, that Richard Reeves is full of shit, and been yelled at for ignoring boys special pain. Now lots of people are finally announcing that boys are fine but note they aren't saying what follows from this, which is: RICHARD REEVES IS FULL OF SHIT.

Most kids, but boys especially, perform better in systems where all or most transcript grades come from external exams and teachers only grade for feedback. Americans are just so opposed to the concept, but for those of us who went through systems like that it enabled us to reach a higher standard with less effort. Watching my kids being pecked to death by a myriad of busywork assessments quickly explained why American kids struggle to reach the same level as some of their foreign counterparts.

The crisis in boys’ education can be seen everywhere except in proctored, standardized tests

@marcportermagee @CharlesOCasey No. My observation is that in systems with mixed assessment types (America), girls underperform slightly in exams. In exam dominant systems (UK) they don't. Basically, all these busywork assignments are causing girls to misdirect their effort.

@CharlesOCasey But did they learn more?

“Whereas girls earned higher grades in all courses, they did only marginally better on an achievement test and worse on an IQ test.” — Angela Duckworth & Martin E P Seligman

@marcportermagee Link: standard.co.uk/news/politics/…

@marcportermagee During the pandemic, the UK switched temporarily from almost all grades coming from exams to teacher assessed grades. Look at the trend in male and female grades during that period. In 2025, with everyone back to exams, boys beat girls in earning the top grades.

In France, students are given exams that are graded blind (not knowing which student took it) and exams graded by a teacher who knows who took the exam. The exams measure the same knowledge and abilities It turns out the boys are graded lower when the grader knows they are boys

A lot of harmful educational trends are partly a result of data like this. In order to give girls an edge, the SAT was deemphasized and grading in schools was changed to emphasize compliance, partly by increasing the importance of graded homework and reducing the role of traditional exams.

This data is a bit old (College Board appears to have stopped breaking the data out) but it gives you a sense of the challenge that math-intensive top colleges & majors have in securing a 50/50 gender ratio Twice as many men as women scored an 800 on the math section of the SAT

Unfortunately avoids the key question: How do we ensure that student grades are valid and reliable? This forces one to address what grades are really supposed to mean, do they represent effort, compliance, academic performance or pace of learning? Are grades relative to the class and school or relative to a broader standard? Many of our current issues are directly related to previous decisions made about grades.

There is far more focus on application in these courses. Student transcript grades generally come from up to about 50 assessments throughout the year, students are tested on topics almost as soon as they are taught it (all these grades count). These courses can be demanding but there is a limit to how academic you can make them without overloading the students. Of course, whether it is busywork or actually teaching students how to think like a scientist is in the eye of the beholder...

@eduleadership Yeah I figured that out...that seems even worse to me. Chemistry is so abstract that without the ability to understand what a name means making links is so hard. Formula literacy is one of the most important things students need.

As someone outside the US I have found this thread interesting, confusing and astonishing. Asking students to make connections but avoiding actually telling them some of the basic rules really makes them learn with one hand tied behind their back. Especially in chem where the rules are pretty simple and uniform.

A lot of effort needs to go into ensuring that grades are fair, part of that is ensuring that grades between teachers and schools are comparable. In the current system, "rigorous graders" are just ensuring that less capable students at other schools get the best college admissions and merit awards.

@Beanie0597 The world is global and competition ubiquitous. As long as merit scholarships exist and grade inflation can't be corrected unilaterally, parents might perceive one teacher's "standard" as an "obstacle." Inflation is the tide that lifts ALL BOATS; whether people accept it or not.

Keep in mind that in most educational systems, students get most/all their grades from end of course assessments. Grades earned during the course usually don't count towards anything. In the situation you describe, it would be better for the student to be given the option of European style end of course assessment instead of hacking the existing grade.

I have a student who transferred in halfway through the semester. They’ve shown up twice in two months and came in with a 23. Today, an administrator stopped by during my conference/planning period and strongly suggested I give this student a 60 so it’s recoverable next semester. I said I can’t ethically invent 37 points. Admin informed me that others have no problem doing so because it's in the student's best interest. Time to update the resume.

@esquiregee @teachthemx3 Australian states adopting American style continuous assessment was foolish. A lot of hassle for both teachers and students.

I teach in Australia and have this problem as well. When too many students were failing our Head of Department told us to make the assessment easier. When I failed more students than other teachers I was asked to explain myself when I knew other teachers were passing students simply because it’s less of a hassle. In moderation meetings when students handed in work late or didn’t adhere to marking criteria the group justified accepting their work AND passing them because it was in the students best interests. If we didn’t pass them then we were hindering their future pathways.

@roger_jgs404040 @tinasindwani @BryIsTheGuy @jliemandt Part of the issue is that colleges have increasingly being treating grades as comparable between schools. If teachers grade rigorously their students are less competitive against students from other schools.

Your high-end private school is lying to you - SAT edition. Your kid gets mostly A’s at the private school where you’ve paid $30k+ per year for a decade. Yet many high-income families end up with kids scoring below 1300. It hurts most because by the time you realize it, it’s too late to fix.

The problem is that assessment in colleges has changed so that students are basically being spammed by a large number of assignments. It was supposed to make college easier (somehow), but it quickly becomes unmanageable. Students push back by using AI and getting accommodations, lecturers have to lower standards otherwise too many students wouldn't cope.

Today's MUST READ: One of the biggest problems in schools right now is no one is empowered to ever hold the line on a standard. The result? "We have a two-speed student population."