Shaikha Al Mazmi
G00058149
Formal critique of “ The Farce Called Grading”
In the essay The Farce Called Grading, Aurthur E. Lean, mentions the grading system. As we all know grades have a huge part of the students enrolled in any school/university life. In the essay Lean states the mistakes and unfairness and extremely subjective in the system. Lean mentions a point that the graders are inconsistent and the same paper can have different grades depending on the person who’s correcting it. He claims that the reason grading systems are evident is because it pushes the student to study hard. Moreover, in his essay he gives out examples where grading varies. I, personally disagree that grading systems should be banned. If grading system is not evident then how will a student enroll in a university?
Lets take a moment and this about what will happen if there were no grading system? How can school and universities accept eligible students that fit the program they offer if they cant see what they posses. There are two main points of argument Lean talks about. First, that there is an inconsistency from the graders mostly teachers and it varies from a grader to a grader. Second, he mentions that the grading is unfair and it punishes the less intelligent ones. Lean provides examples and quotations to back up his statements. “A sustained effort should be made to throw out false inducements to learning. In one way or another most of these refer to our obsession with grades. A few
In Brent Staples “Why Colleges Shower Their Students With A’s”, he claims that professors in colleges in the 1990’s are changing their grading on students assignments so much where that they are just passing out good grades when students don’t even deserve them. Colleges have started to change the whole grading system over the years just to make it look like the students are doing better. For example, “In some cases, campuswide averages have crept up from a C just 10 years ago to B-plus today” (Staples 1). There are many reasons as to why they day this.
He believes that professors are softening the grades. Phil Primack also is aware of the many excuses professors give for grade inflation, he even comes up with a reason. He sates, "colleges are unwilling to challenge and possibly offend students and their hovering, tuition- paying parents with some grade tough love. And without institutional backing, individual faculty members simply yield to whining students."
Nowadays our entire future strictly depends on our GPA's and getting into college and graduate school has gotten much more competitive. Because of this, students are scared to receive anything less than an A as it could make a huge impact on one's future. Also, most students generally think they deserve a better grade than what was originally earned by them. Students in college take grading policies very seriously because they are the ones paying for their education. True, this is an important matter because, like I said, when I pay for my education then I should receive a grade that I know I earned.
Imagine blowing up a balloon, with every exhale of breath the balloon gets bigger. Similar to a balloon, with every year that passes grades inflate. In “Grade Inflation Gone Wild” by Stuart Rojstaczer, he discusses how the grading system has changed over the years. Rojstaczer’s overall purpose is to increase awareness of grade inflation and persuade his audience to take action. He argues that “changes in grading have had a profound influence on college life and learning” (2).
Farber believes that the grades create phony motivation and students only want to please the teachers. According to Farber, students only retain the material until they are graded on it. No longer having a grading system would leave students having no drive in school. Schools would no longer have a basic form of ranking the students and see how well they are doing. Students would no longer want to see the point in striving to be the best when everyone is ranked the same.
Elona Kalaja Professor Eleni Saltourides ENG 101 Critical Analysis Paper February 21, 2018 Flunking vs Students In the article, “In Praise of the F Word” Mary Sherry argues that flunking students is a method that has been effective in the past and is still effective todays day, and anyone needs to see is as a positive teaching tool. Sherry indicates that flunking students is a method that motivates students to study more and to be more responsible for what is their responsibility. Students challenge is not to get an A or B, but to succeed or to fail.
In Kurt Wiesenfeld’s article “Making the Grade”, he address the issue that students want a higher grade than they deserve. He goes on to prove this be by giving examples of previous students that he has had and what can happen when students get the grades that they want and not what they deserve. In Wiesenfeld’s article he states that about ten percent of students that take his class do not care about their grades until final grades are over. “You might groan and moan, but you accepted it as the outcome of your efforts or lack thereof,” Wiesenfeld stated.
In the text, it is about why colleges and/or professors seem to give out A’s to students. It could also cause the value of grades inflate. Staples explains what seems to be the problem as well as showing what could be a solution. Staples wants reader to understand colleges are starting to be devalued. He goes on to emphasize why the colleges/professors feel forced to give in and give students A’s, why it will not change.
Paragraphs 25 and 26 illustrate grade inflation at highly respected universities and what strategies are utilized to combat it. Without statistics and hard facts, Shepard’s argument would have been viewed as isolated issues instead of an epidemic. These hard facts provided a foundation for every claim made, and solidified the logicality of the professors’ statements. Her argument became reasonable because of the statistics provided, and proved grade inflation is a nation-wide problem in need of
Cassie Davis, a former student at Highland High School in Nunn, Colarado, worked herself strenuously in order to achieve academic excellence. She took every AP and Honors class she could, and in her senior year, while the others students began to relax as the result of their college applications being finished, she hit the books and continued to take classes at the University of Northern Colorado. However, she was punished for her diligence, as her school’s grading system discounted her college credits, and she lost her valedictorian status to a kid who had not taken difficult college courses. She found that she had been cheated, punished for choosing to challenge herself and learn more.
Essay One: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin The extent that grades have on hindering the ability to learn is discussed in Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, in which Shevek a college professor is troubled by the importance placed on the grading system as a mark of understanding of a subject at the university he recently started teaching at. One of the first points to be made is that understanding what you were taught isn’t the point of schools anymore, it’s about memorizing the information for a test or assignment. Second, is that achieving high marks in school doesn’t always equate intelligence or lack of it . Lastly, it’s not how well one is able to memorize what they are taught, but how they’re able to take that information, process and apply it to real world problems that shows the extent of one’s true education.
In this case, progress and goals can be set from grades to reflect and analyze how someone is doing as a student in the school system no matter where they attend that uses grades. By all means, grades will always be required and used without them school systems would fail and would probably cause more laws lifting the restrictions of school making it okay to remove students from a school as long as they have basic knowledge and skills to work a full time job five days a week instead of a gradeless pointless schooling system that requires five days a week. Therefore, progress and goals are main key points of grades in today’s world for every student and to ask, how would you change or remove grades for your future child or relative attending school and
They lack the indication of students’ knowledge as they are only a depiction of their effort. Absences, laziness, and disengagements are just a few of the factors of why grades are a poor representation of students’ intellectual capacity. While others may argue that grades motivate them, it is not genuinely correct since grades encourage