[tenaciousDaniel]

I admit I didn't read the entire conversation so I can't give an absolute opinion on it, but the following passage stuck out to me:

The problem with that, is that for the student who does well from the very beginning and gets A's on everything, their performance is fine, their average is an A, but for the student who struggles at the beginning and gets very low grades, D's and C's and even F's as they are in the process of learning, and even on early quizzes when they demonstrate mastery on the test and let's say they get an A on the test, because they have those earlier grades that ostensibly were for assignments and assessments that were on the path to learning, that they were supposed to learn from, and that they weren't even supposed to have learned everything yet, when we include those early scores, it pulls down the final grades, so it actually misrepresents the level of mastery that a student has ultimately demonstrated.

I tend to be skeptical of the term "equity" since I strongly disagree with a lot of the thinking that goes along with it, but I can empathize with the above statement. Anyone who works with data knows that using an average can product highly misleading numbers, so he's correct on that point. But also the idea that a student is supposed to be learning and improving, and that expecting A's across the board defeats that purpose, seems totally reasonable.

[avasylev]

From my own experience as student, having only final test matter, removes the motivation for doing work during the semester and only preping last month/weeks before the test. Which is not as good learning as putting work thru the whole semester. The earlier assignments/tests/projects are covering only chunks of materical, which students supposed to learn in incremetns as they progress thru semester. If student is getting Ds thru all incremental steps, they are not magically getting A at the final test.

[mpalmer]

So maybe there's an approach that weights earlier grades heavier if and only if the final exam grade falls short? E.g. if I get an A on the final, the C average I've maintained until that point matters less to my overall grade for the semester.

No system is perfect and there will be inadvertent and undesirable incentives to underperform one way or another, but I like the idea of a system that focuses on rewarding improvement.

[tenaciousDaniel]

That's a good point

[professoretc]

The authors of Grading for Equity spoke at my school and the experience was an interesting one: the Humanities faculty constantly tried to move the conversation toward the topics traditionally associated with "equity": systemic racism, how the California college system was designed to exclude everyone but white males, etc. But the authors basically ignored those attempts and gave what (I though) was some really good, practical advice for improving grading practices. A few of their suggestions (preferring partial credit to pass/fail, in particular) came across to me as being motivated more to increase scores than to make them more accurate, but by and large the whole talk was very good.

[boplicity]

It seems to me that the term "equity" triggers a lot of people. As someone who only sees it as a positive term, can you explain the skepticism around this? I understand that there are quite a lot of controversial things related to racial justice -- many of which do seem to be clearly controversial -- but I don't understand how this relates to the idea of equity. I would appreciate an explanation. (I'm not looking for a heated conversation here, just trying to understand different perspectives!)

[knubie]

The term "equity" is part of a suite of coded jargon that is often used by members of the so-called critical social justice movement. It is a loaded term that in most cases means "redistribution," or as a sort of antonym for "meritocracy."

For example if current grading practices are based on merit, then it is not equitable, as some students will naturally have higher grades than others. The solution, then, is to change the grading system so that good grades may be "redistributed" to lower performers and achieve a more "equal" outcome.

[boplicity]

> The solution, then, is to change the grading system so that good grades may be "redistributed" to lower performers

That's interesting, because this idea is so completely counter to what is proposed in the linked article. The article, if anything, is advocating for grades to be more focused on actual learning outcomes (performance) than is the current default. Many of the solutions proposed (such as getting rid of averaging over the entire course) have the goal of making it based more on merit, not less.

I think this gets to the difficulty, in terms of the overall discussion about race, equity, etc. There are some people who really abuse these terms, and others who simply don't know what they mean, or simply have very different ideas of what terms like this mean. (I see this from people with a variety of ideologies and backgrounds.)

My general conception of equity is about adjusting the system in order to remove unfair (and un-necessary) burdens on certain groups of people.

For example, equitable access to real food requires actual groceries available to people. I used to live in Park Slope, Brooklyn. There were literally five high quality grocery stores within a ten minute walk. Contrast that to other parts of the country where there is no easy access (at all) for people to buy fresh produce. That's not equitable.

Similar for grading: If you go into an algebra 101 class, and you do very badly in your first few weeks, simply because you have a lot to learn, you should still be able to get an 'A' in the class if you fully master the material. Otherwise, it's not equitable.

Equity specifically isn't (and shouldn't) refer to equality, IMO. It should be about removing the often arbitrary burdens that disadvantage some people, and the unfair advantages that only serve to put people in an advantaged position (such as providing better grades to people who already know the material in a class, when final learning outcomes are no better.)

[tenaciousDaniel]

There's another comment in this thread who attended a college talk by the authors of the article. They describe how the faculty attempted to direct the conversation towards discussing equity from the standpoint of redistribution, and the authors kept bringing the conversation back to the pragmatic points that were in the article.

So to me it seems we have a definitional issue with the word. Your interpretation of equity makes sense, and is not something I would be opposed to personally. But then there's the other interpretation (redistribution), which is shared by enough people that it's what I think of when I hear the term.

I don't think there's a right or wrong answer to "what equity means", and it's not a very interesting question anyways. What is interesting is how these two very different ideas became conflated, and how to move forward with the good idea and discard the bad idea.

[boplicity]

I think there are strong arguments to be made for redistribution, especially in order to enable equity, but I agree that redistribution and equity aren't the same thing.

I suspect they've become conflated in some circles because redistribution is seen as a real solution to lack of equity. Notably, this is literally baked into our system in terms of federal income tax, but many people argue that it doesn't go far enough. For example, redistribution of wealth could result in making childcare available to most people, eliminate childhood poverty, etc.

I don't think that in principal that 'redistribution' is controversial. Every contemporary society has some form of redistribution of wealth. However, many people see proposals around it as extreme. Though, whether the proposals are extreme may depend on one's knowledge of the consequences of action (and inaction), among other things.

This gets sticky, because a lot of social activists get hung up on this to the detriment of making real-progress on things that are not controversial when presented in the right way. I see a lot of calls for "ideological purity" and "absolute dedication to the cause". These calls, among activists, often become central to the conversation, as opposed to specific policy proposals that could make a real difference. Personally, I find it rather upsetting to see this happen, as I really do see the problems that are caused by lack of equity, structural racism, etc. But the way the dominant activist groups push for change seems to be too focused on ideology, as opposed to pragramatic solutions. I see the value in anger, which turns into dedication and motivation, I think that it sometimes goes way too far, and then becomes a form of unfortunate self-sabatoge. Anyways, I think I've digressed a bit.

[tenaciousDaniel]

If more activists took your approach, I'd be far less skeptical of them.

edit: I should add why I tend to be skeptical of them. It's not just about idealogical purity, it's that in order to truly make progress, you have to reduce the total number of problems in the world. It's very easy to spot a problem - anyone can do that. It's less easy, but still fairly easy, to recommend a fix for the problem. But what's very challenging is to find a fix that does not cause more problems than it solves. It's entirely possible to make things worse, and the best way to make sure that doesn't happen is to be dispassionate. But right now the trend is to lean into passion, and specifically, anger. As you said, anger can prompt action. But the problem with anger is that it's a fire that you can't control, especially when you're talking about millions of people.

[chalst]

Equity is a term of law that means all parties are treated fairly. Given that critical race theory originated among legal theorists, I would not be surprised to learn that they make heavy use of the concept.

Critical social justice is a portmanteau term coined by Pluckrose and Lindsay that is being heavily pushed by media sympathetic to their brand of culture war. Neither of them are idiots, but equally I don't find either of them to be highly intellectually honest. I recommend avoiding the term CSJ on HN except where we want to talk about Pluckrose, Lindsay and their entourage, since I think the term tends to undermine curious conversation.

[professoretc]

I heard a few faculty suggest that at my school and my reply is always, if I fail everyone, isn't that also equitable? (I.e., if "equity" in final grades is your single goal, adding 100 points to everyone's grade, and subtracting 100 points from everyone's grade will have the same effect.) And of course people react with horror and talk about how unfair that would be, revealing that deep down, they really do believe that grades should be tied to student performance.

[simiones]

But that's just it: this is a misunderstanding of what "equity" means, and it is certainly a misunderstanding of what the author/interviewee meant by it.

The article is strongly about more performance-oriented, meritocratic grading, not less so.

It considers this to be a problem of equity since current grading practices (in the opinion/experience of the author, at least) disadvantage certain students who perform better than others but have other problems (less access to tutors, less time for homework, less preparation before class etc).

[tenaciousDaniel]

Sure thing, I don't like heated conversations either.

To explain it succinctly, I've become wary of a certain group of people attempting to use subtle language choices to slip in their controversial ideas without being noticed. Equity sounds very much like equality, and therefore people are more likely to sign up for it without understanding the difference. It's a weasel word.

[boplicity]

That's interesting. Personally, I like the term equity specifically because it is not equality, which has a problematic history and doesn't actually tend to make sense in terms of actual policy.

[tenaciousDaniel]

Bridging the gap between our perspectives would take more time and effort than I'm willing to commit, but I do appreciate being able to converse like this without descending into a heated argument, so thanks for that.

[mklepaczewski]

Unfortunately, we humans quickly loose knowledge. Studies have shown that refreshing knowledge in intervals gives much better results in terms of information/skill retention. So, with high probability we can infer that a student who studied throughout semester is going to retain a lot more knowledge and skills than a student who powered through a course material in a week.

[loughnane]

I agree. Finding a balance is tough though.

On one end of the spectrum you grade work throughout the semester, which has the failings you mention above.

On the other end a “final” of some sort is worth 100% of the grade, which feels too high stakes to be a reliable representation of what students truly understand.

I hope to find an explicit recommendation for a good balance.

[professoretc]

The solution I use is to allow later grades to replace earlier grades. This works best if you can assign each graded item to a specific "topic", so that you can say "your grade on each topic is the highest grade you receive throughout the quarter" or whatever. Then at the end, you calculate their final course grade from some combination of the topic grades. (The easiest way is just to set a pass/fail threshold for each topic and then base their final grade on the number of topics passed.) You can adjust the ratio of replacement to averaging so that you're not totally throwing out earlier results, if you want to do that.

[loughnane]

That’s a neat approach. I like it.

[professoretc]

I got the idea for this system from Nilson and Stanny's Specifications Grading:

https://styluspub.presswarehouse.com/browse/book/97816203624...

[cosmojg]

I can imagine a system where students are graded relative to the median performance on each exam and assignment, and if what the article is saying is true, we can expect this median to rise on its own as the semester progresses. Naturally, this would place more weight on later performance and less weight on earlier performance.

Alternatively, one could keep their existing grading system and simply use some sort of quadratic weighting scheme which continuously increases the effect of an exam or assignment on a student's final grade as the end of the semester approaches. This would be a lot easier to write down on a syllabus but might disincentivize effort spent earlier in the class.