[brian_spiering]

I taught in a system that tried to implement "equitable grading" with unlimited attempts until the end of the term. In practice, this idea was untenable for instructors.

Many students would turn in low-quality work to get feedback, then make very minor incremental changes. This process would be repeated many times. The result was a higher than typical grading load for the instructor (sometimes it felt like I was spending more time on the assignment than the student).

Students would wait until the end to complete the work. The result was students spread out through the content. As an instructor, you could not expect students to know the fundamentals necessary for more advanced material later in the term. The procrastinating students then would expect a lot of rapid feedback at the end of the term. Again, increasing the grading load.

[Wowfunhappy]

> Many students would turn in low-quality work to get feedback, then make very minor incremental changes. This process would be repeated many times. The result was a higher than typical grading load for the instructor (sometimes it felt like I was spending more time on the assignment than the student).

The teachers I know who use this policy also have a sort of "bad faith" exception, where students who are clearly abusing the system and not trying are given an ultimatum. But others are allowed to keep trying.

[no_butterscotch]

Are those teachers in middle class well to do schools?

I don't know if inserting teacher discretion is a "good idea" in cases where we're talking about "equity" - it could just as easily result in some students being graded worse/better with no respect to the work done.

[Wowfunhappy]

> Are those teachers in middle class well to do schools?

No, actually.

> I don't know if inserting teacher discretion is a "good idea" in cases where we're talking about "equity" - it could just as easily result in some students being graded worse/better with no respect to the work done.

It's a fair criticism. But keep in mind that grading already involves a lot of teacher discretion, to the point where I'm not convinced that a significant amount is being added here.

Also, I'm not sure these teachers would necessarily say the policy is specifically intended to increase equity (as much as that is a priority in general). As one of my professors explained it (I'm a graduate student working towards a teaching degree, so my professors are also K-12 teachers), giving a child a bad grade means they did not master the learning objective. Allowing the child to retry the assignment at least provides an opportunity for them to go back and learn the material.

(For what it's worth, when I become a teacher I don't think I'm going to allow unlimited retries in my own classroom. I'm not sure though—I like some aspects of the idea.)

[morkalork]

My sister-in-law is a teacher dealing with this in a pretty rough school district. The admin does not want to expel or fail students because of very sensitive political reasons and there are many students that just don't give a fuck. In the end, she's marking entire semesters worth of work and assigning extra attempts at the end of every semester. It's insane.

[orwin]

There is one way to "bypass" a bad admin: involve the parents. And do not actually bypass the admin, keep them in the loop, but this allow an educator to mitigate the issues.

You will find mostly three types, with a percentage that change depending on the area: Those who want to get involve but do not know how, those who want to get involved but do not have time (single moms are a part of that, but poor working class nuclear family too), and those who don't care. Luckily the third type is not that common (but it exist).

On way of involving the parent is sending them a mail with what was aborded in class and the two-three main points their children should know about. Cc the child. One hidden benefit is that if you're a new teacher, you will have to do that anyway to understand the notions you're teaching better (at least that's waht my teacher friends do).

The children do not have to know those point perfectly, and it has to be clear for the parent. You don't want to be the cause of home dissension. a rough idea is enough, because the next ideas will refine the first one, that's how learning work.

Then improvise on that. I have a friend who started that this year, it's a method that was tried like 5 years ago and that's slowly gaining ground in my country. My friend added "Email hour" where he garranteed to be on his computer between 18 and 19 four days a week, and try to respond as much as he could. He also changed from putting both notions and explaination in the body to notions in the body and explanations in attachment. There is a lot of details to be ironed out, and he also do not want to take too much time from the parents. He likes his job better since he started doing that, and the parents are grateful.

But now my government want him to participate in clubs and other stuff to have his augmentation, so i guess that method might be in jeopardy.

[mrguyorama]

>There is one way to "bypass" a bad admin: involve the parents. And do not actually bypass the admin, keep them in the loop, but this allow an educator to mitigate the issues.

A student in the US who is struggling usually comes from a home that does not give a crap about education in general. Involving the parents just results in them not caring, or blaming you as the teacher. Your admin will then side with the parent, because they also DGAF, superintendent is usually not a merit based position.

[orwin]

Not my experience tbh. It could be cultural differences, but parents disengage because they don't know how to help their children w/o creating tensions and/or without neglecting the rest of their life. If the teacher provides a cheap way (low time investment) for parents to have a view on what's done in the classroom and what their children are supposed to know, they usually embrace it, from what I've seen.

There is some cases where yes, the parents shouldn't have had kids, and disengage because they don't care. I do not believe this is the majority (my friend teach in middle school, but the technique cale from a high school teacher BTW).

[rngname22]

Honestly sounds like when a junior doesn't make any pull requests until their 3 month project is feature-complete and then expects the seniors to drop everything to code review their 10k line change, rather than doing incremental releases with incremental code review.

AKA one of the biggest adjustments I've had to overcome in working with teams.

[lazyasciiart]

Also like when a freshman doesn't start their project until the night before the deadline, or every other way that people procrastinate that leads to failure. If they start getting some real practice overcoming this in high school that would be an insane benefit.

[drbojingle]

SO MVP approach? Seems fine. Get AI to to the intermediate grading and limit the human level grading to 3 attempts.

[theonething]

> Many students would turn in low-quality work to get feedback,

Sounds like one of my coworker's PRs

[hirvi74]

Could this not be alleviated with software? Let the student submit how ever many attempts he or she would like and then just have the software do the grading?

I imagine there is less 1-on-1 feedback, but if the student had questions, I imagine most teachers would not mind assisting a student at that point.

My university used software like this over a decade ago. I honestly preferred it for some classes. For example, I had a Calculus II class where we could take every test three times. I would take each test once, see what I did wrong, ask the professor, take it again, then repeat if I was unsatisfied with my grade the second time.

I honestly felt like I learned more via this trial-and-error approach than I ever did studying for one-and-done kind of examination because I was able to actually learn the material vs. trying to memorize as much as I could just to pass the test.

I have pretty severe ADHD (didn't know it at the time), so this methodology was extremely beneficial for my "not built for school" type of brain.

[SoftTalker]

How much Calculus do you remember now?

I didn't have this option but I crammed for tests rather than spend time over a longer period actually learning the material. I passed, often with As, but I don't remember a bit of it today.

[anthonypasq]

i havent needed to do calculus in 10 years. why would expect to remember it? My friends who are mechanical engineers remember calculus perfectly well.

[hirvi74]

I do not remember a lot now, but that doesn't mean I didn't need to know it during my time in University. There were times when Calculus resurfaced in other classes, and properly understanding what was going on was beneficial.