riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle) (01/06/84)
Regarding the substitution of English for letter grades: >> UC Santa Cruz did one thing right: it allowed the >> instructor all of the Power of English to give the grade... >> -- Bill McKeeman, mckeeman@wivax.UUCP I agree that, in theory, this sounds nice, and it may have been nice in practice at UCSC as well, but I once attended a school at which the experiment failed miserably. It was the elementary school where I spent 1970-1972 attending the 5th and 6th grades. English can be a very powerful means of expression, but it can also be a very powerful means of obfuscation. The language used on report cards quickly devolved into a set of buzzwords that meant nothing to students or their parents (and may not have meant anything to the teachers who wrote them). Part of the phenomenon may have been due to the normal passion for jargon found in the teaching trade (and in almost any other trade, too; we in CS certainly shouldn't throw any stones on that account!), but it also seemed to be an extension of the older problem of "grade inflation". Most people don't like to give negative feedback, and when teachers were expected to do it in English instead of the neutral ground of A's, B's and C's, they were rarely willing to be any more negative than to "damn with faint praise". Most often, they were simply ambiguous. I'm not trying to say that a letter grade is inherently better than an English description of a student's performance, but neither is the opposite true. As Bill McKeeman aptly points out, "[letter] grades attempt to linearize a multidimensional, nearly unmeasurable quantity." Unfortunately, linear feedback may be all we can sometimes expect to get from a teacher. --- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.") {ihnp4,seismo,ctvax}!ut-sally!riddle