Sunday, October 23, 2005
Departure from Politics
I would like to take a departure from politics for a moment to consider education. In an ideal world the goal of the student would be to learn and the goal of the teacher to teach. The student, then would do all he or she could to increase learning efficiency, while the teacher would do all he or she could to promote students' understanding and rentention of knowledge.
Grading on a curve stands as antithetical to all these principals. Though it engages students in a Prisoner's Dilemma (for those of you who know what that is) inspiring every student to study no matter what the other students do, it radically dammages any incentives for group study or cohesion in the class and fosters the worst kind of cut-throat competition. When a students chances of doing well increase as other students do worse, the student has no motivation to help his fellow students or engage in group studying by which every party would benefit. If it were possible for all students to acheive the maximum grade however, students would still have sufficient motivation to study since that aspect of the prisoner's dilemma would still exist, but they would also be motivated to help one another, thus increasing the effectiveness of learning in that class.
Medical schools in recent history have found that it was common place for a student to read a helpful text and then hide it somewhere in a remote area of the library so that other students who want to or need to use the book couldnt find it and their grades would be dammaged, thus bolstering the first students grade. Is this really the atmosphere we want to foster while trying to teach students how to save lives? Is this really the atmosphere we want to foster at any university?
Stay tuned in the next few days for more political commentary, but for the moment, I have fixated on the absuridy of our education system. Oh yeah, and I hate midtems.
Grading on a curve stands as antithetical to all these principals. Though it engages students in a Prisoner's Dilemma (for those of you who know what that is) inspiring every student to study no matter what the other students do, it radically dammages any incentives for group study or cohesion in the class and fosters the worst kind of cut-throat competition. When a students chances of doing well increase as other students do worse, the student has no motivation to help his fellow students or engage in group studying by which every party would benefit. If it were possible for all students to acheive the maximum grade however, students would still have sufficient motivation to study since that aspect of the prisoner's dilemma would still exist, but they would also be motivated to help one another, thus increasing the effectiveness of learning in that class.
Medical schools in recent history have found that it was common place for a student to read a helpful text and then hide it somewhere in a remote area of the library so that other students who want to or need to use the book couldnt find it and their grades would be dammaged, thus bolstering the first students grade. Is this really the atmosphere we want to foster while trying to teach students how to save lives? Is this really the atmosphere we want to foster at any university?
Stay tuned in the next few days for more political commentary, but for the moment, I have fixated on the absuridy of our education system. Oh yeah, and I hate midtems.
