Cookie-Cutter Report Card Generators Suck

The BBQ Pit
1

Here’s something that has bothered me for a long time: Software that speeds up report card generation through the use of templates and boilerplate phrases generated by simple forms filled out by teachers.

Schools keep telling parents to take more interest in what their kids are doing in school and to help them in areas where they need work. I agree with this, but getting actual information out of the school on my daughter’s work is like pulling teeth.

There are two primary channels of information about how your child is doing: Parent-teacher interviews, and report cards. Leaving aside the parent-teacher interviews for this discussion, I want to talk about report cards.

When I was a kid, teachers didn’t have computers. This forced them to write personal assessments for every student. So my report card for science might read something like this:

“Little Sammy understands fluid flow very well, but he’s still a little weak on the concept of viscosity. I’ve noticed that he’s often distracted in class when the subject isn’t very interesting, and spends a little too much time talking to his neighbors. Also, the bunsen burner is not supposed to be used as a roman candle, and filling balloons with propane and igniting them is frowned upon. Overall, Sammy is an excellent but somewhat dangerous student who would make a good scientist if you can keep him away from combustibles.”

Anyway, there was enough information for a parent to get a picture of what the kid has been doing in class, and if the mark was anything other than an A, the teacher would always write down exactly what was lacking, and why.

But now, it’s apparent that teachers are saving time by using report-card generating software. They plug in the mark, and the software generates the written summary.

Here’s an example from my daughter’s report card for a subject she got an A in:

That doesn’t sound too bad - fairly specific. But then you read the math mark, which was also an A:

You can see right away that both teachers used the same software. They filled in a field for what was covered in the course, and then for each student they jsut had to click a radio button to indicate the overall mark, and the software generated the text for all the kids. Then maybe they edit the text a bit to add a phrase like “Good work!”.

But hey, she got A’s, so maybe I don’t need to know anything specific. But she got a C in phys-ed. I’d like to help her improve. So I went to the report card to see where she had problems. Here’s the summary:

Exactly the same boilerplate. A description of the units covered, and a summary paragraph that was clearly generated by software because the teacher selected ‘C’ as a grade.

This is useless information. You might as well just tell me the grade letters and leave it at that. There’s nothing I can learn from this report card that will allow me to help her in school, other than the letter grades themselves.

But the use of this kind of software is even more pernicious. The use of templates and boilerplate software generators like this allows the teacher to avoid having to sit and think hard about what to say about a child, and sometimes that process of thinking can help the teacher with understanding the needs of the children.

This issue has come up in health care digitization. One of the things stopping digitization is research that has shown that doctors who chart patients with computers start to develop habits like cutting and pasting diagnoses and treatment plans between patients, and they slowly begin to mentally disengage from their patients. They start fitting everyone into cookie-cutter boxes driven by the design of the software rather than by their own training. It’s a slow, pernicious effect.

The other problem with boilerplate text is that it can actually be misleading because it provides generalized responses for specific problems. It’s misleading in that it suggests that it’s describing personal traits of the child when it isn’t. Maybe my daughter’s problem in Gym isn’t lack of effort, but a physical defect or an inner ear problem causing lack of coordination. But the software can’t make that distinction, so it gives me bad info. Perhaps if the teacher had to sit and think about what she had done wrong, the teacher might have an epiphane about her needs and become a better teacher for her. That won’t happen when the sum total of the teacher’s per-child effort is clicking a damned radio button.

If if you’re a teacher and you’re reading this, put down the mouse and pick up a pen. Write personal student evaluations. Engage your brain, and think about what information the parents need to know to be better parents, and what next year’s teachers might need to know about the kid to be more effective. If you’re using an algorithm to generate the text of your report cards, you might as well just send home a list of letter grades and leave it at that.

2

I don’t entirely disagree that report cards should have more useful information so parents know their kids’ specific strengths and weaknesses. But writing individual statements for 140-150 students takes time, and that’s something teachers don’t have a lot of. Between lesson planning, paperwork, grading, and all of the other stuff teachers have to do, including actually teaching, there just isn’t time. Also, report cards have to be turned in by drop-dead date so they go out on time, which makes it even more difficult to find the time.

What’s wrong with e-mailing or calling your daughter’s teachers to ask these questions of them directly? Or is it easier to bitch about cookie-cutter report cards and leave it at that?

3

We never got statements like that in our report cards. In elementary school it was an actual card that had grades written on it and a place on the back for my parents to sign. In high school it was a dot-matrix printout of numbers on a 100-point scale.

My teachers were always happy to provide more detailed info if a parent wanted it, but it wasn’t a part of the report card.

I agree, though, that the boilerplate is useless. It’s kind of nice that it prints out what exactly they’ve been doing in that class, but they might as well just give you a letter grade after that.

Electronic medical records have similar problems. When I used to ask for records from another doc I’d get a half-page of illegible scribbling that told me nothing. Now I get 140 pages of automatically-completed forms that tell me nothing.

4

You know what? I don’t care. I don’t care about your time. I don’t care how hard your job is. NO parent should care. Their job is to get the best education for their kids, not to help teachers manage their workloads. That’s an issue for you to discuss with your supervisors, union officials, and elected school board trustees.

Tell me - how would you feel if you got your car back from the auto shop and it was dirty and the repair was done sloppily, and when you complained about it the mechanic said, “You don’t understand! My job is HARD! My boss works me like a dog. I put in overtime, and I don’t see my kids enough. Do you know how hard those car manuals are to read? I’d have to read them on my own time!”

What would your answer be? My guess is it would be something like this: “If you’ve got problems at work, that’s your problem. I’m not responsible for your shitty job or your relationship with your boss or how much you get paid. I contracted with you to do a good job on my car, and you didn’t do it. Give me my damned money back.”

I do that when it’s a big enough problem (although it’s still like pulling teeth to get real information out them). Maybe EVERY parent should do that, and then your ‘time saving’ report card generator would take up ten times as much time for you in the end. But you’re counting on only a few parents caring enough to actually demand real information about their kids. The rest will glance at the boilerplate and shrug, and you’re off the hook.

But more to the point is that the use of this type of software is not a good thing for the kids, for the reasons I mentioned. It allows teachers to disengage. Hey, you score a bunch of multiple-choice exams, average them up, assign a letter grade, click a radio button, and you’re done. You don’t even have to think hard about the kid’s individual needs.

Maybe YOU do that, and you’re a great teacher. But systems like this allow the bad teachers to skate through without being challenged and without having to seriously engage with their students, and the evidence from health care digitization studies suggests that even good teachers will eventually have their thinking and their practices changed by the incentives provided by boilerplate generating software.

5

What is usless about the comments by the Pys-ed teacher? They clearly told you that she particpates fully in the units she likes and slacks off in ones she doesn’t. Now, you can talk to your daughter about why she needs to give attention to things she doesn’t like doing. Find out which parts she doesn’t like and see if you can find ways to get her interested in them or motivated to work harder on them.

Just giving you a grade letter *is *useless. They gave you a neat, easy to understand comment that addresses the reason why she got the letter grade she did without overloading already overloaded teachers even more.

6

I have my old report cards somewhere from about 30 years ago, and the comments were a half sentence, at most.

7

The comment was generic - it wasn’t personalized. It’s the comment all kids get it if they get a ‘C’. Actually, I can’t state that categorically for the phys-ed mark, since it was her only C so I can’t compare it against others. But in the case of her two B’s and all her A’s, the comments were identical.

8

My report cards (mostly from the 60s) usually had short hand-written comments for exceptionally good or bad classes. That didn’t mean they were useful.

One from seventh grade mentioned that I would be a better student if I had more interest in reading than in playing baseball. After my parents had spent seven years desperately trying to get me to pull my nose out of a book and go do something outside once in a while.

I think all you can expect out of a report card is a clue that there’s a problem needing to be investigated. You have that.

9

We just got letter grades and nothing more. This was at Catholic and Public schools. They may have written something up about “deportment”, but that was generally not good. One nun wrote that I had “a world of knowledge”, which I thought was a compliment until my parents explained to me that it meant I talked too much in class…

10

Sam, you just started this thread to brag about <Daughter’s> good grades, didn’t you?

Things could be worse. I remember one of my report cards in junior high or high school; I got an A with a comment of “student is not working up to his potential”. I guess a lot of students had asked about that, because the next day that teacher explained that the comments were input by number, 1-6, and that she’d given the wrong numbers for a lot of us. So it was boilerplate and it was wrong. That was in the late '70s or early '80s.

11

Same here and after sixth grade there weren’t ANY comments, just the grades.

12

I also don’t disagree, generally speaking, that report cards could be more useful, but I also think these things are the things you’re “setting aside” by refusing to talk about conferences. Covering these fine details is exactly what conferences are for; report cards are for record keeping. In other words, I think you’re assuming their primary purpose is something other than what it is.

I don’t know that you can conclude that all C students get the same comments, though, unless you’ve seen the software. I suspect it’s a row of options the teacher can click on, and your daughter’s teachers who gave her an A chose the same clicky boxes because she’s acting the same way in both their classes. There may be other options, you just don’t know unless you ask or see the program - which, by the way is almost certainly mandated by the school district, not chosen by “lazy” teachers.

(And at the risk of a hijack, I also agree that there are dangers to patient care with computerized medical charting. There are some things about it, like accountability, durability and easy transportation of medical records and increased ability to accurately read other caregiver’s notes, which are really good. But there are also problems with it. I haven’t noticed the depersonalization issue, although I’m prepared to believe it. What I *have *noticed is administrations pressuring nurses to click on their little clicky boxes rather than spend time with the patients, and some truly headache inducingly terrible computerized charting systems which take far more time to wade through than they save in writing. But again, it’s about what the tool is designed to do…computerized charting isn’t put in place to provide better patient care, no matter what they try to tell you. Computerized charting is put in place to better protect the hospital in case of a lawsuit.)

13

Same here. And it was always some variation of “Vinyl has enormous potential, but spends most of his time making armpit farts.”

14

We had the standardized stuff when I was a kid and I always got “Works well independently” which means “Is a social retard”. We used to trade them back and forth - who got “Talks too much”, who got “Works well in groups”, etc.

15

When my kid gets a lower grade than expected and I don’t know why, I contact the teacher. All of my kids’ teachers have always been very good about responding to emails and/or phone calls to discuss problem areas.

The report card is just an indicator. It’s not meant to be a huge discussion about all the things your kid is doing right/wrong. That’s what conferences are for. (And not just the “official” once-or-twice-yearly parent/teacher conferences, but any parent-teacher discussion or meeting.)

16

Not at all. In fact, this is the worst report card she’s ever had. Usually she’s straight A’s. That was actually what triggered my rant. I’ve always been annoyed at the cookie cutter stuff, but until now I didn’t really have much reason to dig into the reason behind the grade. But then I saw she got a C in a class and two B’s, and I read the report card to see what had changed, and realized that there was pretty much zero content to all the written stuff.

I’m surprised that so many of you just had report cards with letter grades and nothing else. Maybe it’s a difference between American and Canadian schools? I’ve still got my old report cards around from back in the day, and they were generally 3-4 page affairs with at least one or two paragraphs of comments for each subject written by the subject teacher, and then a half page or full-page summary on the back written by the home room teacher. I guess it’s the dichotomy between the care that used to go into the report cards compared to the computer-generated twaddle that gets added to them now that bugs me.

But then, maybe I just warranted a lot of comments. The little joke about blowing up propane bags wasn’t exactly much of an exaggeration in my case…

That’s actually one of the issues that’s stopping health care digitization as well. It’s far too easy to make critical errors when you’re clicking buttons or copying and pasting prescriptions.

17

Maybe. I was curious, so I just checked my old report cards, and the earlier ones have about 10 linear inches of room for the teacher to write in, so about 2 sentences worth, max. The later ones are still filled out by hand, but have a series of boxes available for checking. My high school ones are just letter grades, no comments. I graduated from American public school in '92.

My son’s early cards have this annoying number reference system, with numbers selected by each teacher that correspond to pre-printed statements on the bottom of the page like footnotes. His high school ones have only letter grades.

18

I’m about 12 years earlier than you, so maybe this is a trend that’s been changing for a long time.

19

You’re not bragging about you daughter, it’s just that usually she’s a straight-A student. Got it.[sup]*[/sup]

I know some of the problems well. Remember old versions of Windows where you’d delete a file and a dialog would put up asking if you were sure? It was useless. You’d click Delete, Yes, Delete, Yes, Delete, Yes, until it became automatic and the dialog was essentially invisible. Now we have the trashcan model.

Computers ain’t perfect, but I’m working on it.
I’m just yanking your chain a little bit. Hope she gets the best education you can find for her. And heck, I might brag a little under the circumstances.

20

All of the tasks I mentioned in my original post are intended to provide the best education possible. Lesson planning alone can take several hours per week to do, and that’s just for the next week’s lessons. Teachers also have to complete paperwork to report information to the state and federal governments, and that adds more time. They have to take continuing education to keep up with what’s happening, not only in education but in their respective fields. (Those days off that your daughter gets? Teachers don’t get those days off. They’re in meetings and seminars to learn what’s new in education.) Those who advise an extracurricular activity also have to stay for meetings and plan activities for those, as well. There are department or grade-level meetings to attend. And, of course, grading to make sure there are grades to report on a report card. And that’s not including the five to six periods per day that they actually have to teach. Hell, I have yet to meet any teacher who put in less than nine to ten hours per day of actual work, and they don’t get overtime to do that. So to add the burden of writing individual statements for report cards four to six times per academic year is too much.

Every parent should take an active role in their kids’ education. I don’t think I said anything to the contrary.

I’d rather my son’s teachers spend more time planning and working in the classroom, and engaging with my son there than spending an assload of time working on report cards. My son’s teachers make their money by, y’know, teaching my son, not wasting time on paperwork. As it should be.

False equivalence. Secondary teachers spend around 225 to 250 minutes per week per class teaching. (That’s actual class time per class, not the additional planning and paperwork time. This assumes five 45- to 50-minute periods per class.) They engage with their students in the classroom, and for some students, before or after school. Doctors, on the other hand, don’t spend that much time with their patients, and some doctors are disengaged with or without boilerplate technology. Doctors can also shift some of the paperwork burden onto nurses or other support staff, something teachers can’t do. Believe me, if teachers could find a way to lessen the paperwork, they would, because that would mean more time spent on instruction.

Finally, I agree with MsWhatsit. Report cards that raise questions should be discussed with the teacher to find out what’s going on. At that point, real solutions can be discussed, and the teacher can get a better idea of what’s going on, if there is anything going on.