In the linked thread (one of the "Ask The … " variety, this one about life as a student at a single-sex high-school), an off-hand comment is made about gym being unfairly graded on the basis of results, not on effort. I asked if it would also be appropriate to request a high grade for an algebra test in which all the answers and methods used were incorrect, but on which the test-taker had tried really hard. Merla’s response to that question was:
I’m not quite sure I follow the logic - although I certainly admit you get graded on the grades you receive.
But the underlying issue: is it appropriate to grade algebra and composition on the basis of how well you perform, and gym and dance on the basis of how well you try?
My gym class (only two left EVER) has tests. I am by no means a very athletic person, but believe me, the teacher who put these things together really does not like students. EXTREMELY specific answers are reqired. It’s pointless. Testing on the details of a game is useless. IT’S GYM CLASS, NOT PHYSICS! You can’t grade it the same way, IT’S NOT AS IMPORTANT, IT’S GYM CLASS!
As long as real effort is shown a good grade should be given.
It seems that if phys-ed courses were graded on performance instead of effort, there would be a need for many classes at different levels of difficulty.
At most high schools students are placed in different learning tracks for academic courses (“honors”, “-A”, “-A2”, and “general” at mine), sorting students by their learning ability. By placing students with classmates who share their learning abilities, teachers can better tailor teaching and testing methods to their students’ needs. Therefore academic effort will be rewarded with a good grade because the difficulty of any test should not exceed the ability of the group of students (for which it is prepared) to perform well.
My experience was that phys-ed courses were about enjoying time with schoolmates, learning enough about sports and games to feel comfortable playing them, and having a fun break during a possibly stressful day of academics. Gym class was not a place to fine-tune physical ability; that’s what the sports teams were there for.
Gym isn’t typically regarded as a core academic course; nor are courses such as Art or Shop – so these courses tend to be graded based on effort. It’s the core subjects – mathematics, the sciences, and the humanities – that are generally graded based on performance. Gym just isn’t important enough.
Now, if Howard Gardner had his way… that’s another story.
I was graded on both effort and results in most of my math classes. If I showed my work, that was some points already. If you got every question wrong but still showed proper work I believe a person could get almost a 50% on any test. Homework was graded only on effort, never on right answers. :shrug:
In any event, gym based on talent wouldn’t be the sort of subject in which your performance can be mediocre, but you can cram the night before the exam and pass.
Grading for effort without taking into account results sets a bad example for students. The real world doesn’t care how hard you try, it just cares about results. An engineer who shows good work and the wrong results ends up with a collapsed bridge. A sales person who tries real hard and ends up with zero sales makes zero comission.
Gym class was not created to usher in a new era of Uber athletes. It was put in place in hopes that youth would get some sort of exercise. The fact that students are “graded” in gym is really laughable. How does the teacher quantify effort? I have played sports competitively my entire life and have seen players who look like they’re giving all they have, while not really exerting much effort at all. It’s all in perception. Gym should just be a partcipation grade. Either yes, the student participated or no, the student did not participate.
By the same token, I don’t believe in giving effort in something like algebra either. It’s math. It’s logic. It’s zeroes and ones. Right or wrong. There is no in between. I mean, if I try really hard, I can come up with a proof that 1=2 that may not be completely correct but, I tried really hard so I should get some credit…shouldn’t I? Doesn’t work that way. Besides, what if something comes really easy for student A and student B spends weeks trying to grasp certain concepts? Should student B get rewarded for their efforts? After all, they surely have worked harder than student A. Not in math.
In something like Literature and the like where there is a lot of subjectivity, yes, effort should be rewarded. After all, if student B believes the poem is about a horse and has taken the time to back up their claim, reward them. But if you get the wrong answer in math, regardless of how you came to that conclusion, it’s still wrong.
Back in the Stone Age when I was in high school I was a skinny runt. I had about as much chance of competing on an equal footing in any sort of physical activity with my classmates on the football team as I did of flapping my arms and flying to the moon. I remember the day we were all supposed to run a mile; my time was something like ten and a half minutes (and IIRC I was either the last or second to last to finish). Should I have been given a barely passing grade because of my inability to run as fast as anyone else, or should I have been given some credit because at least I kept going?
One of my gym teachers was always on my back because I couldn’t keep up with the others in anything which involved physical effort. Finally, one day he admitted that even though I couldn’t do a single pull-up, I deserved a passing grade because I refused to stop trying to do one.
On preview Greenback’s post reminds me of another point. Math was one of my natural subjects; I would whip through my math homework in nothing flat and finish tests before almost everyone else. Since it involved no effort on my part should I have gotten a lower grade? By that logic the “natural athletes” should have gotten lower grades in gym.
I agree with Greenback about Gym—it isn’t meant to train professional atheles. If the class gets kids to get out and exercise and enjoy teamwork more, then it has achieved its goal. Same with art—we all know that some people have NO talent for art. And with certain art forms, there sometimes is no “right” way to do a project. People have proven this by earning Fine Art degrees while having absolutely no artistic talent whatsoever, just the ability to sell a line of bullshit about what they really meant by that splat of paint on canvas. Trust me. I’ve seen this.
In high school, I had no talent for PE and a lot of talent for art. I was petrified and miserable in PE and bored to tears in art. I often got bad grades in art. I can’t remember what I got in PE—I’ve blocked the whole experience out. But I think I have a hazy memory of getting (sometimes) decent grades. Because I showed up. But I still hated it—the other kids (and sometimes the teacher) took “winning” all too seriously. I felt stygmatized at all times because I just wanted out of there, I didn’t give a shit about winning. Had I been graded on performance, I would have failed every time. It would have been beyond cruel to do that to many of us uncoordinated kids.
When you strive to be a professional athelete, a whole different set of standards should apply. But for the typical schlub kid—why torment them because they are not physically as able or talented as other more naturally athletic kids? In art class, I was bored to tears (the classes were designed to be more plebian, I guess, and I was already into doing other stuff). I sometimes got bad grades because the teacher explained that my “effort” was lacklustre. I never got too worked up about getting lower grades. Fair is fair. Why should I automatically get a better grade than the kid who has no innate sense of color or design? If they put in more effort and I didn’t? And needless to say, art class was not like PE—no one was obsessed with “winning” in the same way. If they had, the kids with no innate sense of color or drawing would have been as miserable as I had been in PE.
It’s different with other classes, like algebra. There is only ONE answer. With art, there is not. With PE, it isn’t about creating professional atheletes. Or it shouldn’t be.
With both math and gym (as well as pretty much every other subject) there’s the “Well, I’m never going to need it, so it doesn’t really matter if I do well or learn anything so long as I pass” mentality that many students have (not to imply that I’m immune from the mentality – not a day went by in my sophomore year of high school that I didn’t sleep through Chemistry). The difference between gym and math is that math is a job skill, while gym probably isn’t (unless you want to be a gym teacher). If you’ve got a high school diploma then it’s assumed that you’ve at least got some rudimentary skills in math, whereas no assumptions are usually made about your abilities in four-square-ball or badminton.
Still, I think that it’s unfair that somebody who is (f’rinstance) mathematically inept is still made to slog through several years of math before earning a H.S. diploma. One of my friends was made to take three or four years of H.S. math just like the rest of us, even though his time would have been much better spent taking another art/history/literature course – he’s now no better at math than he was before high school, despite many a frustrated math teacher (though fortunately they stuck him with the apathetic math teachers for his junior and senior years). IMO high schools should operate more like universities, at least for upperclassmen – the ones who’re good at math can load up on two dozen calculus courses and wind up with a “High School Diploma in Mathematics And Assorted Geekery,” and the one who’re good at history (or whatever) can load up on two dozen history courses and wind up with a “High School Diploma in History And Assorted Hippiness.” The math folks will still have to take some basic history courses and the history folks will still have to take some basic math courses (they need a well-rounded education and all that jazz), but if gentleman’s C’s are the order of the day then the general education requirements needn’t be too painful.
AS whatmove pointed out, there are different levels of math, so students who are less adept are put in easier classes. Since the material is less difficult in these classes, they are in effect getting the same grade for the same effort.
Distilling the sense of some of the posts above, and with apologies for not taking the … ahem … effort … to credit them to their authors:
Gym is not as important as physics or algebra. Really? Why so? I can tell you the volume of the solid that results from rotating a conic section about an axis, because I learned integration – but I’ve never had a career occasion to use this skill. On the other hand, physical fitness may arguably save me from an early grave from obesity-induced diabetes, hypertension, or cardiac arrest.
While high-school gym isn’t meant to train professional athletes, neither is high-school math meant to train professional mathematicians. But future professional athletes must take math in high school, just as future math professors must take gym. In each case, it’s not about whether you’ll go on to make a career out of it, but rather an opportunity to explore the discipline and to learn how to learn, so to speak, basic skills which will serve you in the future.
…gym based on talent wouldn’t be the sort of subject in which your performance can be mediocre, but you can cram the night before the exam and pass. Err… true, but I’m unclear on the significance of this observation.
*But I still hated it—the other kids (and sometimes the teacher) took “winning” all too seriously. I felt stygmatized at all times because I just wanted out of there, I didn’t give a shit about winning. * Without sounding too heartless here – let me just point out that this is more an emotional observation than an argument for the proposition. It’s irrelevant if you felt stigmatized by others’ competitive approaches. What was it about those approaches was inherently bad? I might as well say that I felt stigmatized by all the insistence on correct citations of law in my Criminal Procedure class. Stigmatized or not, there’s a good reason to insist on correct information there. The question is, then, what distinguishes that from gym?
All previous explanations aside, there remains one last tidbit:
Especially with varying levels of coursework, one can easily find a class of math of science where, with proper effort, you should get an “A”. Barring some truly brain-dead people. However, there is a sad fact that most people are not going to be very good at any sport without a lot of practice - much more than any Gym class can give. Mreover, people develop physically at different rates. You wish to punish late bloomers? Particularly at a high school level, teens (younger children too, but to a lesser degree) experience very varying rates of physical change. Peple enter puberty at different times and different rates. It would grossly unfair to grade PE on performance - your going to condemn nearly everyone to a bad year at some point.
Not to mention that if PE is given an actual grade, a student who is brilliant in classroom work but klutzy or slow physically is going to find his GPA significantly affected. I find the idea that not being able to run a five-minute mile can reduce your chances of getting into the college of your choice to be repugnant, unless you’re trying to get in on a track scholarship.
Gym is not an academic subject. The only rationale I’ve heard for its existence is a social engineering one – “We need to do something about the epidemic of childhood obesity!” (Personally, I’m skeptical – the kids would get just as much exercise with an extra half hour of recess, and fewer of them would end up hating it with a passion. Schools are not as effective at social engineering as they think they are.) But in any case, I don’t see how grading on performance would help the class achieve its stated objective – encouraging as many kids as possible to make exercise part of their lives. Instead, the majority of students would get the message that exercise is for the athletically talented; ordinary people aren’t going to be much good at it no matter what they do, so why try?
Fine. I find the idea that a lack of talent in PE can affect your academic benchmark (GPA) in any way to be disgusting. Except for the few students whose physical performance will help them to get into college through scholarships, students are going to school for academics, not sports. While I understand the importance of a class period in which students partake in some amount of physical activity, I dislike treating it like a core curriculum class and gradng it on performance.
I’ll add the caveat that PE in high school was, for me, basically four years of absolute hell, just so those reading can guage how many grains of salt they need to take with my opinions on the matter.
What is the basis for the assertion that students are going to school solely for academics, and not sports, jayjay? A gratuitous assertion, as my high school debate teacher was fond of reminding us, may be equally gratuitously denied.
So I contend, with as much evidence as you have offered, that the purpose of school is a well-rounded introduction to a holistic approach to learning BOTH purely academic and physical skills, and it’s as appropriate to grade performance in one as it is the other.
It’s irrelevant to the argument that you feel disgust or repugnance; if that were a convincing data point, surely my feeling towards Joe Millionaire would result in its immediate removal from the air.
This is in GD because I hoped to develop an argument, based on evidence, probative facts, stuff like that. Your disgust and repugnance duly noted, can you now offer any actual evidence that supports your way of thinking?
