Well, forgive me for asserting an opinion and personal experience into your debate. I concede your point and will remember not to participate in GD without fifteen scads of hard data.
Carry on.
erislover, the point is that if I took every advanced/honors class the school offered and get A’s in everything but gym (let’s say I got a C), I’d have the exact same GPA as someone who took the same classes, got an A in gym and a B in two academic classes. From the numbers, we’d appear to be exactly equally qualified to attend a competitive university, right? But closer examination would tend to imply that I’m somewhat more academically able, right?
Carrying it on a little further, what happens if I apply to an ultra-competitive school next to folks whose gym grade reflect their effort rather than their results, hmmm? We’re all academically equal, but they’ve got higher GPA’s because of gym class. All other factors being equal, all those people are going to be admitted before they even bother to look at why my GPA is lower. By the time the admissions folks get to me, there’ll be a lot few (if any) open spots left for me and the other folks who got a C in gym because we’re clumsy, making it harder for us to get in.
I’m pretty sure that’s what jayjay was getting at, since it was something I worried about in high school.
Oh, rats. That’s supposed to be “a lot fewer open spots”.
Jeez, a lot of you must’ve had bad gym teachers!
My gym class was graded primarily on improvement. Did you get better at the particular event, regardless of where you started? Then you got a good grade. We also did a lot more than just running around a track. We learned to juggle, bowl, design an exercise program, and coach a little bit on top of the regular stuff. The jocks were paired up with the less athletic kids to try and help them out. Didn’t always work of course, but it did sometimes. Gym was among the most popular classes in my high school.
I always thought the grading on improvement idea was good because if rewards effort and results. I do agree that the more objective classes (math, science) should weighted heavier to results, but effort should count some.
That is pretty much what I was getting at, crazycatlady. Thank you.
And jk1245, yes, I had lousy gym teachers. Practically an entire grading period was spent on running. Just running. And the grade depended on your final time for a mile run. This was for four years. Shin splints were an annual ordeal for me.
The ONLY thing I enjoyed in four years of gym class was the dance segment (square, folk, ballroom), which was usually a total of three weeks a year. Everything else was a nightmare of pain, shame, and ridicule. Add in open showers (and being (as far as I knew) the only gay teenager in the world surrounded by other naked guys (which isn’t so much a sexual fantasy as a perpetual fear of erection and public exposure as “queer”)) and Hell seemed like a pleasant vacation spot.
I don’t know about your high school, CrazyCatLady, but mine - Class of 1982, to put it in perspective - offered several math courses. In my senior year, I took Calculus BC (Honors), and the AP Calculus test. But there were plenty of people that stopped math at Algebra II/Trig, and there was also a class called “General Living Arithmatic” or some such, which was intended to cover such things as balancing a checkbook, totalling credit card charges, and figuring out a household budget. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, in other words.
Students taking any of these classes got the same type of grades – that is, there was no GPA weighting assigned to an Honors course.
By your logic, the “General Living” students that got an A and my A in my class would suggest we were equally qualified to attend a competitive university. In other words, their A weighed the same as my A – exactly the same situation as would ensue for the gym grade.
Why are the two different? Both situations appear to create the undesirable situation of sending a potentially false message to universities.
- Rick
Depends, surely, on why we teach gym at all. To the extent that we teach gym to impart and encourage participation and team-player skills, or to promote physical fitness, then the question of whether the student is actually any good at the specific exercises is wholly irrelevant. I may be a hopeless football player, but in terms of physical fitness and developing team skills I will benefit just as much from a football game as the team star.
Hence any grading scheme for gym should attach little or no weight to how good the student is, except to the extent that this is judged to be a fair measure of his participation skills and/or fitness.
Given that, if universities are going to treat a GPA which includes grades for gym as a measure of academic attainment, they are abusing the GPA. But that would be equally true even if the gym grades were based entirely on objective ability in the games and exercises involved.
I wish schools would use PE as a chance to learn how to implement exercise into every day life. I’m very uncoordinated for athletics. Paintball is the only sport I do well at (I’m still quite an amateur). If schools could all have gyms with cardio and weight lifting and teach students how to use them, they might seriously cut down on obesity and make more lifelong fitness converts. See, no matter how uncoordinated you are, you can still learn how to use a treadmill or a butterfly press.
I hated PE. I was one of those “last or second to last” picked for games. No matter how hard I tried, I’d have never made the softball or basketball teams. Grading for effort should matter more in that case than grading for results. Grading for results should matter in classes with easy right and wrong answers, but effort should make some difference.
At my university, there was a theater major that left without graduating with only one class remaining: the algebra class all students had to take. He’d taken the class at least three times, with different teachers, but he simply could not pass that class. Should he have been prevented from graduating despite taking every effort to pass?
If the point of gym class is to teach kids how to exercise and make sure they actually get some exercise, then I see no reason to grade them on anything but effort. I don’t believe successfully making a basket burns any more calories than shooting and missing.
Excellent point, Lamia.
But just as we learn how to take limits of fucntions before we learn integrals, so too must we learn basic sports skills before playing the sport. The grade for making the basket is not so much an end as a building block; once you can reasonably successfully shoot baskets, your likelihood of playing an actual game - more valuable exercise - substantially increases.
- Rick
My gym class ran in such a way that we started new sports on a Monday… but the previous week, for three days half of the time was spent learning about the sport: its rules, its history, etc. On Friday there was a test. These tests accounted for half of our grade. The other half was showing up in the proper clothing.
I hated gym, but I have to admit I like the way it was run.
Bricker, my example was talking about people who’d taken all the same classes. We had weighted GPA’s at my high school (they used the 5-point scale method, rather than the multiply by 1.3 method used in other places), but I still had the same GPA as the guy who’d gotten B’s in physics and advanced senior English.
If I’d applied next to people who took the exact same courseload at a different school and gotten A’s in gym, who would have looked like the better candidate? Me, or the person who’d taken the same classes and had a higher GPA (all other factors, like extracurricular involvement, being equal)?
That is what I was getting at.
Your grade should be based on whether your performance reflects the purpose of the class. In gym class, the purpose is to get the students exercising so that they live healthier lives. If you’re out there moving, whether or not you can move as fast as the next guy shouldn’t count. The academics are a different story. The purpose of the academic courses is to prepare you for further study either later in high school or college. The way you fulfill the purpose of the class is to learn something, and that can be measured.
Lamia is right, the guy who shoots a basketball and misses gets as much benefit as the guy that can hit the three pointer. But the guy who can’t solve a quadratic equation is not getting the same benefit as the guy that can, so that’s why you need results-based grading.
This is largely irrelevant.
First, it presupposes that gym class grades are computed in students’ final averages. In my high school and in the high schools of just about every other person I have ever discussed this with, gym class grades were not so computed.
Even if they were, you are not giving admissions officials any professional credit whatsoever. For example, I was ranked 4th in my high school class. Yes, I am sure you are all very proud of me. I took a load of straight honors and AP classes throughout my entire four years. I got into every college I applied to. The student ranked #3, whose average was a staggering three quarters of a point higher than mine (no 4 or 5 point scale for us, our averages were based on the 100 point scale and computed to three decimal places) took a perfectly normal courseload, but got into none of her choice colleges. And I’m sure her gym grades were better than mine: I was very small, and until junior year, had a lousy attitude about physical education.
Give the people who make admissions and scholastic decisions a little credit. They do review transcripts in their entirety. They don’t only look at the bottom line.
I disagree – as my post above suggests, the guy who misses is unlikely to take up basketball as recreation, since he sucks at it. The guy that can hit the three pointer is more likely to play it for fun in the future.
THAT is the benefit. Arguably as important - or more so - for future life as the real and imaginary roots to a quadratic.
- Rick
Yes, if he couldn’t complete the course work required for that degree then he should have been prevented from graduating.
Marc
I used to be a professor of Mathematics at a public university. I was very much involved with admissions and scholarships.
We put virtually zero weight on high school GPA. The correlation between high school GPA and college success was virtually nill. I have had students denied scholarship visit me all pissed off because they had a 4.0 GPA. Funny how their ACT was 16.
People knock them but the college entrance exams, particularly the SAT were far better indicators of college success. These scores were what we used.
So, if you didn’t have a 4.0 GPA because of Gym class but you nailed the college entrance exam then you will be in fine shape.
When, if I may ask, was your last PE class? I can still remember mine. It was a toal pile of dog doo. They did not teach anything. They said, “go here”, and “do this” and we did. One does not learn baseball from being ordered to do it and practicing five swings a week.
I think the goal of any high school should be to produce well rounded young adults who can think for themselves. You don’t really get a well rounded student by teaching them nothing beyond reading, writing, and math. You don’t really have well rounded students if you work on their minds and ignore their bodies.
I believe there are very few students who are incapable of learning algebra. On that same note I believe there are very few students who are incapable of learning athletic skills. If the gym teacher had actually taken time to teach the fundamentals of whatever sport was being played I wonder how much better some of you would have done.
My electives such as orchestra counted against my GPA. I wasn’t graded on my effort I was graded by how well I played. Of course in athletics I wasn’t graded by how well I did the coaches just gave everyone a 95 and that was that. I don’t really have a problem with PE being graded on effort. There are things I think gym teachers need to do to improve the class.
-
Spend some time teaching the fundamentals of everything done in class.
-
Offer a wider variety of physical activities beyond games or team sports.
Marc
It’s true that someone who is good at basketball is more likely to play it, but I don’t see how giving a poor grade to someone who is bad at shooting baskets is going to motivate them to play for fun. It might motivate them to make more of an effort (there’s that word again!) in class, and increased effort will generally result in some degree of skill increase, but this may not be enough to make the student a good basketball player. And it seems likely that when a lack of natural ability is combined with bad experiences such as poor grades then the result will be a student who hates basketball and never plays it voluntarily.
I’m not opposed to having students practice basic sports skills; in fact, I think many bad gym experiences could be avoided if students received more instruction in basic skills. Many students are miserable in gym class not merely because they’re naturally bad at shooting baskets but because they don’t know the right way to shoot a basket, or what the rules of basketball are. It’s unfair to throw students into a game that they are unprepared for or unfamiliar with. However, I think the overall emphasis should be on exercising and having a good time. I was never a good basketball player myself, but I’d be a lot more likely to play it for fun now if I had more fond memories of playing it in school. Instead I have mostly negative memories of being shouted at and receiving poor grades because my lack of athletic ability and poor eyesight kept me from being very good at sinking shots.