This seems pretty subjective and nearly impossible to prove. This isn’t great debates, so I’m not going to run around screaming, “Cite! Cite!” but I still think having a 50% or higher count as a passing grade instead of 70% or higher has to make things a little easier. This is probably especially with younger students studying simpler subjects. I mean how much discretion is there to “grade a lot harder” when you’re a teacher correcting a 10th grade spelling test or a 7th grade math test? If Bob the student gets 90% of the questions correct he generally gets a 90%. Is there any evidence that demonstrates that foreign tests are harder or that the grading curves work drastically differently in other countries?
Most countries outside of the US do not use grading curves.
Yes, that means it is possible for a whole class of 40 (or, at university, of anything between 15 and 5000*) to flunk an exam. Been there, done that; some times it was the teacher being an ass, sometimes it was perfectly reasonable.
- The biggest university in Spain is long-distance; they do have courses with thousands of students.
Exams and grading work very differently in other systems. It isn’t a matter of discretion – the whole educational system grades harder. The knowledge I have is of the system in India I don’t know about what goes on at lower grades, but when it gets to 7th grade and 10th grade, it’s not about weekly spelling tests or math tests. Their grades are based on comprehensive exams that cover several years’ worth of material. The exams are much, much harder than anything we see in school.
Furthermore, there isn’t a concept of 90 percent of the questions equals 90 percent score. The concept is not “credit for correct” but “penalties for errors.” Getting one question wrong out of 100 can cost you a lot more than 1 percent of the points.
Furthermore, on essay-type questions, for which grading is slightly more subjective, it is literally impossible to get 100 percent scores. It’s a matter of policy on the part of grader to give lower marks.
Anecdote:
I was educated in Hong Kong before the 12th grade, and I was in the US afterward. I can assure you that tests are graded significantly harder in HK than in the US. In my secondary school, there are 8 letter grades, A to H. A to E are considered passing. In a typical class of 40 students, only the top 2 or 3 students would get an A. Generally, A to C are considered decent grades, while D and E are considered barely passing. As another example, getting all As in the public examinations (the equivalent of the British GCSE and A-level) is an extremely big deal, because only a handful of students, out of tens of thousands, are able to manage this feat every year.
Well ok it was a “University” so it depended on the college in the university you enrolled in. Unfortunately it turns out that by far the largest college there had that requirement.(Close to 40% of the Freshmen went to the liberal arts college) Well ok, if you already spoke a second language then you didn’t have to take one.(Yes, really big of them there.) Since that was the college that had the pure sciences I ended up there. Of course I didn’t realize how bad I was at language before I went because if I knew then what I know now I never would have gone to any school with that requirement.)
I guess it’s a north east thing because when I checked other schools around here(Admittedly years later since there was no web when I went) loads of them required it and it wasn’t unusual for them to require 2 years of it. (I actually did reasonably well in Latin in high school which is why I didn’t even check for it. However there were about 10 of us in that class and really there was no speaking or listening, just reading.) I guess one positive is that when my brothers were switching colleges they knew to avoid any school with a language requirement like the plague.
It is probably impossible to prove, as you say, because I doubt anyone has done scientific studies of thedifferences in testing and grading in different countries. All the evidence I have is anecdotal and to a large extent hearsay.
All the same your doubt is unwarranted. Things can be very different in other countries. Your basic assumptions about the basis for scoring are culturally specific.
For example, the idea that getting X percent of questions correct earns you an X percent score. That’snot a valid assumption. In many countries scores aren’t based on a “reward for success” concept but rather a “penalty for error” concept. Thus getting 1 percent of the questions wrong can lose you more – sometimes a lot more – than 1percent of the marks.
Also, here in the U.S., we are used to the idea that our grade at the end of the quarter or semester or year is based on an accumulation of numerous small assignment, tests, papers, and exams completed throughout the year. However in many countries you don’t get this chance to build up your grade slowly and steadily over the course of a year. Your grades depends on single, comprehensive exam graded anonymously covering multiple years’ worth of material.
Additionally, it is common in some countries fir individuals with the authority to give grades fir more subjective materials – essays instead of problems, in other words – to enforce arbitrary policies such as “I don’t care how good you are, nobody ever gets higher than X score from me.”
IIRC There are more people who speak English as a second language than speak it as a first language. That isn’t to say that they speak it well. It certainly is linguistic imperialism.
First Cornish, then the world!
In answer to the OP: In Sweden, my age group took up a second language in 4th grade (English), a third in the 7th grade (French, German or Spanish) and for students choosing a humanistic program in high school (we specialize early) a fourth (usually another from the previous list).
Having grown up in Sweden, I remember comparing education levels when I was in high school between Sweden and the States, both by comparing curriculum and from anecdotal evidence from friends who did an exchange year abroad. Swedish high school is a lot tougher, and Swedes that chose to go to college in the states skip the first one or two years. As further comparison, my M. Sc. (from a rather reputable Swedish technical university) took me at standard pace 4.5 years, compared to 6 (I believe) in the US.
The definition is rather difficult. I’d define an immigrant as speaking fluent Swedish when he could hold an unhindered conversation with me. On the other hand, most Swedes consider themselves perfectly fluent in English which I (being bilingual) very often don’t agree with. I’m not sure why, but I have a far higher standard for English speakers than I do of Swedish speakers.
In Singapore, your mother tongue (in my case, Chinese) is mandatory until around 17 years old. Your score in your mother tongue is counted as put of the average in your Primary School Leaving Examinations (English, Maths, Mother Tongue, and Science). After primary school, however, MT becomes a subject you merely need to pass to graduate.
I did badly for my PSLE Chinese and that affected my overall score. I could only enter an above average neighbourhood school. But after the weightage on my mother tongue was lessened in my secondary and junior college years, I’ve actually clambered up academically, so to speak.
There was this guy I knew from my primary school class whose poor Chinese was attributed to dyslexia, thus his Chinese grades were officially exempted from his PSLE score. He ended up in a better secondary school and a better junior college than he would have had if his Chinese had become a factor in his primary school score.
Consider how better-ranked schools tend to have better teachers and better learning environments. It seems that in my country your entire fate could rest on your PSLE, and thus also on your proficiency in your second language. The system prevents naturally monolingual people like me from getting into schools that could have further enhanced my education in other non-linguistic areas.
Oddly, my English is quite good and I routinely do well for for English language essays and comprehension, but the standard of my Chinese essays has hardly improved from primary school to junior college. I used the Chinese equivalent of ‘Jack’ as the name of my protagonist for every single narrative essay up to junior college.
Genetics doesn’t seem to have been a factor in language proficiency for me. 
I bitched about this in the Pit just yesterday, but I used to be an English teacher in a Bulgarian public school (an educational system in which all kids are required to study second and third languages) and total lack of understanding was no obstacle to getting passed on to the next grade. Unsurprisingly, the problem became worse as the grades increased. We had a specific curriculum mandated by the government, and the kids’ inability to speak English became more and more pronounced as time went on. My second graders did a great job of following along with the lessons. My eighth graders, on the other hand, with a couple of exceptions, couldn’t have passed a test on the subject matter they were supposedly learning if their lives depended on it.
But it was unfeasible to flunk an entire grade of kids just because they couldn’t speak English, so they just got passed year after year, each year becoming less and less able to understand the subject matter.
There are many reasons for this problem, but the essential one is that the Bulgarian government wants its kids to learn other languages, but isn’t willing to pay teachers a high enough wage to attract people who actually speak those languages. Bulgarians who legitimately speak English can inevitably find much, much higher-paying jobs than teaching. (The wage for a new teacher is 200 leva [100 euro] a month, which is quite literally not enough to live on.) The two English teachers at my school both spoke abominable English. One of my jobs was to improve my counterpart’s English, so I spoke to her almost entirely in English, but very, very often I would have to repeat myself in Bulgarian (and keep in mind she was teaching English years before I knew a single word of Bulgarian). I do think my constant chatting at her in English did help - but I know that if she ever got really good, she’d start looking for a new job in a second.
Yes. I lean towards your definition. It was also interesting to see SecTech use IMHO in his definition. That shows quite clearly that the “definition” is very subjective and open to interpretation.