Froggiemama on gatekeeping, part 2 (and against zero)

To follow up on the story - we did go the special needs route after my extremely bright kid was gatekeepered out of every honors course for the 9th grade. Our district has cutoffs that range from 90 to 95, which you have to maintain for 3 quarters the year before. The problem is, the 8th grade teachers grade largely on vast reams of homework, which all must be submitted in the exact format mandated. It is all on paper, so everyday is a massive paper shuffle. If anything gets lost, it is a 0. The science teacher would take off points if the pen color was blue instead of black, or the margins were wrong, or there were fraggles left on the paper. So my smart but messy and forgetful kid could never get his average up over the cutoffs even though he aced the tests.

So we had a full neuropsych done to the tune of several thousand dollars, targeted at the school district. We learned, surprise, surprise, that my son scores in one of the higher reaches of the gifted realm (forget the term now for his level), and is also "inattentive ADHD". We did a 504 plan, during which I promised he would see a weekly therapist/coach (to the tune of $195 per week) and would take meds. Those promises finally got him a waiver to get into the honors courses. The last one to capitulate was science (his 8th grade science teacher hated him and refused to help out). And now, guess what? He has the highest average in the class in science, with several 100's on tests that the teacher says "no one gets a 100 on." Bleh to the gatekeepers.

As Susan S used to say, I don't even know where to begin.

Since I don't, and since I don't remember discussing this before, here is Douglas Reeves on "The Case Against Zero."

[T]he common use of the zero today is based not on a four-point scale but on a 100-point scale. This defies logic and mathematical accuracy. On a 100-point scale, the interval between numerical and letter grades is typically 10 points, with the break points at 90, 80, 70, and so on. But when the grade of zero is applied to a 100-point scale, the interval between the D and F is not 10 points but 60 points. Most state standards in mathematics require that fifth-grade students understand the principles of ratios -- for example, A is to B as 4 is to 3; D is to F as 1 is to zero. Yet the persistence of the zero on a 100-point scale indicates that many people with advanced degrees, including those with more background in mathematics than the typical teacher, have not applied the ratio standard to their own professional practices. To insist on the use of a zero on a 100-point scale is to assert that work that is not turned in deserves a penalty that is many times more severe than that assessed for work that is done wretchedly and is worth a D. Readers were asked earlier how many points would be awarded to a student who failed to turn in work on a grading scale of 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, but I'll bet not a single person arrived at the answer "minus 6." Yet that is precisely the logic that is employed when the zero is awarded on a 100- point scale.

There are two issues at hand. The first, and most important, is to determine the appropriate consequence for students who fail to complete an assignment. The most common answer is to punish these students. Evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, there is an almost fanatical belief that punishment through grades will motivate students. In contrast, there are at least a few educators experimenting with the notion that the appropriate consequence for failing to complete an assignment is to require the student to complete the assignment. That is, students lose privileges -- free time and unstructured class or study-hall time -- and are required to complete the assignment. The price of freedom is proficiency, and students are motivated not by threats of failure but by the opportunity to earn greater freedom and discretion by completing work accurately and on time. I know my colleagues well enough to understand that this argument will not persuade many of them. Rewards and punishments are part of the psyche of schools, particularly at the secondary level.

Froggiemama on gatekeeping, part 1

Report from the front

The other day I was introduced to a dean at a progressive private school. We chatted, and at some point I asked how the school assesses student learning.

The dean was vague. He mentioned teachers "reflecting" a couple of times, and then said the school is moving more and more to students assessing themselves, which also involves reflecting.

Funny thing: just last week I talked to a friend of mine whose son attends the school. She says the school has rampant grade inflation, and her son has learned nothing but his grades are good. He learns so little at school that he had two full-time tutors all last school year. (This is a very smart kid, by the way. No learning problems, no behavior problems.) When she took him to the SAT tutor she used with an older child in the family, the tutor told her there's no way he can prepare her son to take the SAT Math Subject test.

I told my friend about "Teach Like a Champion" classes: rapid-fire, high-energy events, with cold-calling and choral response, and said we need charter schools for rich kids. Parents should at least have the option of putting their kids in classrooms where kids spend a a lot of time practicing, not just discussing.

My friend is athletic, and she sparked to the idea it instantly. She said her son would love it, and he would remember what's been taught because he would be practicing in class.

Grade inflation and no practice during class-time: that is a recipe for total disengagement in a lot of kids.

more fun with middle school

An Amazon book review:

The reason I gave this book two stars, is because we use this book in our class all of the time. Most of the stories and poems in here are hard to understand and complicated.

I know that you are supposed to use your mind, and there is no right or wrong answer, but you can not use your mind if you dont know what is going on. I keep getting zero's on my daybook assignments, because all I can put in the margins or the pages to write what you think, is that I can't write anything because it was hard to understand, so I get zero's for not understanding, and that to me isnt fair! So, I think that if to this book you tell your opinion, I think that if your opinion is that you didnt understand it, than that should still be counted as "no right or wrong answer".

Amazon review of Daybook of Critical Reading And Writing (Grade 6)

The fabulous thing here is that this student is attempting a fairly sophisticated argument. It's an argument of the jailhouse lawyer type, of course, but still. He or she is onto something. S/he just needs better writing skills to pull it off.

Unfortunately, better writing skills aren't in the offing, I predict. Daily zeros on daybook assignments are a proven time-waster even the Writing the Essay people don't go in for.

p.s: Someone needs to tell this student about the Postmodernism Generator.

p.p.s.: I was going to title this post "Why we fight" but I thought that would be over the top.

handwriting and grades and the wisdom of the crowd

Even legible handwriting that's messy can have its own ramifications, says Steve Graham, professor of education at Vanderbilt University. He cites several studies indicating that good handwriting can take a generic classroom test score from the 50th percentile to the 84th percentile, while bad penmanship could tank it to the 16th. "There is a reader effect that is insidious," Dr. Graham says. "People judge the quality of your ideas based on your handwriting."
How Handwriting Boosts the Brain by Gwendolyn Bounds | WSJ | October 5, 2010

I absolutely believe that. And I doubt teachers can turn this bias off. Cognitive biases can't be turned off at will.

Grades and grading are a mess. Probably for writing especially.

Speaking of writing and grades, I had a thought the other day. It's not possible, under the current system, for teachers to grade papers according to an objective standard. An A paper for one teacher is a B paper for another teacher is a C paper for a third.

In theory, a testing company can achieve 'rater reliability' by dint of extensive training sessions, although Todd Farley's account of his experience in the industry makes me wonder.

But is training-up individual graders to apply the same standards as their colleagues (even if it's possible) the best approach?

Maybe not.

Any teacher can (or should be able to) correct a paper's grammar, punctuation, and spelling. I assume teachers are going to agree on grammar, punctuation, and spelling far more often more than they disagree.

Beyond that, however, I'm not sure you actually want a uniform response across teachers. "Writing" as a profession or a business obligation means writing for an audience of more than one reader, and the individuals who make up that audience don't necessarily agree amongst themselves that you've said what you've said or that you've said it well. Writers learn from these disagreements.

Maybe students would also benefit from a 'diversity' of reader reaction?

If I had my druthers, I would scrap the letter-grading of writing altogether, apart from scoring punctuation, grammar, and spelling, simply on grounds that the letter-grading of student writing is simply too inconsistent to be credible.

I would experiment with some kind of Intrade or Wisdom of the Crowd approach. Farm papers out to a bunch of readers who read quickly and check off a thumbs-up or thumbs-down option. Something simple. Then give everyone the results for everyone.

Students would receive a kind of polling or survey result instead of a grade: a rough sense of how well their papers worked for an audience compared to papers written by their peers.

Of course, students would need to be able to read the work of their peers to see what kind of paper produced what kind of global response.

Or -- here's a thought -- perhaps schools could create an extensive set of exemplar student papers that have been 'voted on' by a large number of instructors. As a teacher of freshman writing I would kill to have such a resource myself.

I don't know whether a system along these lines would offer useful or 'actionable' information to students.

But I think it might.

games people play

the Exo thread has comments on grade deflation, which Exo has not seen in the schools she teaches in:

Exo:

In fact, I've being teaching for 6 years now. Of course, I have not being teaching in really Upscale schools - but I have not met a teacher yet who actually would want to lower the grade of a student; in fact, most of us are looking to bring the grades up... Many are afraid that students failing will result in the very least with a talk with the supervisor (and that's a no-no for a untenured teacher) or other unpleasant consequences - for the teacher, not for the student.

So, there come in poster projects in HS, HW crossword puzzles, in class time spent on making PPt presentations etc... The grades must go up - to cover for HWs never done, tests failed, quizzes missed..

Catherine:

We're exactly the opposite.

The scores are always high no matter what the school does (high relative to scores from urban/rural areas), and the parents are PITAs [in eyes of admin] and the school needs a way to keep students out of Honors/AP ....

Princeton, btw, has a formal policy of grade deflation.

At the end of the semester, professors have to limit the number of As they assign as final grades, even if students have been getting As all semester.

That's Princeton. Super-expensive, super-achieving students.

Grade deflation.

Anonymous:

All too true! There's a push to cap the top grades and an easy way to do that is to demand the impossible of and/or downgrade the work of the top students, because "they could do better than this." Of course, by doing group projects (teacher chooses groups, of course), lower-achieving kids can be given top grades for work done wholly by the top kids, who don't want to risk a lower grade by letting others do the work. And the gap vanishes! There are lots of similar games...

SAT Verbal Tutor:

Wellesley now has a formal grade deflation policy as well (at least in 100- and 200-level classes; upper level seminars don't have a cap). I know that a lot of professors felt like they were backed into a corner because of it -- in the past, they would have been generous to an A-/B+ student whose grades rose throughout the semester, but after the policy was implemented (after I graduated), they had no choice but to grade down because they didn't want the administration on their case.

AND SEE:
winner-take-all schools ALL POSTS

The achievement gap: how our schools are working hard to make it go away

If you're concerned about achievement gaps of the sort recently reported on by the Times, you could either (re)instate rigorous, structured, direct instruction in line with the latest findings in cognitive science research, teaching each child in his or her Zone of Proximal Development, i.e., at his or her instructional level, with proper scaffolding, and furnishing each classroom with teachers who've mastered both their content areas and these best practices. Or you could:


I. Eliminate the ability of academically advanced students to get ahead in the classroom by:

1. implementing low level, one-size-fits-all instruction (for which there's no better model than Investigations math)

2. eliminating grade acceleration and individualized instruction

3. eliminating gifted programming or making it about time-consuming projects that supplement existing assignments rather about academic challenges that replace these assignments.

II. Reduce the ability of students to get ahead on their own time by:

1. assigning tons of homework of the low-ratio-of-learning-to-effort variety 

2. including massive summer projects and one-size-fits all reading lists.

III. Reduce the ability of grades to reflect achievement differences via"grade compression" and inflexible "rubrics" that:

1. employ subjective grading standards (elevating "creativity" and "engagement" over correct answers, clarity, articulateness, and solid analysis) 

2. take points off for unexplained answers, however correct 

3. give partial credit for "explained" incorrect answers 

4. keep the purely academic demands/expectations of assessments and assignments as low as possible 

4. minimize the opportunity for students to demonstrate work that exceeds those demands/expectations 

5. even if students find a way to demonstrably exceed expectations or go above and beyond academically, don't give them any extra points for it 

6. deploy "wild card" variables that partially randomize who gets what grade (e.g., trick questions; unclear directions; trivial requirements like including today's date on the title page of your report or using the word "I" in your science project abstract; rather than collecting homework, leaving it up to the students to turn it in and giving out zeroes for things not turned in on time) 

7. assign heterogeneous-ability group projects and give everyone in the group the same grade

IV. Reduce the ability of NCLB tests to reflect achievement differences, via:

1. low academic ceilings 

2. partial credit for explained incorrect answers; points off for unexplained correct answers (as above) 

3. wild card variables (as above)

V. Lobby colleges to pay less attention to high-ceiling standardized tests like the SATs and the Achievement Tests, and more attention to grades and "leadership" activities.



But then the next question becomes how to eliminate the growing achievement gap between U.S. students and those from other developed countries.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)

from the archives: grading student writing

from 2009:

Students have long believed (on good evidence) that if the same paper is submitted to two teachers in two different sections of the same course, the paper is likely to receive two very different grades. In 1961, Paul Diederich and his colleagues proved that this student belief is no myth. When 30 student papers were graded by fifty-three graders (a total of 15,900 readings), more than one third of the papers received every possible grade. That is, 101 of the 300 papers received all nine grades: A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, and D. Diederich also reported that

94 percent [of the papers] received either seven, eight or nine different grades; and no essay received less than five different grades from fifty-three readers. Even when the raters were experienced teachers, the grades given to the papers by the different raters never attained a correlation greater than .40. Diederich, P.B., French, J.W., and Carlton, S.T. "Factors in judgments of writing ability." Research Bulletin RB-61-15. Princeton, N.J.: Educational Testing Service, 60 pp.
The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them
E. D. Hirsch
185-188

writers should take the SAT

I was just talking to Debbie S, who reminded me that a passage from one of my books appeared on an SAT critical reading section. I think it was a section of Animals in Translation, but I don't recall at the moment and can't seem to scare up the email she sent me with the passage attached).

Meanwhile Debbie is no slouch in the professional writing department, either. Her book will be published by a major house, and her advance puts her in a small and select group.

We both have 10s.

I think other writers should take the SAT and see how they do. We can compile a database. I'm serious:  I'd love to see how 'real writers' do on the SAT essay. I'm guessing we'd see a lot of 10s.

Actually, I'd like to see professors take the SAT. I'd be willing to wager a small sum of money that college professors would consistently score lower than top-scoring high school students.

I'm not exactly sure why I think this, but I imagine it has to do with the K-12 grading I've been dealing with over the years.<sup>*

*</sup>grade deflation posts

AP science & math

from Education Week:

Begun in the 1950s to let gifted students undertake college-level work in high school, AP courses, in Mr. Sadler’s words, have since become “the juggernaut of high school education.” Growing at a rate of 9.3 percent a year in the past two decades, enrollment in AP courses well outpaces the 1 percent yearly increase in the number of students graduating from high school, the book says.

[snip]

...some students elect to retake the AP course they took in high school by enrolling in an introductory-level course in the same subject in college.

In his study, Mr. Sadler and his research partner, Gerhard Sonnert, look more closely at the retakers in 55 randomly selected colleges across the country.

Their aim was to see whether students who took and passed high school AP courses had an edge over their college classmates in the same subject, after controlling for differences in students’ academic backgrounds or previous science coursework. (AP course-takers typically have more extensive science backgrounds and better grades than non-AP students.)

The answer, judging by the students’ grades in the introductory-level college classes, was yes. The former AP students didn’t ace the classes—their grades fell on average in the range of B to B-plus—but they did better in their chemistry, physics, and biology classes than peers without any AP experience.

That was not the case, though, for students who had previously failed an AP biology test; they fared no better in that subject in college.

Grade Bump

In another study featured in the book, Mr. Sadler also applies some systematic analysis to the GPA-boosting “bonus points” that high schools often assign to AP-course grades. College-admissions officers also use similar methods to add weight to AP-course grades when comparing students’ grades.

To find out if the extra points were warranted, Mr. Sadler asked college students in 113 introductory biology, physics, and chemistry courses about the level of high school science courses they had taken and the grades they received in them. He then compared the results with professors’ reports of their students’ grades in those introductory science classes.

Mr. Sadler found that students who took honors or AP courses in high school science added an average of 2.4 grade points, on a 100-point scale, to their college science grades for each additional level of rigor. Based on that calculation, he figures that students who take honors courses ought to receive an extra half-point on a grade-point-average scale of 1 to 4, while AP courses ought to be worth an extra point, and an extra 2 points if students pass the exam.

Book Trains Critical Eye on AP Program's Impact
By Debra Viadero
Published in Print: March 17, 2010, as Book Eyes Impact of AP Classes and Exams
Education Week

A Critical Examination of the Advanced Placement Program
Edited by Philip M. Sadler, Gerhard Sonnert, Robert H. Tai, and Kristin Klopfenstein

"Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World"

Catherine has encouraged me to post an announcement of my book's release:




Here (edited slightly) is what I wrote to Catherine yesterday:

Though it's not the general critique of education that I initially intended to write, I'm hoping its focus on the special needs of a specific kind of child ("left-brainers," in the vernacular sense of the term) will help it bypass some of the political polarization out there and reach a broader spectrum of educators. And allow me, ultimately, to publish my general critique.

I am happy that one of the chapter titles (chosen by my editor) is "Hindered by Reform Math and Other Trends in K-12 education," and I do make a more general case against those trends in the penultimate chapter.

I'm concerned that some of what I write may suggest that I subscribe to "learning styles" theory--about which I'm generally skeptical (but I'm still trying to find out whether there's any empirical research on differences in "cognitive bandwidth"--i.e., individual differences in "linear"/one-thing-at-a-time thinking and learning vs. "big picture"/holistic thinking and learning).

My main thesis, however, is based not on learning styles theory but on all the testimonials I've collected, and it is that:

Children who are the least socially skilled and most analytically inclined are among the most shortchanged by the current system--both in terms of the quality of their classroom experiences, and in terms of the grades they earn.

These children include, of course, many on the autistic spectrum.

KTM has been a wonderful resource for my book. I quote Catherine (anonymously) in a couple of places (on choosing "Hogwarts"; on whether writers collaborate in groups); I also quote Allison on how American-educated vs. foreign educated fare at MIT.

grading student writing

Lynn G asked:

If 80% of student feedback is wrong, what % of teacher feedback is wrong? Are we just assuming that the teacher is 100% correct the 20% of the time they actually provide feedback?

Hah!

I wish ---

Students have long believed (on good evidence) that if the same paper is submitted to two teachers in two different sections of the same course, the paper is likely to receive two very different grades. In 1961, Paul Diederich and his colleagues proved that this student belief is no myth. When 30 student papers were graded by fifty-three graders (a total of 15,900 readings), more than one third of the papers received every possible grade. That is, 101 of the 300 papers received all nine grades: A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, and D. Diederich also reported that

94 percent [of the papers] received either seven, eight or nine different grades; and no essay received less than five different grades from fifty-three readers. Even when the raters were experienced teachers, the grades given to the papers by the different raters never attained a correlation greater than .40. Diederich, P.B., French, J.W., and Carlton, S.T. "Factors in judgments of writing ability." Research Bulletin RB-61-15. Princeton, N.J.: Educational Testing Service, 60 pp.

The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them
E. D. Hirsch
pages 185-188

Grade Reversal?

I'm collecting anecdotes!

Specifically about cases in which smart students are getting lower grades than their classmates. 

Perhaps they aren't explaining their answers to math problems.

Perhaps they don't do well with the arts & crafts/"creativity" components of English and social studies assignments.

Perhaps they don't cooperate well in group assignments.

Perhaps they participate insufficiently in class discussions.

Perhaps their classrooms are too cluttered and chaotic for them to concentrate.

Perhaps they are overwhelmed by big, interdisciplinary projects and multi-step directions.

Perhaps they are too uninspired to "go that extra mile" that top grades require.

And perhaps the actual academic requirements in math, science, writing, etc., are so low that they have no way to exhibit their strengths.

Whatever your child's/students story is, please share it here.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)

portfolio assessment and grade deflation

I've left a comment at Flypaper re: portfolio assessments used to deflate high achievers' grades.

Grade deflation is a topic near and dear to my heart.

Grade compression at colleges and universities, II

It's inevitable that, the more students catch on that B's are the new low, the more fervently they want A's.

As the dual forces of student evaluations and cynical burnout continue to exert upwards pressure on faculty grading practices, wants becomes expects becomes deserves.

Only those few who believe that grades should still mean something, and that they should somehow reward those whose work is truly distinguished, get to see the somersaults that the mediocre majority will turn to argue for A's.

From two of my B+ students (all identifing details removed):

I am writing to you with concern regarding my grade... I was just wondering what areas you felt I needed to improve on to earn an A because I completed all of my work, papers and participated in class as best as I could have. Is there anything I can do to have my grade reconsidered?

-----

I just checked my final grade online and saw that I got a B+. Can you tell me the breakdown of my grades? Most of my problem sets were V+ [no, they weren't] and I attended every class and tried to participate in lectures. The only reason why I am asking is because I felt confident that I would receive an A in the course.

What surprised me about these two students in particular was that each seemed to be putting in so little effort (as evinced, for example, by their papers--thickets of typos in what looked like stream-of-consciousness keyboarding, printed out and never actually read) that I'd assumed they were at peace with B grades. It never dawned on me that they might be expecting A's.

At least as disturbing is the most likely explanation for this expectation: presumably, all their other professors are giving them A's--along with every other student who shows up and turns things in.

All the worse for those who actually deserve top grades--particularly the left-brained crowd whose greatest strengths are typically more in academics than in extracurriculars and other varieties of resume-stuffing, not to mention career networking, schmoozing, and grade grubbing.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)

Grade compression at colleges and universities

Only in the last few months, thanks in part to Catherine, have I become aware of how grade compression has permeated our grade schools.

My first experience with this phenomenon was over a dozen years ago, when I finished up my PhD and began adjuncting at local colleges.

While the consequences of grade compression in colleges and universities are probably similar to its consequences in grade schools--among other things, disfavoring the brightest students by clumping grades together into an ever smaller number of slots--the underlying forces, my experience suggests, are quite different.

On the one hand, I'd get emails from deans bemoaning the institution's rampant grade inflation and asking instructors to be sparing with A's. On the other hand, I'd get complaints from students who received anything below a B. Sometimes those students would successfully lobby the very deans who'd sent the emails, who'd then ask me to change C's to B's.

The only way to keep everyone happy--a key consideration for adjuncts, whose standing is largely a function of student evaluations, and whose renewal is at the pleasure of deans-- was to make B the new C (and D, and sometimes F), and compress all grades into a B- to A range.

So I'd reserve the A's for the two or three best students, including some I'd prefer to give A-'s to; translate the B's and B+'s to A-'s, B-'s to B+'s, and everything else to a B. It was more important, I felt, to make finer distinctions at the top than the bottom. That way, the very best might still gain some distinction--albeit not nearly as much as they once did.

After a 4-year hiatus from teaching, I've returned to find that my A-B grade scale is no longer compressed enough for many students...

But more on that in my next post.

(Cross posted at Out in Left Field).

Parent Report Cards ?

A republican board of ed member in Manchester, Connecticut (not my town) is proposing parent report cards -- giving grades to parents on how well they do at getting involved in their children's education.

Parent Report Cards


Apparently this was tried in Chicago 7 years ago -- and abandoned after 1 year. Hard to believe, but it didn't solve the problems and actually created resentment between parents and teachers. Who could have predicted that?

He said the program would not be punitive, but instead would help the district identify struggling parents who might need support.

They can't identify the struggling parents without grading all of them?

And how do you think that Board will respond when parents demand the right to grade the teachers, administrators and board members?

An Extremely Bad Idea

Crossposted on my blog.

Science Goddess is discussing the idea of giving Incompletes in secondary school (thanks to Joanne Jacobs for pointing it out--I'm not sure how I missed it on my first read through the Carnival this week). In the comments, I said that I'd have to think about it, but that my first reaction was that this was a remarkably bad idea.

The more I thought about it, the worse it seemed. It would have been bad enough if it were assigning an Incomplete for the whole class, but it's even more disastrous because it's assigning Incompletes for assignments. So if little Jimmy doesn't do his homework, instead of getting a zero for it, he gets an Incomplete (and we'll ignore the fact that Jimmy has earned an F, or perhaps leave it for another day).

We university types know something about Incompletes. Students ask for Incompletes all the time, and nearly always, the answer is "No," and for very good reasons. I've had this conversation with so many faculty members and grad students that I know it's not just my, or even a minority opinion. Incompletes are bad all the way around, for lots of different reasons. And the best example that the university--not just me or a handful of us--knows that Incompletes are bad is your nearest university policy on giving Incompletes. The typical university states that they should be given only in extraordinary circumstances beyond the control of the student. As another example, many universities also have policies that convert Incompletes into Fs after a specified time limit, usually a year.

Certainly, there are a handful of faculty who hand Incompletes out like candy, but they are a very small minority (or newly-minted PhDs who have next to no teaching experience). Incompletes are trouble all the way around, for the faculty member, for the university administration, and most of all, for the student.

Several commented that giving Incompletes sends the message that deadlines aren't important, and that's a valid objection, though by no means the only one, or even the major one. More importantly, it sends the message that deadlines--and assignments--aren't to be taken seriously, that work isn't important, and that managing time isn't important. Worst of all, it is grossly unfair to those students responsible enough to have done their work and turned it in on time--unforgivably unfair. Any teacher who would have handed out Incompletes in any class where I was a student to others who couldn't be bothered to do their work would have earned my undying, intense, cold hatred, the type of hatred that makes fantasizing about that teacher's gruesome, painful, tortuous death and screams of pain an erotic experience. And if I had children in a class and found out that the teacher was giving lazy little Jimmy an Incomplete instead of an F, you had better believe I would be in that teacher's office raising hell until he changed the policy.

But all that aside, there are other excellent reasons not to give Incompletes under these circumstances. A student gets an Incomplete because he is behind. If you could wave a magic wand and stop the passage of time so Jimmy could get caught up, it wouldn't be a problem--but you can't. What invariably happens is that as the class moves on, Jimmy either forgets about the Incomplete and stays behind, or doesn't, and gets further behind the rest of the class.

Most of the time, Jimmy forgets about the Incomplete, and never finishes it. This is why universities have implemented time limits on Incompletes, turning them into Fs if they aren't completed within a specified time. Or if Jimmy doesn't forget the Incomplete, he invariably turns in the paper or report or project at the very end of the semester, when the instructor is snowed with many hours of grading, recording grades, and turning in grades.

Jimmy assumes that his Incomplete will be given highest priority, but reality is the opposite (for obvious reasons). His report is put on the bottom of the already huge stack, or in a drawer so it won't get lost, and all too often, the instructor is so snowed with grading and end of the semester duties that, well, Jimmy's report falls through the cracks and turns into an F.

Jimmy's Incomplete then becomes an administrative nightmare. Rarely is the problem going to be noticed by the instructor; after all, had the instructor remembered, he would have graded the report. No, Jimmy or his parents will discover the problem when the grades come, and then (pardon the French) seventeen different kinds of hell will explode. The administration will call the department chair onto the carpet, and the department chair will then chew out the instructor. The instructor will then have to find Jimmy's report (where did I put that?), grade it, calculate a final course grade, file a change of grade form, and then explain to Jimmy that it can take the university up to a year before the grade change will be reflected on his transcript (ain't bureaucracy wonderful?)

And those are university Incompletes, given as a course grade. The proposal under discussion is giving Incompletes as assignment grades. Say the teacher gives twenty assignments. Multiply the problems mentioned above by twenty.

The best thing I can say about this idea is that any teacher who implements it will drop it after he recovers from his nervous breakdown.