“But How Many Points is it Worth?”

confusedstudentI’m giving a test this week and, predictably, it’s worth a certain percentage of the students’ final grades in the class — which reminds me of a much earlier experience I had when students in my intro course complained that my syllabus was only out of 100 possible points when their other courses were worth 715 points or maybe 864 points, or sometimes even more!

Who was I to limit their chances by making my course out of only 100?

Which prompted me to ask them what they would think if I offered two sections of the same course one semester and made the one out of 10, with ten assignments worth only one point each (“What? I got only 0.832 out of 1?!”), while the other course would be out of 1,000,000 — you heard me right, one million points! — with ten assignments worth one hundred thousand points each (“WOW! I got 83,200 points on that test!”).

I tend to think that the point system — something utterly foreign to my own undergraduate education, when we understood what “70 percent” meant — developed from teachers uninterested in making tests that had an even number of equally weighted questions (standardized tests in public ed is surely behind this somehow, no?); just make a test with an arbitrary number of questions worth varying numbers of points each, record raw scores in your grade book, add them all up at the end of the semester, and then turn it all into a percentage behind the scenes and just assign a letter grade.

But this led to students — not prepared to work with fractions and, for some reason, unable to keep track of their own performance in a class — who somehow thought that a course out of a total possible 964 points was somehow worth more than one out of 100, failing to realize that, sooner or later, some basic math would turn 832/964 into 86.3%.

Voila, you earned a B+.

That their chances of earning a strong grade are, probably, more closely linked to the total number of assignments (that is, the number of opportunities they have to earn a grade, thereby allowing them to minimize on one or two poor performances) is not something they realize. Instead, they seem to approach the course like the high score on a video game.

Somehow this is surely linked to most people’s inability today to make change at a cash register without the machine telling them what to give back to the customer…, but I’d better end this post here, coz I’m starting to sound like an old crabby man.