Something that's been brought home to me by my 8yo doing virtual school is the absolute pointlessness of test grades: a thread.
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As part of virtual school, 8yo often has to do online quizzes- the same sort of thing he might do in a class, except that, by necessity, these are all multiple choice, which means that, as soon as he hits submit, he gets a graded result. He also gets the option to try again.
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We don't always take the try-again option, but I very much like that it's there - because it means that, when he *does* do badly on a quiz, I can sit down with him for the redo and walk him through each question, figuring out where he missed something or went wrong.
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I don't give him the answers: I just make sure that he fully understands each question, and tell him if he makes a mistake. This enables him to think through the material, figure out the issue and, eventually, get it right - and that means he's LEARNED.
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But in a regular school setting, you don't get the redo option. You just get a grade like 10/25, and a markup that either gives you the answers without explaining how they were reached or simply says the one you gave was wrong, neither of which helps the child to learn.
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It ought to be intuitive that a wrong answer means more explanation is needed. Instead, we rely on giving a numerical mark, which not only puts the onus of correcting any mistakes on the student, but disincentivizes that correction, b/c the right answer no longer counts.
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I accepted this as a student because nobody ever suggested an alternative, but as a parent now, whenever I sit down to work with my kid, it just feels totally ass-backwards that finalising a grade is prioritised over fixing any deficiencies that grade revealed. Why?
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The further my kid progresses through the education system, the greater the disconnect I feel with the idea that I'm meant to support it uncritically, and the more I feel that teenage!me, who ended school *furious* with how the secondary system worked, was correct.
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All this is a way of saying: as a millennial who lived through the massive dissonant shift between What School Was Meant To Prepare You For vs How Employment Works Now, my baseline faith that a specific mode of schooling is Vital To My Child's Future is, uh, nil.
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