The rationale there is that since it’s a percentage, if you do worse than 50%, you are literally doing worse than random chance.
You have to beat random to get a bare minimum passing grade.
So it does make sense, in a sense.
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Right you should be displaying competency with the skills/knowledge being tested, so if you take a 10 question test and each question is worth 10, ideally most students should be getting at least 7-8 right if the competency has been taught.
Of course, there is a place for “unlimited ceiling” testing.
My AP Biology class in 10th grade was like that. The questions were complex and spanned well beyond the basic course material and even in some cases the textbooks. Getting 20% was a passing grade. Getting 100% meant you literally knew enough to be employed in biology academia.
The average scores on the tests were around 12%. The best I ever did was ~40% once, and that was because it was focused on cellular biology, which I was interested in enough to study outside of the material.
It worked. Most of us got 5s on the AP test. The AP test seemed trivial compared to what we’d done in class.
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This is my school of thought. I’ve applied it to some of my hobby stuff, where I’ve designed and implemented rubrics for competitions. I basically set the top achievement level at “unreasonable” to “impossible” in an attempt to get effectively infinite granularity.
You run into morale issues if that’s the only approach, but it’s a valid method of analysis.
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The key benefit of unlimited ceiling tests is that the test itself also teaches in addition to evaluating. Simply by reading questions and thinking about answers, even though you have not been formally taught the material, could be enough to cause learning to happen.
The downside was that a handful of people couldn’t deal with it. They freaked out and quit the class. They couldn’t handle not having been told the answers, and were incapable of truly independent study.
We started with 12 kids (more than usual). We ended with 8.
It was the second most challenging class I ever took in my life. In 10th grade…
But it got me out of 16 credit hours at RIT!
What kind of freak out? You can just draw a line on the test separating the first 20% from the rest. Concentrate on that. Then the rest of the test just be like whatev, let’s go for extra credit.
They freaked out at the fact that half the questions weren’t covered in the class at any point. They could only be tackled at all if you did independent research.
That concept bothered two people deeply. They complained about it, and later got moved out of the class. The other two didn’t freak out so much as fail utterly.
But you can get an A without doing them. The questions are just sitting there. You can even ignore them safely if you want. Like when you beat Super Metroid, but you don’t get 100% clear.
surely you’ve seen or remember parents who wouldn’t settle for their children receiving anything less than 100% in academics
Their brains couldn’t handle it. They got scarily mad about the fundamental concept of “this wasn’t covered in the class.” It was purely philosophical. It didn’t even affect their grades.
The tests were scored on simple “curve.” Whatever the highest actual score in the class was “counted” as 100% for the grade. So if I got a 16%, and someone else got 11%, we were graded as 100% and 95%. Even better for them, if someone was way off the charts on the upper end, the curve would be set at the second highest score.
The grading worked because everyone either got nearly the same score, or got around a zero (the other two kids who didn’t make it).
It was an awesome class. These kids just had weird issues with it.
Seems like within a structured learning environment, some very studious “by the book” type learning people can’t handle staring into the void and being faced with the utter vastness of knowledge of which there could be to possess and the insignificance of the range they are currently taking in. In a class environment where there’s a set curriculum of coverage and it doesn’t bother you with going outside the confines to learn more but just focus on the current tasks, they can compartmentalize their mental intake to focus on what’s in front of them and absorb it. From that framing it feels like progress was made and accomplishments achieved. “Congrats you got 100% of the content in your brain hole!” When they are explicitly shown “this is but the tutorial, you are like a little baby” by the class structure itself, people probably can’t handle that contextualization of what they’re doing.
And I’m sure other types of people get it, and can thrive when encouraged to dig in and figure stuff out and get rewarded for it.
Obviously if you can’t handle that freedom and vastness you shouldn’t be in the AP to begin with.
I never gave half of enough fucks to get into such classes. But I did draw on all my homework. I now wonder if I had people try getting me into more interesting type of classes (if those even existed where I went) would I have been more interested in the learning? Clearly I was always reading and learning on my own, but it was about nuclear science and astronomy instead of, well, maths and basic science stuff.
Err, non-Heat non-Mohicans.
It’s okay, I got what you meant. His newer, digital stuff that he made starting with Collateral.
I thought the words ColLasteral of the MoHeatcans and now I can’t unthink them.
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That’s all I could think about after that.
Edit: Also, if you’re curious about that artist here is their site. I discovered them from their cheesed room.
number fifteen
burlington coat lettuce