I agree that the purpose of education is learning. Learning specifically so you have a certain skillset that makes you useful after graduation (key here is people’s expectations/desires of usefulness). I don’t agree that we learn to “make the world a better place”-thats a personal value. (Boy, I sound evil). I believe that we will act in our self-interest (obviously, some people highly value contributing to the community-great for them).

In general, however, you learn so one can fufill their chosen purpose. HOWEVER, because we all are slaves to the $ to varying degrees, we need other people (employers) to be interested in paying us for our purpose. They will pay the people who LEARNED the most/best at university. And, without ‘getting to know’ students or observing them @ the workplace for two years, the only rough way to see how much they learned is our standard marking system.

Therefore, as flawed and perhaps inaccurate a reporting system as it is, marks are important because they provide a measure of learning. And therefore, as false as it may be, I want to maximize my mark to make it appear that I maximized my learning.

What really would be ideal is a marking system that more accurately reflects learning. Professors make many incentives for marks unrelated to actual quality of learning; just work, or other bs (bonus marks for ….) There are so many cases of incentive in-congruencies…(given the goal is truly learning)

It was good seeing you again…druken @ mcdonalds and all.

I like this idea, but I don’t think it would work. If bonus credit was given for this, everybody would just spend an hour making Peerwise/Quizlet/study guides to share (probably just copying existing questions) just to get the extra credit, so I don’t think it would work.

I agree that the point of partaking in the education process is to learn, not to achieve good grades. However, from what I can see from people in first year, people aren’t learning anything any more. They are memorizing things to achieve good grades. This is definately not the point of education, but if the aspect of grades it taken away (that is, removing any and all motivation for a large portion of the student body), no memorization nor learning will take place. Education is confuzzling.

@Erwin I agree that if students are assessed purely on their ability to meet or exceed goals then grade curving is a useless procedure and should be removed entirely. Unfortunately here most courses seem to rely more on the numbers than the outcomes.

If you really want to grade on the curve and encourage students helping fellows by sharing their knowledge, maybe the amount of sharing should be taken into account when grading.

This is not to say that I believe our system is better, because we get stuck with those “professors who have lost touch with just how difficult their material is”. I do know some of these guys and their just convinced that it’s the students fault that only a mere 10% or so can pass their tests.

Hope one day we can give grading on a curve a test run back here. Keep up the good blogging!

Unless a student purposing leads others astray (something which surely is quite rare), I don’t think it “fosters malicious competition”. I think it “fosters competition”. The world isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, and my goal is to maximize my mark. In an ideal system, maximizing my mark would involve self study and working with others (and often, helping others IS in our best interest). However, if keeping a cheat sheet to ourselves will guarantee me a better grade than my peer-well, you get the picture.

Sharing can be a good thing…when its a good thing for you.