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Radford Neal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in sci.stat.edu:
>In my opinion, this verges on dishonesty. It seems to be motivated by
>the desire to avoid complaints from students who get a 79 and think
>that some small increase in a mark on some component would put them
>over the boundary line. Such students can indeed be annoying, but
>avoiding the problem by lying to them about the location of the
>boundary line is not the proper solution.
I think the problem here is that grading is not an exact science. It
is probably true that some slight change in their work (or in how it
was graded) would have bumped them to a 78 or an 80.
After all, if a student computes a z test statistic using the sample
standard deviation, about all we can agree on is that she should not
get full marks. But some teachers would give nearly full marks
(assuming that is the only thing wrong in the student's solution),
some would give no marks or almost none, and others would fall
various places in between. This is a matter of each teacher's style,
and there's no objective way to assign partial credit in such a
situation.
Yet the difference in how that one problem is graded can well make a
difference between 78, 79, and 80 in a student's overall course
percentage.
That said, I agree with Neal that it's dishonest to fudge the
problem by pretending that it doesn't exist. No matter what grading
system we have (even pass-fail), there will inevitably be students
where the decision is a close one.
--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
"My theory was a perfectly good one. The facts were misleading."
-- /The Lady Vanishes/ (1938)
.
.
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