Marking with a difference

Why are we giving marks to the answers and assignments ? Only a minority of students take a clue from their poor marks and work hard to improve on specific skills (if ever we tell them what those skills are).

We know very well that absolute performance has a wide spread in any class, so it hardly helps if one child gets 2 out-of 10 and another 9 out-of 10. The good grades of one child don't percolate to another child like osmosis !

Percentile is even worse way to evaluate a child (compared to absolute marks) as it enhances the competency differences and has less to do with progress of each child. These marking schemes are like a fuzzy snap-shot of progress in time.

It's the progress per child that we want to track and not the absolute performance.

So shouldn't we be giving marks for how much a child has improved on the Simple Evaluation Metric (SEM) between the last assignment (the slope of the gradient) and the current one ? Larger the improvement greater the n, e, s score.

The marks should say - you have improved n, on neatness; e, on English; and s, on Subject understanding - between the last assignment and the current assignment !.

• So a good teacher is one whose class has high average <n>, <e> and <s>, averaged over all the students over one academic year
• A good school is where average <n>, <e> and <s> is high for all students, all classes.

Its a place where all students do far better, as compared to themselves, year after year.

ReMarks not Marks

I try not to give marks for assignments. Giving 3 out-of 10 to a child hardly says what exactly is missing in his/her work. Instead, I give Remarks, +ve and -ve.

• In the +ve remarks, I highlight a.what is done correctly and b. what can be done to improve upon it.
• In the -ve remarks I write a.what is not done correctly and b.how it can be done correctly.

I do give marks for my own reference using Simple Evaluation Metric (SEM) as a baseline performance of each student - but students don't get to know these marks.