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>> Every one of us has the experience of either receiving a grade
or assigning a grade to a student.
Before I talk more, I would like to introduce this quotation from Albert Einstein,
"not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts".
If connects a grade to the wisdom of Einstein,
one question will pop up, what counts for a grade?
This is what my thesis aims to find and more specifically,
my study investigates what has been counted for a grade.
I used to believe that my grades reflected my achievement and my achievement only.
So did my mom, if I told her that I got a D for my course,
she would just ask me "that's how much you have learned with my money?"
Well, wait a minute, researchers have implied that information a grade carries may not be
as simple as what it looks like, either a letter or a number simple.
This suggested that teachers try to involve many types of information besides achievement
into a grade; say, student's attendance and effort.
So in my study, I included both achievement and non-achievement in the factors.
Achievement factors referred to as a percentage of learning objectives a student had mastered
and non-achievement factors included a student's attendance, effort, progress and ability.
Then I build these factors into real life scenarios and as the teachers
who assign the grade to each of the student described in each scenario;
results show that teachers involved in non-achievement factors in their grades --
so for example, if you have mastered a 90% of the learning objectives,
your final grade would be 85 just because you didn't attend all of the classes.
In addition, among four non-achievement factors, teachers were found to put a greatest value
on attendance and then effort, followed by progress and ability.
So you see, many factors have counted for a grade so the grade becomes an indicator
of everything instead of indicator of achievement only.
Now if we go back to what Einstein has said, we must pay attention to two points; one,
non-achievement factors such as effort, progress and ability are by nature and countable; two,
if a grade is an indicator of everything, then it will be an indicator of nothing.
Imagine that you are sending your transcripts to universities, employers, scholarship
and the research funding committees, how will they interpret your grades?
Will they say well, that's how much a student has mastered
or will they just shrug their shoulders and shake their heads, thinking a grade is
like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.
Thank you.